Games and Self-Imagining: A Comparative Media Perspective

Van Looy's analysis of games and self-imagining rests on Kendall Walton's make-believe framework of representation, which he applies in place of Espen Aarseth's claim that games are ontologically separate from fiction. Both fiction and virtual worlds, Van Looy argues, draw on the same imaginative faculties, so games can be studied as representations within a shared theory. The work uses Walton's theory cautiously, acknowledging its difficulties with non-fiction, and tests it through a comparative case study of three versions of Alice in Wonderland: Lewis Carroll's 1865 novel, Disney's 1951 film, and the 2000 game American McGee's Alice. Across all three, the study finds an emphasis on episodic, playful spectacle rather than tension-driven narrative, with each medium locating its appeal in different sources, such as wordplay in the novel and color, music, and movement in the film.

The central analytical contribution concerns the distinction between subjective (de se) and objective (de re) imagining. Each adaptation combines both modes in a counterbalanced way. The book and film lean toward objective imagining but use focalisation and character-tracking to draw audiences into Alice's perspective, while the game is primarily subjective yet employs third-person framing and cut-scenes to maintain a sense of distance. The resulting picture is that self-imagining in representation is complex, non-binary, and shifting rather than a fixed property of a medium.

Van Looy extends this view into a broader argument that representation is a hybrid "patchwork," inviting audiences both into the depicted universe and to an outside vantage. Giving players agency, he contends, does not reliably produce subjective imagining. Electronic literature and interactive animation such as Ryman's 253 and Leishman's Deviant show agency yielding objective perspectives, and SimCity, despite offering a role and goals, fails to induce subjective imagining. The study concludes that a primarily subjective experience requires both a particular game setup and close association with an entity within the simulation, a hypothesis the author leaves open for future empirical validation.