Games, Fictions, and Possible Worlds
This paper proposes a philosophical discussion about identity issues in video games, based on possible world semantics (PWS). It sheds some light on the way we handle (unreal) intentional objects, on the projection of real objects into the world of the game, and on the projection of subjects into the world of the game. The paper is organized in three sections. First, the author introduces PWS and Lewis’s semantics of fictions. Second, Lewis’s account of fiction is translated to games, thanks to the idea of modal window and to that of cross-world relations. The third section raises the question of subjective identity in virtual reality, which is at the core of the issue of responsibility for game-players. Ethical reflections about action in games provided by the modelling are briefly presented in the conclusion.