Pretensive Shared Reality: From Childhood Pretense to Adult Imaginative Play

Abstract

Imaginative pretend play is often thought of as the domain of young children, yet adults regularly engage in elaborated, fantastical, social-mediated pretend play. We describe imaginative play in adults via the term “pretensive shared reality;” Shared Pretensive Reality describes the ability of a group of individuals to employ a range of higher-order cognitive functions to explicitly and implicitly share representations of a bounded fictional reality in predictable and coherent ways, such that this constructed reality may be explored and invented/embellished with shared intentionality in an ad hoc manner. Pretensive Shared Reality facilitates multiple individual and social outcomes, including generating personal and group-level enjoyment or mirth, the creation or maintenance of social groups, or the safe exploration of individual self-concepts (such as alternative expression of a players sexual or gender identity). Importantly, Pretensive Shared Reality (both within the specific context of table-top role-playing games, and other instances) are primarily co-operative and co-creative. We draw on multiple examples, and focus on Table-Top Role Playing games (TTRPG) – and specifically, the most popular and enduring table-top role-playing games, Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) – as a primary example of such play. Our conception of “pretensive shared reality” links the widespread existence and forms of adult imaginative play to childhood pretense, places it within a developmental and evolutionary context, and argues that pretensive shared realities – which underpin many forms of imaginative culture – are an important topic of study unto themselves, and may be utilized to provide methodological insight into a variety of psychological domains.

Identity Fusion between Imaginary Characters and Oneself during Moral Dilemmas: An examination of cognitive quarantine during adult pretend play.

“…In such cases it is largely a theoretical account of how an individual can hold pretend proposition p without it interfering with the real knowledge k, and what conditions modify and change the content of p. Nichols and Stich (2000) assert that "When the [pretend] episode is over, the pretender typically resumes her non-pretend activities, and the events that occured in the context of the pretense have only a quite limited effect on the post-pretense cognitive state of the pretender" (p. 120). But an imaginary tea-party is a profoundly impoverished act of pretence compared to typical imaginative pretend play in adults, especially in common and popular forms of TTRPG such as D&D (Kapitany et al, 2022).…”

“…Humans are uniquely capable of imagining impossible and fantastic realities, and pretending to operate within those realities in consistent and coherent ways. Most often, the study of pretence and imagination is limited to children (Fein, 1981;Göncü & Perone, 2005;Nielsen, 2012;Pellegrini & Smith, 1998;Piaget, 2013), but recent scholars argues that adults engage in imaginative pretend play more than previously recognized (Kapitany et al, 2022;Lillard, n.d.;Weisberg, 2015). The cognitive foundations of pretend play were laid out by, Nichols and Stich (2000), and here we apply one of their concepts of pretend play to adults.…”

“…We have chosen to examine this topic within the context of Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) for several reasons. First, Kapitany et al (2022) have argued that games like D&D are well-calibrated to create a pretensive shared reality, a rich and enduring alternative reality, wherein the open-endedness is a feature, not a bug. Second, we are using the approach as it closely approximates the ordinary experience of tens of millions of individuals when they play such games (Hasbro Annual Reports, 2020; 2021).…”

“…One form of pretence that is common among adults is roleplay, a practice in which a player 1 assumes the role of a player-character -one which they invented, or one which was assigned -who must navigate a co-constructed, collaborative, imagined world (Bowman, 2018;Bowman & Lieberoth, 2018;Kapitany et al, 2022). Kapitany et al (2022) describes the practice by which social groups co-construct fictional worlds within which inference and embellishment are made, and in which the action is the act of role-play, as 'pretensive shared reality'.…”

“…One form of pretence that is common among adults is roleplay, a practice in which a player 1 assumes the role of a player-character -one which they invented, or one which was assigned -who must navigate a co-constructed, collaborative, imagined world (Bowman, 2018;Bowman & Lieberoth, 2018;Kapitany et al, 2022). Kapitany et al (2022) describes the practice by which social groups co-construct fictional worlds within which inference and embellishment are made, and in which the action is the act of role-play, as 'pretensive shared reality'. Pretensive shared reality differs from Nichols and Stich's (2000) 'possible world box', primarily because a pretensive shared reality is intrinsically socially embedded, and frequently endures over multiple sessions (sometimes spanning years); the possible world box (that Nichols and Stich invoke) only minimally describes the four conditions of pretence.…”