Fiction, Imagination, Videogames, and Virtual Reality

Abstract

This thesis contains five chapters on our imaginative engagement with fiction, videogames, and virtual reality. Relatively recent forms of fictional media, such as videogames and virtual reality, offer opportunities to inhabit different roles and access alternative social spaces, but they can also generate various ethical concerns. I employ concepts and frameworks in aesthetics and philosophy of mind in order to understand how we engage with these media and assess the ways we can both cause harm and be harmed through them. Chapter One begins by examining a phenomenon wherein actors, videogame players and virtual reality users imaginatively assume alternative personas, and subsequently find themselves acquiring attitudes of their characters. I offer an explanation of this imaginative “contagion” and identify two preventative mechanisms which mitigate such effects, dampening concerns that contagion may result in moral corruption. I then turn to investigate how virtual reality might be psychologically harmful in a distinct way through the perceptual experience it offers. Chapter Two argues that the phenomenology of virtual reality differs from that of depictive images and film. I argue that virtual reality lacks the typical experience of seeing-in, where we see a surface as giving rise to the objects visually represented. Chapter Three argues that the distinctive phenomenological experience of virtual reality can give rise to harm, as to some extent users experience virtual events as real. For instance, some users report symptoms of post-traumatic stress following horrific and realistic experiences of virtual harassment and assault. I employ work on affective responses to fiction in order to argue that such strong emotional responses and resultant wrongdoing in virtual reality can be adequately explained whilst still regarding virtual reality as fictional. In the final two chapters, I offer new perspectives on two traditional issues in aesthetics: the nature of truth in fiction and our ability to learn from fiction. Chapter Four argues that, by focusing on linear narrative media like literature and film, philosophical work on truth in fiction fails to capture interactive fictions, such as videogames and virtual reality. I propose an account of truth in interactive fiction and illustrate its necessity for capturing player culpability for virtual transgressions. Finally, Chapter Five turns to the role of fiction and virtual reality in philosophical methodology. Whilst philosophers generally employ real cases or thought experiments as examples, I defend the illustrative use of literary fiction in philosophy, as well as novel ways in which thought experiments can be presented through virtual reality.