Not long after writing A Game Has Never Made You Cry I read Kendall Walton’s Mimesis as Make-Believe and began writing about game design as make-believe, the topic that forms the core of my latest book Imaginary Games. On Walton’s theory, all fiction is a kind of game – specifically a game of make-believe, related in form to the games children play with toys as props. The game of make-believe associated with a painting or a stage play are more rich, and the artists behind them have the capacity to make them much more intrusive on the play that results – such that, for instance, the viewer of Van Gogh’s Starry Night has few choices in how to interpret that painting as a prop. Nonetheless, the ‘player’ of Starry Night is an active participant in the game of make-believe that causes the fiction concerned to come to vivid life in their imagination. What lead me to Walton was a philosophy paper by Colin Radford entitled How Can We Be Moved by the Fate of Anna Karenina? Radford identified what is called the paradox of fiction – that we can have apparently genuine emotions in response to something that we know is false. This argument is closely related to my claim that a game has never made you cry – or rather, if a game has made you weep for a character, it did so in its fictional elements and not as a consequences of its rules. In other words, even though a Mario game might have moved you to tears through frustration, loss of social capital, laughter or victory, you have never shed tears for Mario himself, nor for Princess Peach, Bowser, or any other character in the Mario world. No rule that could occur in these games could cause you to weep for Mario, because that emotional response must occur in the fiction and not in the rules as such. However, accepting Walton’s philosophy complicates this issue considerable – because understanding fiction as a game of make-believe means that the fiction itself is fundamentally construed of game rules (the tacit rules of the make-believe game), and conversely the game rules are themselves a kind of fiction. Although it can be useful to divide functional and fictional elements (Juul’s rules and fiction), this division will not hold up as a distinction between what is real and what is not (Juul, conversely, thinks rules are ‘real’, a claim I dispute). I do think we can understand a distinction between the functional and the fictional elements of games, but we have also to recognise that this distinction is more of degree than of kind. (via ihobo: No Tears for Mario)