Embodied and Enactive Imagination in VR

Do we perceive or do we imagine virtual entities in virtual reality games? There are, to date, two mainstream answers in the literature to this question: the answer of the fictionalists, which is that we must imagine virtual entities for they are fictional, and the answer of the realists, which is that we directly perceive virtual entities since they are digital. In this article, I put another option on the table, and argue that following a particular embodied and enactive take oni magination (what I will call EEI), imagination can play a specific role in our experience of virtual entities. Specifically, imagination is involved in anticipating virtual affordances (or in-game actions possibilities), and in allowing one to be creative within the game context. The view ultimately endorses a relational instead of a representational view of imagination: instead of representing unreal fictional entities, it showcases that imagination is a context-dependent process shaped by the interactions found within the virtual games.