Belief-Discordant Alief: A Common Denominator of Fiction and Non-Fictional Games

This paper, presented at DiGRA 2019, argues that the relationship between belief and alief, a concept drawn from philosopher Tamar Szabó Gendler, is a central psychological mechanism underlying play, games, and fiction. Alief is characterized as associative, automatic, and arational: an emotional, intuitive response that can drive behavior even when it contradicts what a person explicitly believes. The author illustrates this with the Grand Canyon Skywalk, where visitors believe the structure is safe yet alieve they might fall, and then proposes that play itself can be defined as the intentional production of belief-discordant alief, as when siblings believe they are playing while alieving they are fighting.

The argument extends to fiction, where the paper suggests that Kendall Walton's make-believe theory is incomplete. Audiences of a stage performance or readers of a novel believe they are watching actors or reading printed words while alieving that the events are really occurring. The author distinguishes this involuntary process from voluntary make-believe, which operates through accepting fictional premises within a fictional frame, and treats alief as indifferent to premises and truth claims.

The paper's most distinctive claim concerns non-fictional games such as professional soccer, which cannot strictly be classified as fiction. Players are said to alieve they are in a combat situation and act accordingly, with audiences sharing these alieves, most extremely visible in hooligan behavior. The author introduces the term "intuitive fictions" to describe how such games, and even video games like Tetris, generate a felt sense that the task matters greatly while belief retains the awareness that it is "just a game."

The scope is primarily theoretical and conceptual, drawing on philosophy of mind, aesthetics, and game studies rather than empirical data, surveys, or experimental results. The argument is supported through illustrative examples and engagement with prior scholarship by Gregory Bateson, Brian Sutton-Smith, Gordon Tavinor, and Walton, and its conclusions are offered as a framework for future empirical investigation.