The first part of Stefano Gualeni’s What We Owe the Dead is a fictional police report, drafted in a dystopian future in which humans live within inhabitable cooling mega-siphons built to counteract the global and catastrophic effects of climate change. But this procedural sci-fi novel is also a philosophical text, and the third and last section of the book—a non-fiction afterword by Gualeni himself—highlights some of its philosophical themes: “the survival of the human race and our duties to our predecessors.” And games.
The detective fiction genre itself already suggests a playful attitude: It’s a puzzle game between authors and their audiences, as Gualeni notes in his afterword and as already observed by American art critic and detective novelist S. S. Van Dine in 1928.1 On top of that, part of the plot of What We Owe the Dead revolves around an actual—albeit imaginary—game called Duplicate Conduit, developed on the basis of a rule book found inside an ancient spaceship belonging to an almost unknown alien culture (“the Fleeting”) and unearthed in Antarctica when Earth’s polar caps melted. Linguists translated the rule book and the other documents that survived the crash (or the landing) of the ship millions of years before. But the original alien game—called something like “Manifold Passage” or “Giving Forward in More Ways than One”—was not playable by human beings: Its rules needed an understanding of the Fleeting culture and norms that humans just don’t have. “What we have today,” someone says, explaining Duplicate Conduit to the novel’s protagonist, “is an attempt to make sense of an alien tradition by loosely adapting it to the context of human society.”
Even in this process of translation and localization, something of the alien mind haunting the game survived. The second part of What We Owe the Dead is a fictional essay written by one of its characters, Dr. Grace Tizzi—a scholar specialized in Duplicate Conduit. Tizzi writes that
Research shows that Conduit causes detectable transformations in its players, especially their use of language and their political inclinations. It definitely changed the way I think about the world. In this sense, as I have argued elsewhere, the game might be better understood as a transformative technology (a “technology-of-the-self”) rather than just a complicated pastime.
By imagining the effects of an alien game on our culture, What We Owe the Dead talks about the cultural and transformative relevance of human gaming and discusses how all technologies co-shape and co-produce who we are, our world and our relationship with it, by extending and externalizing (and delegating) specific human abilities. It is something comparable to what occurs in Ted Chiang’s novella “Story of Your Life” (1998), which imagines the effects of learning an alien language and in this way explores how languages (another technology) shape us and our world.
In addition to being a sci-fi writer, Gualeni is also a game scholar (he teaches at the Institute of Digital Games of the University of Malta) and a game designer. He fits in a long philosophical tradition of deploying fictional scenarios and narrative structures in order to introduce complex and hopefully thought-provoking ideas to a large and non-specialized audience: from the Veda to Zhuangzi’s parables, from Plato’s dialogues to Augustine of Hippo’s Confessions, from the existentialist novels (Søren Kierkegaard’s Either/Or [1843], Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea [1938], Albert Camus’s The Plague [1947]) to Simon Sellars’ Applied Ballardianism: Memoir from a Parallel Universe (2018).
Gualeni’s previous speculative novella—The Clouds: An Experiment in Theory-Fiction (2024)—talks about the simulation hypothesis, according to which we are living within an artificial, computationally simulated universe. The Clouds is even more explicitly philosophical than What We Owe the Dead. Its subtitle recalls the ambiguous theory-fiction genre pioneered by Jean Baudrillard, Arthur Kroker (Spasm: Virtual Reality, Android Music and Electric Flesh, 1993), and Nick Land, and further popularized by the conversation around Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (2008) and Urbanomic’s series K-Pulp, in which Applied Ballardianism was originally published. According to Gualeni, this conflation of virtualities and actualities happens inside a spectrum of possible hybrids. At one end of this spectrum we have fictional theories and “works of fiction that narrativise the process of developing (fictional) theories … that apply to a fictional world.”At the other end, we have “actual theories presented to audiences in fictional form.”
An analogous idea underlies the New Journalism style or the concept of the “Unidentified Narrative Object” coined by Italian writer Wu Ming2: essays and reportages written in narrative forms and through fictive devices (creative nonfiction), historical novels challenging hegemonic histories, fictional worlds that exemplify and produce theories and ideas about how the physical world works and how we understand it and that are sometimes able to speculatively propose alternative and non-human or more-than-human perspectives. Some of these theory-fictions can be understood as extended thought experiments, in the same way as allegories are understood as extended metaphors.
Another feature The Clouds shares with What We Owe the Dead is the prominence of one or more fictional games in its plot and as part of its worldbuilding. If What We Owe the Dead features Duplicate Conduit/Manifold Passage, The Clouds includes no fewer than four different imagined video games, with three of them even being doubly fictional since they only exist within a novel being written by one of the characters.
In the monograph Fictional Games: A Philosophy of Worldbuilding and Imaginary Play (2022), Gualeni and Riccardo Fassone (University of Torino) explore the peculiarities of similar fictional games—“playful activities and ludic artefacts conceptualized as part of fictional worlds.” These games “are meant to trigger the imagination of the appreciator of a work of fiction and cannot actually be—or at least were not originally meant to be—played.” Gualeni and Fassone list four possible reasons for this unplayability: fictional games can be described incompletely, vaguely, and sometimes even inconsistently; they can need magical powers or fictional futuristic technologies unavailable to actual human beings today; they can be designed for non-human beings and biologies; and they can be unethical or illegal within our current societies.
