Alief & Belief in Virtual Worlds
“Just because it’s only a game doesn’t mean that your head has to believe it,” proclaimed a 1995 advert for the virtual reality i-glasses! The ideal of video games offering environments that our minds would perceive as real has been around for some time. But can this actually happen? This paper will argue that, to some extent, it can. Following Tamar Gendler’s work on alief and belief, I will characterize experience as two-tracked: part of our mind automatically takes stimuli at face value, while another part provides an anchor to reality. The first track, alief, is a set of automatic activations: mental representations, affect, and behavioral predispositions. The second track is belief: propositions that we consider to be true about the world. During a gaming session, we focus our attention on the alief activated by the virtual world and bracket our beliefs. To play is then to activate and attend to alief that is incongruent with our beliefs.