I hate writing; I love having written.
Dorothy Parker
In an interview, British actor Simon Jones recalled the struggle for his personal friend Douglas Adams to finish creating Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
He labored over his sentences in Hitchhiker's Guide. In fact, Douglas was a victim of his own perfectionism because it was agony for him to write. It took him forever…Douglas used to take long baths or find all sorts of excuses to not do it (Larkin, Reference Larkin2020).
Many writers similarly toil for years to realize their fictional worlds as a finished product. Indeed, worldbuilding is enormously complex and difficult. In addition to pulling readers into a compelling narrative, writers must maintain consistency in describing their fictional worlds, considering aspects like spatial and temporal scales, social relationships, and readers' expectations about behavior and dialogue among characters. They have to supply the reader with details, often bundled into narratives, that are not distracting, overly counterintuitive, or otherwise burdensome. The worldbuilder's task is not to simply imagine possibilities, but to narrow a vast possibility space into concrete, readable narratives that hang together in a coherent and (at least somewhat) believable way.
Worldbuilding therefore demands creative writing skills that, like many other skills, are developed with years of deliberate practice (Ericsson, Reference Ericsson, Ericsson, Charness, Feltovich and Hoffman2006). Because mainstream success is extremely unlikely, the years of writing and editing multiple drafts is also an enormous opportunity cost. Why, then, did Tolkien spend most of his life perfecting his piecemeal stories about Middle-earth (Carpenter, Reference Carpenter2000), ultimately for the enjoyment of other readers? Why did J. K. Rowling, as an unemployed and impoverished single parent (Kirk, Reference Kirk2003), work tirelessly to finish her early manuscripts of Harry Potter?
Dubourg and Baumard (D&B) explain why consumers enjoy fictional worlds, but in our view they do not explain the motivation to create these worlds. The arduous task of worldbuilding, a process typically taken on by heavily invested creators, does not resemble exploring the finished product, contrary to D&B's brief claim that creators are “best seen as curious explorers” (target article, sect. 7). Creators skillfully use intense, attention-grabbing stimuli (target article, sect. 3), but why go to such effort to stimulate readers in the first place? What incentives drive some individuals to take on the costs of building a fictional world?
To explain the motivation and skills of content creators, we propose a different set of selection pressures and evolved psychological mechanisms. Knowledge specialists, who similarly invest their life's work in cultivating high levels of expertise in some domain (e.g., medicine, astronomy), appear in nearly all known cultures. Like worldbuilders, these specialists agonize over mastering their skills and services. Like the audience of consumers who enjoy fictional worlds, non-specialists can and do benefit from specialists' expertise (Lightner, Heckelsmiller, & Hagen, Reference Lightner, Heckelsmiller and Hagen2021a).
Specialists often treat their knowledge as they would any other economic resource in a market setting. If their knowledge has value based on its scarcity (e.g., healers making a living providing treatments to their clientele), then they tend to keep it secretive and proprietary (Lewis, Reference Lewis2015). If a specialist has exceptional skill in a domain that is widely used (e.g., hunting, cooking), then the specialist might share their knowledge with others in exchange for prestige (Henrich & Gil-White, Reference Henrich and Gil-White2001). Both types of specialists are widespread across cultures (Lightner, Heckelsmiller, & Hagen, Reference Lightner, Heckelsmiller and Hagen2021b).
This is useful because, if we want to develop a theory that explains “this urge to create new fictional locations from scratch” (target article, sect. 2, emphasis ours), then we might consider how and why creators, like knowledge specialists, stand to benefit from their costly investments. The intellectual property rights to popular fictional worlds are often lucrative, and are therefore proprietary and closely guarded by their original creators. Fan fiction writers and video game modders routinely expand these publicly available worlds, and while modders, for example, might be driven by curiosity (target article, sect. 7), it is hard to see why they would share their creations – often providing documentation and resolving bug reports – without some kind of prestige or financial incentive.
