Problem This Solves
Writers and analysts often treat games depicted in fiction as either throwaway worldbuilding detail or as prototypes for actual playable games. Both approaches miss the point. Fictional games -- games that exist within novels, films, TV shows, and digital games -- are a distinct cultural category with their own expressive logic. Their incompleteness and inaccessibility are not flaws to be patched but constitutive features that make them philosophically powerful.
Without a clear framework, creators default to either over-specifying fictional games (turning them into design documents) or under-utilizing them (treating them as background noise). Gualeni and Fassone's core framework establishes what fictional games are, why they matter, and how to distinguish them from adjacent objects like minigames and nested games.
Key Principle
Fictional games are "playful activities and ludic artefacts conceptualized as part of fictional worlds" that "are meant to trigger the imagination of the appreciator of a work of fiction and cannot actually be played." Their unplayability stems from four sources -- fictional incompleteness, impossible features, nonhuman design, and ethical impermissibility -- and each source generates distinct expressive power. When fictional games are made actually playable, they become "effectively different artefacts with substantially different properties," losing their ontological fluidity.
The book adopts a "double definition" of game: (1) a nominal, loose definition, and (2) anything literally understood as a game or sport by characters within the fictional world. If characters treat it as a game non-metaphorically, it qualifies -- even if it violates classical definitions from Huizinga or Caillois.
Good Examples
Calvinball (Calvin and Hobbes): The only rule is you cannot play the same way twice. Its radical incompleteness is the joke and the philosophical point -- it embodies pure play freed from fixed structure.
Kepesh-Yakshi (Mass Effect 3): A board game requiring resource management and territorial domination, but presented as a fictional game within the digital game. It remains under-specified and unplayable, serving worldbuilding rather than ludic function. This distinguishes it from nested games like Triple Triad (Final Fantasy VIII), which are fully playable.
Ignis fatuus (Tokarczuk's Primeval and Other Times): A labyrinth game on cloth with brass pieces and an eight-sided die that consumes the Squire's life. Its rules can never be reconstructed; it functions as "the symbol of an unreachable original, the sign of an absence that haunts the text."
Bad Examples
Treating Gwent (The Witcher) as still a fictional game after it was developed into a standalone playable card game. Once formally resolved, it gained teleological crispness but lost its ontological fluidity -- it became a different artefact entirely.
Classifying basketball in Spike Lee's He Got Game as a fictional game. It is a real game depicted in fiction, not a game invented within a fictional world.
Calling the ritualistic chase in Seven a fictional game. Characters never literally refer to it as a game. The book's double definition requires that the activity be understood as a game by characters within the fiction. Compare with Saw, where characters explicitly call it a game -- so it qualifies.
Key Quotes
"Unlike actual games, fictional games are neither formally complete nor teleologically crisp for the fiction appreciator. Instead, they are typically presented in ways that are deliberately vague and incomplete, and they can undergo surprising changes and transformations." -- Gualeni and Fassone, Chapter 1
"When fictional games are formally resolved into actually playable artefacts and the functions and meanings of their elements are codified in affordances, rules and exceptions [...] they become effectively different artefacts with substantially different properties." -- Gualeni and Fassone, Chapter 1
"not all the possibilities and themes presented and explored in the form of fictional games are also expressed (or can be expressed) through the interactive experience of actual games." -- Gualeni and Fassone, Introduction
Rules of Thumb
- If characters in the fiction literally treat something as a game, it qualifies as a fictional game -- even if it violates classical game definitions
- If a game-within-a-game is formally complete and playable by the player, it is a minigame or nested game, not a fictional game
- Fictional incompleteness is a feature: examine what is left unspecified and how that serves the narrative
- The four sources of unplayability (incompleteness, impossible features, nonhuman design, ethical impermissibility) are non-exclusive; a single fictional game can be unplayable for multiple reasons
- When analyzing a fictional game made real (Quidditch, Cyvasse, Gwent), ask what expressive qualities were lost in translation
- Side quests within digital games are excluded -- they are not presented as games within the fiction
Related References
- Ground and Figure: Analyzing Narrative Prominence -- Framework for analyzing whether a fictional game serves as background worldbuilding or focal narrative device
- Fictional Games and Ideology -- How fictional games replicate and reveal power structures
- Fictional Games as Utopian Devices -- How fictional games subvert sociopolitical status quos