The first book-length study devoted to FromSoftware games, On Soulsring Worlds explores how the Dark Souls series and Elden Ring are able to reconcile extreme difficulty in both gameplay and narrative with broad appeal. Arguing that the games are strategically positioned in relation to contemporary audiences and designed to tap into the new forms of interpretation afforded by digital media, the author situates the games vis-à-vis a number of current debates, including the posthuman and the ethics of gameplay. The book (...) delivers an object lesson on the value of narrative (and) complexity in digital play and in the interpretive practices it gives rise to. Cross-fertilizing narrative theory, game studies, and nonhuman-oriented philosophy, this book will appeal to students and scholars of game studies, media studies, narratology and video game ethnography. (shrink)

Emotion Review, Volume 13, Issue 4, Page 299-305, October 2021. According to recent accounts, we experience the emotion of “being moved” when a situation brings into play our core values. What are the core values evoked by nonhuman landscapes, however, particularly as the distinction between man-made and natural environments becomes increasingly blurry in the so-called Anthropocene? That is the central question tackled by this article. I start by rethinking the sublime as an affect that, since Romanticism, has shaped Western attitudes (...) toward nature. I argue that today's climate crisis calls for an expansion of our affective engagement with the nonhuman: the sublime can be part of our emotional repertoire, but only if it is complicated by feelings that point to constitutive human–nonhuman entanglement. (shrink)

Uncertainty and ambiguity are central dimensions of play. In video-game design and experience, they are dramatically amplified by the material uncertainties built into digital technologies. This article explores the ways in which contemporary fiction imagines and negotiates the ambiguity of digital play. Building on Brian Sutton-Smith’s play theory, I examine how the literary imagination invokes, combines, and opposes many of the discourses that coalesce around play in contemporary culture. Discussing fiction’s engagement with both video-game design and larger gamifying trends, I (...) show that play serves as a complex signifier of creative freedom, spiritual aspirations, but also moral crisis and loss of agency. My two examples—Gabrielle Zevin’s _Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow_ (2022) and Richard Powers’s _Playground_ (2024)—frame the ambiguity of digital play in relation to different forms of vulnerability: personal anxieties relating to illness and disability in the former novel, fears of ecological crisis and AI-driven societal collapse in the latter. The epistemological and affective challenges of play are thus primarily understood in interpersonal terms in Zevin’s narrative, whereas Powers links them to the novel’s formal “trick” of a covert AI narrator. (shrink)

Emotional responses to the climate crises are typically split between negative feelings (including concern, fear, and anxiety) and the need for more hopeful or utopian scenarios. This chapter focuses on how contemporary Anglophone fiction blurs this binary by immersing readers in affectively complex situations. Different - and sometimes opposing - emotions are brought together in a progression that reflects the trajectory of closeness and distance in readers’ engagement with the protagonists. I discuss two recent novels in which style and narrative (...) patterns give rise to this emotional dynamic, Weather by Jenny Offill and The LivingSea of Waking Dreams by Richard Flanagan. The mixed affects elicited by these works of climate fiction promise to enrich and nuance the cultural repertoire of environmental emotions. (shrink)

How can providing less textual information about a fictional character make his or her mind more transparent and accessible to the reader? This is the question that emerges from an empirical study of reader response conducted by Kotovych et al. Taking my cue from this study, I discuss the role of implied information in readers’ interactions with characters in prose fiction. This is the textual strategy I call ‘character-centered implicature.’ I argue that the inferential work cued by implicature creates an (...) intersubjective dynamic analogous to what philosophers Zahavi and Rochat discuss under the heading of ‘experiential sharing.’ Effectively, readers complement the textual evocation of mind by drawing on their own past experiences, which leads to a distinctive first-person plural perspective—a sharing of cognitive resources that is responsible for the perceived transparency of the character’s mind. While this experiential sharing may result in empathetic perspective-taking, not all instances of empathy for fictional characters involve sharing. (shrink)

In the Sahara, there is a species of silver ants with coats precisely calibrated to adapt to the harsh landscape around them. Their tiny radiant armor is made of triangular, reflective hairs on their midsection that dissipate heat through thermal radiation, thus enabling them to survive in the greater than 150 degrees Fahrenheit temperatures during the twenty minutes or so each day when they leave their nests. By midcentury such examples of extreme adaptation may have increasing significance for us. How (...) we are able to become constituents of a broader landscape will gain more relevance as the earth warms and its population reaches the nine billion mark. Our deeply held values about individuality may even become... (shrink)

[This volume was the first book-length introduction in Italian to the field of cognitive approaches to literature and narrative.] Possono le scienze cognitive (filosofia della mente, psicologia, neuroscienze, linguistica cognitiva) gettare luce sui processi di comprensione e interpretazione dei testi letterari? Quali sono le promesse e i rischi di questo dialogo interdisciplinare? Questo volume cerca di rispondere alle numerose domande sollevate dagli approcci “cognitivi” alla letteratura e alla narrazione che si sono fatti strada negli ultimi due decenni, per lo più (...) in ambito angloamericano e tedesco. A partire da un esame attento dei modelli preesistenti, il libro costruisce un percorso coerente e originale in un campo tanto ricco di stimoli quanto ancora in corso di definizione. -/- [Can the cognitive sciences - philosophy of mind, psychology, neuroscience, cognitive linguistics - shed light on the processes of understanding and interpreting literary texts? What are the promises and risks of this interdisciplinary dialogue? This volume sets out to address the many questions raised by the "cognitive" approaches to literature and narrative that have emerged over the past two decades, primarily in the Anglo-American and German contexts. Starting from a close examination of existing models, the book charts a coherent and original path through a field as stimulating as it is still in the process of being defined.]. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2014 Heft: 202 Seiten: 183-205.

After establishing its roots in basic forms of sensorimotor coupling between an organism and its environment, the new wave in cognitive science known as “enactivism” has turned to higher-level cognition, in an attempt to prove that even socioculturally mediated meaning-making processes can be accounted for in enactivist terms. My article tries to bolster this case by focusing on how the production and interpretation of stories can shape the value landscape of those who engage with them. First, it builds on the (...) idea that narrative plays a key role in expressing the values held by a society, in order to argue that the interpretation of stories cannot be understood in abstraction from the background of storytelling in which we are always already involved. Second, it presents interpretation as an example of what Di Paolo et al. ( 2010 ) have called in their recent enactivist manifesto a “joint process of sensemaking”: just like in face-to-face interaction, the recipient of the story collaborates with the authorial point of view, generating meaning. Third, it traces the meaning brought into the world by interpretation to the activation and, potentially, the restructuring of the background of the recipients of the story. (shrink)