The imagination and the imaginary in games and virtual worlds

This special issue of Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds seeks to demonstrate the potential for depth and broadness of interpretation within one single concept, and to present a variety of articles that interpret this theme in different ways. The Imagination and the role of Imaginary, a topic that both editors have studied in different ways, seemed also to be a subject that has crossed the various debates in gaming and virtual worlds studies, engaging many different philosophical, ludological, aesthetic and practice-based fields. This issue has therefore also been designed to reflect the growing maturity of games and virtual worlds studies, and to suggest ways in which one concept can provide extremely disparate readings of each medium.