Nele Van de Mosselaer

Drawing from narratology and design studies, this article makes use of the notions of the ‘implied designer’ and ‘ludic unreliability’ to understand deceptive game design as a specific sub-set of transgressive game design. More specifically, in this text we present deceptive game design as the deliberate attempt to misguide players’ inferences about the designers’ intentions. Furthermore, we argue that deceptive design should not merely be taken as a set of design choices aimed at misleading players in their efforts to understand the game, but also as decisions devised to give rise to experiential and emotional effects that are in the interest of players. Finally, we propose to introduce a distinction between two varieties of deceptive design approaches based on whether they operate in an overt or a covert fashion in relation to player experience. Our analysis casts light on expressive possibilities that are not customarily part of the dominant paradigm of user-centered design, and can inform game designers in their pursuit of wider and more nuanced creative aspirations.

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.

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.