Reality Games: Modeling the Universe in Dimensional Fiction

This essay examines “dimensional fiction,” a genre that emerged in response to the philosophy of Absolute idealism and the mid-nineteenth-century development of non-Euclidean geometry. By surveying the works of the late Victorian writers and mathematicians Edwin A. Abbott and Charles Howard Hinton, their literary descendants in the 1980s, A.K. Dewdney and Orson Scott Card, and the twenty-first-century video games that serve as the latest expansion pack to the genre, I argue that dimensional fiction uses interactive models to dilate the reader-player’s ontological, aesthetic, and ethical purview. These ludic models systematically dismantle the discrete self to suggest that it is identical, in some sense, to the extent of reality—the universe or Absolute. The result is an alienating realism that chal lenges subjectivism and anthropocentrism by attempting to depict that which is impossible for humans to conceptualize.