Description
When a story ends with the words "… and nobody lived to tell the tale", how is it possible for a reader to be reading this tale? When a glitch occurs in a videogame and accidentally causes the in-game cowboy characters to fly like birds, is a player supposed to imagine the gameworld being inhabited by flying cowboys? Within philosophy of fiction, such questions have been called silly questions: they are questions about fictional worlds that have no answers within these worlds. Elaborating on them is deemed inappropriate and pointless when interpreting works of fiction (cf. Walton 1990, 237; Currie 2010, 59). In this presentation, however, I argue that silly questions are useful tools for gaining greater understanding about our imaginative experiences of fiction. I will focus on silly questions about videogames, which have not yet attracted the philosophical scrutiny they warrant. My aim is to show how silly questions about interactive fiction experiences can be used to re-assess the authority of fiction creators, to analyse the fictional relevance of mistakes in fiction, and to investigate the limits of fictional worlds.| Period | 20 Feb 2024 |
|---|---|
| Held at | University of Turin, Italy |
| Degree of Recognition | International |