“Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt”: Video Games between the Global and the National

Video games are sold and bought in the global market but they also have local characteristics – e.g., they may draw from national cultural heritage (Eklund et al., 2024). Therefore, video games are hybrid media texts, shaped by global flows and local contexts (Šisler et al., 2017). This perspective is in line with the current work in social theory that questions the binary opposition of globalization and nation-states (Billig, 2023; Schmitz et al., 2023).

I will use this framework to examine the success of “Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt” (2015), one of the most acclaimed and best-selling video games (over 250 game of the year awards, over 50 million copies sold). Basing on previous studies (Drewniak, 2018; Majkowski, 2018) and my own research, I will show that the game’s popularity results from an interplay of the global and the national, for example:

1. The game adapts the prose of Andrzej Sapkowski, who became successful partly because he had been able to read English-language fantasy fiction before other Polish writers.
2. The company that developed the game – CD Projekt – had distributed and translated foreign video games in Poland before producing its own titles for the regional and ultimately global market.
3. The game is known for its references to Slavic music, Polish literature, etc., but it also employs global game conventions (e.g., following a tradition of computer role-playing games established by the Canadian company BioWare).
4. The game’s setting (e.g., smaller states under threat of invasion by an empire) corresponds with Poland’s position in European history.

SHORTENED REFERENCES

Billig, M. (2023). The National Nature of Globalization...

Drewniak, P. (2018). In Eastern Europe...

Eklund et al. (2024). Games for the Pluriverse...

Majkowski, T. Z. (2018). Geralt of Poland...

Schmitz et al. (2023). Rethinking the Nation...

Šisler et al. (2017). Video Games and the Asymmetry...