“Back to Reality”: The Case Against Ludo-Fictionalism
- Dec 1, 2023
- 1 min read
Aarseth, E. (2023). “Back to Reality”: The Case Against Ludo-Fictionalism. In Exploring Extended Realities (pp. 13-22). Routledge.
In this chapter, the author defends a view developed since the 1990s that digital objects can be real and defends this view against rival fictionalist accounts of the metaphysics of virtual objects and simulated worlds. In order to do so, the author distinguishes between fictions, representations, props, and metaphors in order to defend what the author refers to “ludo-realism” (the view that, in at least some classes of simulations, the underlying functional game elements of those simulations are real in a metaphysically robust sense). While games that rely substantively on a player’s imagination (as in role-playing games) may contain fictive elements, other games (like chess) do not depend on any specific set of representational components.