Nele Van de Mosselaer

Fictional games are games that do not actually exist, but that are presented within works of fiction. They are thus not appreciated through play, but rather through practices of game spectatorship, interpreted broadly as acts of reading, watching, or listening to reports or representations of other people playing games. This paper focuses on fictional games that are pretend-played with the aim of creating captivating experiences for non-playing audiences. More specifically, I discuss a fictional game created on the subreddit dedicated to the videogame Elden Ring. Before this game was released, users pretended to have played it already, creating a communally imagined, fictional version of Elden Ring. Framing this as an act of game spectatorship, I discuss this comical make-believe game, focusing on the shared game literacy that was leveraged in pretend-play and the way in which it gamified the spectator experience.

Emotions Caused by Untrue Propositions: A Broader View of the Paradox of Fiction Ever since Colin Radford wrote his article ‘How Can We Be Moved by the Fate of Anna Karenina?’ in 1975, philosophers have tried to solve the so-called paradox of fiction, or the question how we can be moved by objects of which we know they don’t really exist. What is striking about discussions on the paradox of fiction is that they often present fictional works as collections of untrue statements and focus on the content of these works, without regard for their form or mode of presentation. In this paper, I argue for a re-examination of the paradox of fiction, in which the work of fiction is treated as a complex of form and content. In this regard, I propose to expand Peter Lamarque’s thought theory, which he explicitly formulated to solve the paradox of fiction, with his later developed concept of opacity, which states that the content of the imaginings we form when reading fiction are fundamentally connected to the specific descriptions within the fictional work.

What do players of videogames mean when they say they want to shoot zombies? Surely they know that the zombies are not real, and that they cannot really shoot them, but only control a fictional character who does so. Some philosophers of fiction argue that we need the concept of imaginative desires to explain situations in which people feel desires towards fictional characters or desires that motivate pretend actions. Others claim that we can explain these situations without complicating human psychology with a novel mental state. Within their debates, however, these scholars exclusively focus on non-interactive fictions and children’s games of make-believe. In this paper, I argue that our experience of immersive, interactive fictions like videogames gives us cause to reappraise the concept of imaginative desires. Moreover, I describe how i-desires are a useful conceptual tool within videogame development and can shed new light on apparently immoral in-game actions.