Can we make true statements about the world through videogames? An indirect realist account of Alexander Galloway’s notion of social realism in gaming
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.19132/1807-8583202152.99344Keywords:
Videogames, Alexander Galloway, Social Realism, Indirect RealismAbstract
In recent years, game-related scholars have claimed that the study of videogames can reveal important insights for understanding and challenging the concept of realism advocated by previous theories of visual culture. In fact, videogames have increasingly been acknowledged as a valuable site for opening up new ways of interrogating traditional theories of realism. Drawing upon Alexander Galloway’s seminal work Social realism in gaming, the argument we seek to advance here is that: his theorizations of social realism in gaming alongside the notion of “congruence requirement” are largely grounded on indirect realist assumptions. In order to provide support to our claim, we assumed that his theory of realism is suggestive of an indirect form of correspondence between the fidelity of gamers’ ordinary world, their derivative actions within the gaming-world and the modes of representation of objective reality depicted in videogames
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