The Silver Fox of Video Games

Questions of Aging and Masculinity in CD Projekt’s The Witcher Series

Authors

  • Amina A. Touzos

Keywords:

aging studies, video game studies, disability studies, masculinity, The Witcher

Abstract

New media has become one of the lenses through which we perceive and consume our lived social realities. Video games, as part of the new media (r)evolution, offer perspectives on our socio-cultural realities by engaging us with their (at times fantastical) worlds, not far removed from our own. Herein, games are a valuable addition to further an understanding of how bodies are performed on screen and what this implies for socio-culturally informed imageries of peoples off-screen. This paper specifically looks at the depiction and performance of age and gender as societal categories in CD Projekt’s The Witcher video game series (2007-2021), and discusses their implication for characters inside the games as well as players outside. While focusing on The Witcher series’ protagonist Geralt of Rivia, interlacing issues of heteronormativity, able-bodiedness, (hyper)masculinity, and the progress of successful male aging will be analyzed. Here, the medium of video games plays a pivotal role in comprehending the series’ presentation of heteronormative male aging as both a dynamic performative act between character and player, and an act of spectatorship with Geralt’s aging male body as a body to be consumed. Moreover, as the games turn to present their hero as an ambiguous figure, fluctuating between rogue “silver fox” and socially empowered patriarch, this paper will also consider what happens to the (fictional, digital) aging male body if he is actualized as a successfully aging body. Finally, this paper draws upon discourses in aging studies, gender studies, as well as disability studies, and aims to broaden the discussion on aging male bodies in new media onto video games.

Author Biography

Amina A. Touzos

Amina Antonia Touzos (she/her) is a PhD researcher in the DFG-funded research group “CORE – Critical Online Reasoning in Higher Education” (FOR 5404) at Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz in Prof. Dr. Mita Banerjee’s project “The Role of the Narrative Framing and Latent Meaning Structures of Online Information Used by Medical and Economics Students in Their Generic and Domain-Specific Critical Online Reasoning”. She recently completed the doctoral research training group “DIAPASON – Digital Information Landscape and Its Impact on Student Learning” at JGU. Touzos received her M.Ed. in English and Philosophy from JGU in 2021 and wrote her thesis on the intersections between video games and trauma. In her doctoral research, she focuses on interdisciplinary approaches to video game studies and the medical humanities, while also employing research in narrative medicine and education studies in qualitative and quantitative projects.

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Published

2024-09-25