In film and literature, such surrealistic fantasy typically occurs at the outer edge of experimentalism, but early video games depended on symbols for the simple reason that the technological limitations of the time made realism impossible.
Far more than Chekhov, whose symphonic realism is impossible not to admire but fatal to emulate, the two playwrights have shaped our drama: Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, John Osborne and Harold Pinter, Caryl Churchill and Sarah Kane are all hugely indebted to them, even when apparently rejecting their influence.
In short, competence in one's language would be impossible to acquire if realism were true [Dummett 1978 , 1993 Wright 1993].
One could then try the following hybrid solution: (1) go realist about possible worlds, and (2) exploit the set-theoretic machinery of modal realism to represent different impossible worlds as distinct ersatz, abstract constructions.
"I wanted to see how far it was possible to take realism before it would be impossible to read.
But an individual's nature is not something really shared with or common to other individuals; Abelard's refutation of realism has shown that this is impossible.
A metaphysical account of impossible worlds, alternative both to ersatzism and to Lewisian realism, has been proposed in Zalta 1997.
Extended modal realism is quite a strong position: concrete impossible worlds represent absolute and logical impossibilities directly, by instantiating them.
But it is relatively easy to extend such modal fictionalist accounts into fictional treatments of possible and impossible worlds, taking e.g. Yagisawa's extended modal realism as the fiction which we make-believe.
Yagisawa's extended modal realism proposes a Lewisian realist account of impossible worlds and impossibilia, that is, of the objects exemplifying absolute impossibilities which may inhabit such worlds: impossible worlds, just like Lewis' possible worlds, are concrete mereological sums of individuals, causally and spatiotemporally isolated from each other (see Yagisawa 1988).
