Doubly Real: Game Studies and Literary Anthropology; or, Why We Play Games

Philipp Schweighauser's "Doubly Real: Game Studies and Literary Anthropology; or, Why We Play Games" argues that video game scholarship has been shaped by strategies of disciplinary distinction, sometimes productively and sometimes as a means of claiming academic territory. Schweighauser contends that the ludology-narratology debate, and Gonzalo Frasca's conciliatory position within it, rests on a narrow reading of literary theory, typically limited to structuralist narratology. He proposes instead Wolfgang Iser's later literary anthropology as a more fruitful framework, particularly his triadic model of the fictive, the imaginary, and the real, which offers a richer basis for comparative video game criticism than the reader-response concepts that earlier critics such as Espen Aarseth had questioned.

At the core of the argument is the claim that fiction mediates between the real and the imaginary, enabling readers and players to inhabit two realities at once through a "fictional pact" framed by an "as-if" structure. Schweighauser treats fiction as an anthropologically necessary compensation for human limitation, and play, understood as free movement within structure, as central to this process. Extending these ideas to games, he argues that their transformative potential is not confined to explicitly persuasive or serious titles, while acknowledging that interactivity and visual realism raise open questions about player agency and imagination.

The study's most distinctive contribution is its characterization of gaming as "doubly real" rather than Jesper Juul's "half-real," or the separation hypothesis associated with Johan Huizinga and Roger Caillois. Schweighauser describes players as continually oscillating between simulated and empirical worlds, a dynamic that he sees as central to the gaming experience. In the same vein, he critiques direct-effects theories of media violence and critiques the "immersive fallacy," positioning games as aesthetic experiences that stage new worlds rather than merely imitate reality. His argument calls on game studies to rethink its key concepts and to engage more broadly across disciplinary boundaries, drawing on reception aesthetics, the work of Janet Murray, Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, and Juul.