Possible Worlds, Virtual Worlds

Abstract

The affinity between the imaginary employed in possible worlds and cyberculture is so obvious that it has barely attracted scholars' interest until recently. Several of them (Caïra 2007(Caïra , 2011Besson 2015), well-known specialists of online gaming, have explicitly rejected adopting a logical or ontological perspective in favor of a pragmatic, sociological approach or one inspired by cultural studies. When a point of view inspired by literary studies is adopted to treat digital artifacts, it is chiefly narratology that is called upon to examine, for example, whether the sources of narrative tension were also at work in video games. 1 When thematics developed in the framework of studies into fictionality were used to look at synthetic game environments (Juul 2011; Ryan ed. 2014), often in comparison with other literary, theatrical or film media (character vs. avatar, immersion vs. interaction), 2 they did not specifically take up the question of possible worlds.However, the proximity of the virtual and the possible (however these terms are understood) is intuitive. The pyramid imagined by Leibniz in Theodore's dream sets in motion an intermedial apparatus, 3 that shares qualities of both the theater and the library that nowadays we tend to spontaneously understand in terms of a tactile screen,

Figures et mondes impossibles en jeu vidéo

“…Vient alors le concept de mondes possibles. D'abord exploré longuement en littérature, il a plus récemment été déployé pour décrire la fiction en jeu vidéo et en fiction interactive numérique (de la Maza, 2017 ;Bell, 2019 ;Lavocat, 2019). Chartrand (2019) démontre plus précisément comment un jeu vidéo peut être décrit comme un monde possible en fonction de composantes statiques et dynamiques, de personnages, et d'interactions.…”