The reality, of course, is far less dichotomous than individual creators versus population-level revisionists, as our sketch here might suggest. Knowledge specialists frequently collaborate in mutually beneficial distributions of cognitive labor (Keil, Reference Keil2003; Mercier & Heintz, Reference Mercier and Heintz2014), even when their knowledge is proprietary (Lightner et al., Reference Lightner, Heckelsmiller and Hagen2021b). Similarly, worldbuilders who work tirelessly to create intellectual property worth defending do not do so in a vacuum. The foundational myths, folklore, and contemporary works that inspire fictional worlds can make worldbuilding resemble a widely distributed population-level process, reducing the burden on an individual creator in many cases. This is especially true when a large bulk of a fictional world is supplied by existing cultural information, such as religions (e.g., in allegorical tales such as Dante's Inferno or C. S. Lewis' Narnia). Worldbuilders also outsource tasks to leverage the creativity and skill of a larger crowd. George Lucas, for example, seeded the initial story of Star Wars with “Annikin Starkiller,” but years of outsourced rewrites and edits shaped the final version of Luke Skywalker (Rinzler, Reference Rinzler2007). Even open source modding communities depend on the video game firms who enable modifications and benefit from increasing the long-term appeal of their games (Lee, Lin, Bezemer, & Hassan, Reference Lee, Lin, Bezemer and Hassan2020; Yang, Reference Yang2018).
D&B do a commendable job of explaining why, from an evolutionary perspective, fictional worlds are attractive. We doubt that their account fully explains the “drive to create new cultural content without any direct return on investment” (target article, sect. 7.2, para. 1), however, because creating a fictional world requires considerable effort and incurs substantial opportunity costs but has a low probability of financial success. Conan Doyle could have remained a surgeon, Vonnegut made a prosperous enough living as a Saab dealer, and Tolkien would have had a thriving career as an academic philologist, translator, and codebreaker. An evolutionary account of fictional worlds should consider the material costs and incentives to the creators, and a useful starting point will be to consider how their commitments reflect those made by knowledge specialists, across cultures and human history, to benefit others (Lightner et al., Reference Lightner, Heckelsmiller and Hagen2021a, Reference Lightner, Heckelsmiller and Hagen2021b).
I hate writing; I love having written.
Dorothy Parker
In an interview, British actor Simon Jones recalled the struggle for his personal friend Douglas Adams to finish creating Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
He labored over his sentences in Hitchhiker's Guide. In fact, Douglas was a victim of his own perfectionism because it was agony for him to write. It took him forever…Douglas used to take long baths or find all sorts of excuses to not do it (Larkin, Reference Larkin2020).
Many writers similarly toil for years to realize their fictional worlds as a finished product. Indeed, worldbuilding is enormously complex and difficult. In addition to pulling readers into a compelling narrative, writers must maintain consistency in describing their fictional worlds, considering aspects like spatial and temporal scales, social relationships, and readers' expectations about behavior and dialogue among characters. They have to supply the reader with details, often bundled into narratives, that are not distracting, overly counterintuitive, or otherwise burdensome. The worldbuilder's task is not to simply imagine possibilities, but to narrow a vast possibility space into concrete, readable narratives that hang together in a coherent and (at least somewhat) believable way.
Worldbuilding therefore demands creative writing skills that, like many other skills, are developed with years of deliberate practice (Ericsson, Reference Ericsson, Ericsson, Charness, Feltovich and Hoffman2006). Because mainstream success is extremely unlikely, the years of writing and editing multiple drafts is also an enormous opportunity cost. Why, then, did Tolkien spend most of his life perfecting his piecemeal stories about Middle-earth (Carpenter, Reference Carpenter2000), ultimately for the enjoyment of other readers? Why did J. K. Rowling, as an unemployed and impoverished single parent (Kirk, Reference Kirk2003), work tirelessly to finish her early manuscripts of Harry Potter?
Dubourg and Baumard (D&B) explain why consumers enjoy fictional worlds, but in our view they do not explain the motivation to create these worlds. The arduous task of worldbuilding, a process typically taken on by heavily invested creators, does not resemble exploring the finished product, contrary to D&B's brief claim that creators are “best seen as curious explorers” (target article, sect. 7). Creators skillfully use intense, attention-grabbing stimuli (target article, sect. 3), but why go to such effort to stimulate readers in the first place? What incentives drive some individuals to take on the costs of building a fictional world?
