Aaron Meskin

This article explores the nature and theoretical import of a hitherto neglected class of fictions which we term ‘self-involving interactive fictions’. SIIFs are interactive fictions, but they differ from standard examples of interactive fictions by being, in some important sense, about those who consume them. In order to better understand the nature of SIIFs, and the ways in which they differ from other fictions, we focus primarily on the most prominent example of the category: video-game fictions. We argue that appreciating the self-involving nature of video-game fictions is key to understanding various otherwise puzzling phenomena concerning the ways in which consumers respond to them. Video-game fictions are, however, far from being the only extant example of this class; and we suggest that the recent philosophical interest in video games would be better focused on the wider class of self-involving interactive fictions.

This guide accompanies the following article: Aaron Meskin, ‘The Philosophy of Comics’. Philosophy Compass 6/12 : 854–64. doi: 10.1111/j.1747‐9991.2011.00450.x Author’s Introduction: Comics have been around since at least the middle of the 19th century, but they are just beginning to receive philosophical attention. Much of this recent philosophical work has focused on the definition of comics and their relation to other art forms , but recent work on such topics as narrative in comics, comics authorship, the relationship between words and pictures, and the interpretation of comics shows that there are a range of interesting issues to be explored. Although comics are not essentially a mass or popular art, the vast majority of them are examples of those categories. Hence, comics may be investigated in their own right or as paradigmatic examples of the mass or popular.

In earlier work we proposed an account of information grounded in counterfactual conditionals rather than probabilities, and argued that it might serve philosophical needs that more familiar probabilistic alternatives do not. Demir [2008] and Scarantino [2008] criticize the counterfactual approach by contending that its alleged advantages are illusory and that it fails to secure attractive desiderata. In this paper we defend the counterfactual account from these criticisms, and suggest that it remains a useful account of information.