In this article, I introduce a methodological approach to video games I call interpretive player positioning. It foregrounds the speculative worldbuilding techniques of fantasy worlds in digital role-playing games whose game mechanics fundamentally invite the player’s agency and active interpretation of the fictional world they build with their choices. With these entangling perspectives, the gaming experience of digital fantasy RPGs is portrayed here as mimetic and world-affecting. This concept is applied to a posthuman reading of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (2015), which highlights the potential of what I call critical mimesis: a re-interpretation of reality that foregrounds the player’s active interpretive role in critically examining various themes within the fictional world that they recognize from their reality.
Sanchez-Taylor, Joy. Dispelling Fantasies: Authors of Color Reimagine a Genre. Ohio State University Press, 2025. ISBN: 9780814215906.
Dhantal, Smita. Identifying Self through Society: A Socio-psychological Perspective of A Song of Ice and Fire. Christ University, 2024.
Polvinen, Merja. Self-Reflective Fiction and 4E Cognition. Routledge, 2023. ISBN 9781032263748.
Castle, Nora, and Giulia Champion, editors. Animals and Science Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, 2024. ISBN: 978-3031416972.
Carr, Bryan J. and Meta G. Carstarphen, editors. Gendered Defenders: Marvel’s Heroines in Transmedia Spaces. Ohio State University Press, 2022. ISBN: 978-0-8142-5852-1.
Carroll, Jordan S. Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right. Forerunners: Ideas First. University of Minnesota Press. 2024. ISBN: 9781517917081
Eco-fantasy critics often celebrate what Gry Ulstein calls fantasy’s “intrinsic exploratory potential for ecocritical ideas.” It is, however, equally important to acknowledge the possibility of failure that a rhetoric of potentiality necessarily implies. As Ulstein admits, fantasy can reinscribe anthropocentric messaging just as easily as it presents ecological perspectives. Naomi Novik’s environmental fantasy novel Uprooted (2015) offers an example of a text that incorporates elements from both ends of fantasy’s spectrum of ecocritical potential. Specifically, it dramatizes a shift in perspective from an initially negative, human-centered depiction of nonhuman environments toward a vision in which humanity appears considerably less central or important. Capitalizing on fantasy’s capacity to focalize nonhuman points of view, Uprooted evokes philosopher Timothy Morton’s ecological concept of coexistentialism, a key principle of which maintains that within the course of negotiating relations between human and nonhuman beings, sometimes “the only thing to do is to treat beings as people, even if they turn out not to be.” Anthropomorphic gestures of this kind critically challenge assumptions of human exceptionalism and elevate the value of nonhuman life-forms, which in Novik’s novel includes the “heart trees” and magical creatures of the ever-expanding dark forest, whose reverse reclamation of human territories provides the principal antagonistic force of the narrative.
Ashley, Mike. The Rise of the Cyberzines: The Story of the Science-Fiction Magazines from 1991 to 2020. The History of the Science-Fiction Magazines Volume V. 2022. 444 pages. ISBN 978-180085648.
Tobin, Stephen C. Vision, Technology, and Subjectivity in Mexican Cyberpunk Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, 2023. ISBN 978-3-031-31155-0.
Williams, Hamish. J.R.R. Tolkien’s Utopianism and the Classics. Bloomsbury Academic, 2023. ISBN 978–1350241466.