To explain the motivation and skills of content creators, we propose a different set of selection pressures and evolved psychological mechanisms. Knowledge specialists, who similarly invest their life's work in cultivating high levels of expertise in some domain (e.g., medicine, astronomy), appear in nearly all known cultures. Like worldbuilders, these specialists agonize over mastering their skills and services. Like the audience of consumers who enjoy fictional worlds, non-specialists can and do benefit from specialists' expertise (Lightner, Heckelsmiller, & Hagen, Reference Lightner, Heckelsmiller and Hagen2021a).
Specialists often treat their knowledge as they would any other economic resource in a market setting. If their knowledge has value based on its scarcity (e.g., healers making a living providing treatments to their clientele), then they tend to keep it secretive and proprietary (Lewis, Reference Lewis2015). If a specialist has exceptional skill in a domain that is widely used (e.g., hunting, cooking), then the specialist might share their knowledge with others in exchange for prestige (Henrich & Gil-White, Reference Henrich and Gil-White2001). Both types of specialists are widespread across cultures (Lightner, Heckelsmiller, & Hagen, Reference Lightner, Heckelsmiller and Hagen2021b).
This is useful because, if we want to develop a theory that explains “this urge to create new fictional locations from scratch” (target article, sect. 2, emphasis ours), then we might consider how and why creators, like knowledge specialists, stand to benefit from their costly investments. The intellectual property rights to popular fictional worlds are often lucrative, and are therefore proprietary and closely guarded by their original creators. Fan fiction writers and video game modders routinely expand these publicly available worlds, and while modders, for example, might be driven by curiosity (target article, sect. 7), it is hard to see why they would share their creations – often providing documentation and resolving bug reports – without some kind of prestige or financial incentive.
The reality, of course, is far less dichotomous than individual creators versus population-level revisionists, as our sketch here might suggest. Knowledge specialists frequently collaborate in mutually beneficial distributions of cognitive labor (Keil, Reference Keil2003; Mercier & Heintz, Reference Mercier and Heintz2014), even when their knowledge is proprietary (Lightner et al., Reference Lightner, Heckelsmiller and Hagen2021b). Similarly, worldbuilders who work tirelessly to create intellectual property worth defending do not do so in a vacuum. The foundational myths, folklore, and contemporary works that inspire fictional worlds can make worldbuilding resemble a widely distributed population-level process, reducing the burden on an individual creator in many cases. This is especially true when a large bulk of a fictional world is supplied by existing cultural information, such as religions (e.g., in allegorical tales such as Dante's Inferno or C. S. Lewis' Narnia). Worldbuilders also outsource tasks to leverage the creativity and skill of a larger crowd. George Lucas, for example, seeded the initial story of Star Wars with “Annikin Starkiller,” but years of outsourced rewrites and edits shaped the final version of Luke Skywalker (Rinzler, Reference Rinzler2007). Even open source modding communities depend on the video game firms who enable modifications and benefit from increasing the long-term appeal of their games (Lee, Lin, Bezemer, & Hassan, Reference Lee, Lin, Bezemer and Hassan2020; Yang, Reference Yang2018).
D&B do a commendable job of explaining why, from an evolutionary perspective, fictional worlds are attractive. We doubt that their account fully explains the “drive to create new cultural content without any direct return on investment” (target article, sect. 7.2, para. 1), however, because creating a fictional world requires considerable effort and incurs substantial opportunity costs but has a low probability of financial success. Conan Doyle could have remained a surgeon, Vonnegut made a prosperous enough living as a Saab dealer, and Tolkien would have had a thriving career as an academic philologist, translator, and codebreaker. An evolutionary account of fictional worlds should consider the material costs and incentives to the creators, and a useful starting point will be to consider how their commitments reflect those made by knowledge specialists, across cultures and human history, to benefit others (Lightner et al., Reference Lightner, Heckelsmiller and Hagen2021a, Reference Lightner, Heckelsmiller and Hagen2021b).
Funding
This work was supported by the Issachar Fund and Templeton Religion Trust (ADL, EHH); and the Aarhus University Research Foundation (ADL).
Conflict of interest
None.