Digital games, virtual reality and post‐truth concept

The paper examines digital games, labelled by some scholars as “the avant‐garde of contemporary audio-visual culture” and “the mass media of the 21st century”, in the perspective of recent concept of ‘post-truth'. The “relativisation” of truth and the blurring of the boundaries between truth and falsehood in the digitalized public sphere are nowadays positioned in media discourse and academic literature as a normal historical process. The author proposes to subject correctness and heuristic value of the ‘post-truth' notion to careful critical analysis and suggests that ‘post-truth' makes a fundamentally important essential substitution: truth in it is stripped of its absolute status and placed in the same line with things temporary, finite, conventional as post-communism, post-totalitarianism, post-modernism, post-secularism, etc. Since ‘post-truth' contains not only a logical, but also an ontological error, the author calls not to analyse digital games in the context of ‘post-truth' and use traditional frameworks based on clear true-false methodological matrix.