Introducing such fictional activities into a narrative can serve different purposes, but fictional games always suggest “critical and/or satirical perspectives on how actual games are designed, played, sold, manipulated, experienced, understood and used as part of our culture.”3 They work as meta-commentaries on games.
Through rule-based arguments, what game designer and critic Ian Bogost called their “procedural rhetoric,”4 games (even fictional games) also propose models that distill how parts of social, political, and physical systems work or could work, reproducing our understanding of these systems and our beliefs about them.
Any game’s rule system is a critical site for analysis because it posits a claim about how the slice of reality modeled by the rules functions. It develops an ontology, a (full-fledged or sketchy) reality model that dictates what is, and as importantly what is not, part of that world. First, the rule system separates figures from the ground of messy reality by defining what elements are at play in a game.5
Many fictional games are thus also intended as commentaries on the dominant ideologies of the societies and of the communities in which these games have been developed.
But while game designers set the stage, they can never have complete control over the specific, situated, and thus at least partly unpredictable experience of the player. Games can be subverted. And since fictional and nonfictional games and their rules are proxies of the social norms of a community, the subversion of a game can demonstrate that “it is possible for the whole system to be questioned and potentially destroyed”6 and subversive fictional games can “stimulat[e] the political imagination”7 of both the characters and the audience.
It’s also important to note that fictional games don’t actually need to be part of a larger fictional world: They can also be standalone artifacts. Plastiboo’s Vermis I – lost dungeons and forbidden woods (2022) and Vermis II – mist & mirrors (2023) are for example strategy guides for a nonexisting fictional video game.8 And Staffan Björk and Jesper Juul have discussed “hypothetical games”—“proposed but non-implemented games described to examine a question, or actually existing games that are for practical purposes unplayable.” Hypothetical games are thought experiments in which the experiments are game shaped, because “playing actual games is sometimes not as important as imagining or considering the potential gameplay of games.”
If fictional games can be thought experiments or part of the extended thought experiments of theory-fiction, nonfictional games can be playable thought experiments and, in their longer forms, playable theory-fiction (or interactive allegories). Games allow us to experiment with alternative and imaginary types of agency, toying with speculative scenarios we wouldn’t be able to meet (or to safely meet) in the physical world.
“Games … are a unique social technology,” writes philosopher C. Thi Nguyen. “They are a method for inscribing forms of agency into artifactual vessels: for recording them, preserving them, and passing them around. And we possess a special ability: we can be fluid with our agency; we can submerge ourselves in alternate agencies designed by another. In other words, we can use games to communicate forms of agency.”9
Gualeni himself has developed what he calls “augmented ontologies”10: video games intended as playable mediators of philosophical concepts and as tools capable “of experientially fragmenting and augmenting the ways in which people can think, perceive, and operate, expanding the boundaries beyond the mere ‘actual’ and extending into what is virtually ‘possible’”11 inside a multitude of simulated worlds that can be designed and manipulated. For example, several games give us the opportunity to experience time in nonlinear ways outside the rules of causality thanks to time-reversing fictional powers, looping timelines, and the possibility of loading previous save states or merely to restart the game from the very beginning.
Gualeni doesn’t maintain that digital games are somehow exceptional or superior to other technologies, but he suggests that philosophy would benefit from a more medium-agnostic and inclusive attitude toward the mediation of thought.
Gualeni proposes his video games as a way of “doing philosophy”—in Ian Bogost’s words, of “constructing artefacts as a philosophical practice.”12 An experiential alternative to a philosophical Western tradition rooted in the linear organization of the written text since Plato and to a contemporary academic tradition centered on journals, papers, and monographs “whose potential audience of readers is thinned almost to nothingness.”13 Gualeni doesn’t maintain that digital games are somehow exceptional or superior to other technologies, but he suggests that philosophy would benefit from a more medium-agnostic and inclusive attitude toward the mediation of thought. In this way we can also engage with the discipline of game studies through its very subject and beyond a mere linguistic approach, as Gualeni did with Doors (the game)14—a meta-reflexive (or self-reflexive) conceptual game dealing with the visual and functional representation of objects (in its specific case, doors) in virtual worlds.
“As I see it, experimental works like this one (and like my philosophical videogames) are contiguous with my academic output disseminated through more traditional outlets,” writes Gualeni at the end of What We Owe the Dead. “As I see it, these less traditional outputs are the portion of my intellectual work that is more likely to have an impact on society.”
Since the technologies we use co-shape how we think, doing philosophy through digital games would also mean doing a different kind of philosophy, one that opens up new questions and new perspectives. Many games, including Gualeni’s own, still place us (our avatars and our agency) against a passive or only reactive background, or else propose environments locked in repetitive cycles. Yet digital games can also offer rich interactions with complex systems that encompass both human and non-human agencies. And Gualeni’s work as a novelist, game scholar, and game designer suggests the role these technologies might play—for example in rethinking our relationship with the vast climate, ecological, and non-human systems of the Anthropocene. In What We Owe the Dead, Duplicate Conduit translates an alien game into something intelligible to human beings. Theory-fiction, fictional games, and above all interactive theory-fiction (in other words, games) could offer ways of confronting and experimenting with the unthinkable.