Fictionalism and Videogame Aggression

Tavinor's paper, "Fictionalism and Videogame Aggression," argues that videogames are fictions and that recognizing this status exposes serious conceptual weaknesses in psychological research on game-based aggression. The central claim is that standard definitions of aggression, which require intentional harm to a real individual who wishes to avoid it, cannot literally apply to in-game violence, because players do not harm real people and fictional characters cannot be genuinely harmed. Tavinor uses the 2007 study by Anderson, Gentile, and Buckley, which reported that players of violent games delivered more high-intensity noise blasts, to illustrate how this conceptual slippage can undermine the scientific conclusions drawn from such experiments.

The paper's most sustained critique targets the General Aggression Model proposed by Anderson and Bushman. Tavinor contends that the model treats fictional violence in titles such as Battlefield 1 as though it were genuine aggression, overlooking that players are primarily engaged in ludic activities like competition and cooperation. On this view, realistic accounts of gameplay knowledge would center on game-specific concepts such as winning, losing, and opponents, not the violent content the model emphasizes. The methodological failure to account for videogame fictionalism, he argues, weakens the model's credibility as an explanation of games and aggression.

In place of the aggression framing, Tavinor proposes that videogame violence functions as a fictional embodiment of non-violent play. He draws an analogy with traditional games such as tag, capture the flag, and dodgeball, which use pretended interpersonal aggression as their structure without any real intent to harm. He further argues that the fictional status of this violence matters, criticizing media-effects research for conflating fiction with fakeness and for ignoring philosophical work on how people learn from fiction. First-person shooters, on this account, are a robust fictional outgrowth of oppositional play, differing from older games chiefly in computational and figurative complexity.