Fiction and Fictional Worlds in Videogames

Abstract

Are videogames fictions? Kendall Walton’s detailed account of fiction in Mimesis as Make-Believe is the most influential extant account of that category, and we begin this paper by arguing that it should be non-controversial that videogames count as fictions on Walton’s view. However, Grant Tavinor has recently argued that although videogames are fictions, the important Waltonian distinction between work worlds and game worlds breaks down in the case of videogames. We reject Tavinor’s claim and argue that the game/work world distinction is just as robust in the case of videogames as it is in other fictions. To show this we draw attention to two important ontological distinctions and use these to diagnose the errors we think Tavinor is making. Finally, we highlight some cases where there is a clear divergence between what is fictional in the work worlds and game worlds associated with particular videogames.