Playtest

I’ve just finished reading Pavel’s Fictional Worlds, and apart from giving me a better grounding in possible world theory, particularly the logic of the philosophical model than I was previously aware from reading Van Looy’s application of the theory to videogames, Pavel makes several points about the boundaries between the fictional and actual world that are of interest to my own research.

More specifically Pavel writes on page 89 –

“In order to make fiction function smoothly, the reader and the author must pretend that there was no suspension of disbelief, that travel to the fictional land did not occur, and that the fictional egos have in a sense always been there, since phenomenologically they came to life together with the imaginary realm.”

I think this short quote raises an interesting question on the problem of immersion, or at least its garden variety suspension of disbelief form. To paraphrase Pavel, he is essentially arguing that the player and the game author(s) have to pretend that they didn’t pretend to be transported into the game-world. Leaving aside the figure of the ‘fictional ego’, might it be that the player, rather than performing these mental acrobatics, experiences this phenomena of transportation or presence as the result of some process other than immersion? Undoubtedly, many players do feel drawn into the fictional world of the game that they are playing – its an interesting problem that I may include in my thesis chapter that expands on my IE2007 paper.