No fiction.

A brief Twitter discussion about authors admitting to the fictional nature of their work, made me realize that I do not think of our games as fictions. We create them to be part of reality.

We don’t tell stories. Our characters are not real people. But they are also not stand-ins for real people. They are themselves. At best they refer to archetypes, fictional characters, without becoming one themselves. I see our characters as actual creatures, with a certain form of life. Creatures with whom you can have a relationship.

Not all depictions are fictional. A photo of a landscape is not fictional because the landscape it depicts really exists. How about a painting of a landscape? And what about the painting as an object? An object of beauty that gives us real pleasure. The painting itself is not fictional. It really exists. In our world.

That’s how I think of our games. They really exist. They are digital, yes. And that allows them to exist in many copies. But it is still existence. Not representation.

I think this sets videogames apart from movies. In movies, the characters are necessarily fictional because they are played by an actor who is not the character. But videogames do not have this ambiguity. There is no actor. The character is wholly itself. It is not being played by somebody else. It exists as this creature who is part of this world.

Initially the concept of a game may be a fiction, imagined by humans. But as soon as the world is built and the characters are created, they become real. They are no longer fictional. The characters may seem to live in this strange world that is not ours. But they also live in our world, just as the game world exists in our world. The gameworld is as much a part of our world as the bowl of fruit on the table.