Bridging the Other-Real

Through the theoretical frameworks of sonic virtuality and embodied cognition, Tom Garner considers the role of imagination in the context of sound in actualizing the virtual worlds of digital games. In a chapter that takes in Spinoza, Hume, Kant, and Deleuze, Garner uses this consideration of imagination as the foundation to explore world-building in digital games—where the player is a significant agent in constructing a viable world in which to be present—concluding that sound, when allied to imagination, has a major role in world-blurring, Garner’s term for the convergence, and inability to distinguish, between the real physical world and the “other-real” virtual world.