Dubourg and Baumard (D&B) connect the human desire to explore unfamiliar environments to engagement with imaginary worlds, defined by them as worlds that are far from reality, fantastical, and primarily drawn from the Western canon of literature, film, and games. The authors ask: “what exactly is the cultural advantage of fictions with imaginary worlds over nonfictions describing the real world (e.g., history books, travel books)?” (target article, sect. 7.1, para. 1). While the authors argue our predisposition toward exploration and novelty draws us to new, alternative, or fictional environments, they fail to answer the primary question posed in their title: “Why Imaginary Worlds?” We can no more visit Renaissance Europe than Middle Earth, but the authors offer no rationale for including the imaginary but not the historical in their analysis. In contrast, research, practice, and theory in childhood pretend play, psychological distancing, and theatrical acting show that the quality of being “imaginary” (defined as anything unreal, rather than necessarily fantastical) makes the exploration of imaginary worlds profoundly different than that of unfamiliar environments in real-life, regardless of the distance the world has from reality. Moreover, research on cultural variance in children's pretend play serves to highlight the unexamined Eurocentrism of the target article.

Moving from reality into pretense of any form is theorized to provide emotional and exploratory safety to experience narratives and environments. The fictionality of imaginary worlds quarantines their contents from the real world (Leslie, Reference Leslie1987; Nichols & Stich, Reference Nichols and Stich2000), thus providing the psychological distance to enable safe – and potentially highly exploratory – engagement within them (Liberman & Trope, Reference Liberman and Trope2014). Quarantining is proposed regardless of the distance from reality these fictional spaces hold; whether they are naturalistic reflections of the real world, or highly fantastical and highly distanced in space or time. Similarly, the “fictional frame” theory within theatre has, for decades, described the ways a theatrical scenario allows action within a “no-penalty zone,” wherein consequences are lowered – if not removed – compared to the real world (Boland, Reference Boland2013; Heathcote, Reference Heathcote, Johnson and O'Neill1985).

This “frame” exists in childhood pretend play as well as the theatre. Just as imaginary scenarios of the stage are bounded by the proscenium, so too do children quarantine the content of their imaginations within their play (Weisberg, Reference Weisberg2015; Wyman, Rakoczy, & Tomasello, Reference Wyman, Rakoczy and Tomasello2009). Quarantining the pretense world away from the real is a defining quality of pretend play: If the imaginary content starts to bleed into the real world too much, the behavior stops being play (Buchsbaum, Bridgers, Skolnick Weisberg, & Gopnik, Reference Buchsbaum, Bridgers, Skolnick Weisberg and Gopnik2012; Rafetseder, Cristi-Vargas, & Perner, Reference Rafetseder, Cristi-Vargas and Perner2010; Weisberg & Gopnik, Reference Weisberg and Gopnik2013). The contents of fictions exist, then, within a distinct cognitive space (Nichols & Stich, Reference Nichols and Stich2000, Reference Nichols and Stich2003). Findings in psychological distancing suggests that this cognitive separation is what enables the exploratory behaviors named by D&B in the target article (Liberman, Trope, & Stephan, Reference Liberman, Trope and Stephan2007; Semin & Smith, Reference Semin and Smith1999), rather than any far or fantastical fictionality. Regardless of the distance from reality, learning and emotions generated through quarantined explorations of the content within fictional frames have been shown to carry forward into the “real” world (e.g., Goldstein & Lerner, Reference Goldstein and Lerner2018; Pierucci, O'Brien, McInnis, Gilpin, & Barber, Reference Pierucci, O'Brien, McInnis, Gilpin and Barber2014; Sutherland & Friedman, Reference Sutherland and Friedman2012, Reference Sutherland and Friedman2013; Thibodeau, Gilpin, Brown, & Meyer, Reference Thibodeau, Gilpin, Brown and Meyer2016; White & Carlson, Reference White and Carlson2015). In fact, young children may not even prefer highly or moderately fantastical pretense at all. Recent findings show American preschool children have a preference for real and realistic activities over fantastical ones (Taggart, Heise, & Lillard, Reference Taggart, Heise and Lillard2018, Reference Taggart, Becker, Rauen, Al Kallas and Lillard2020), and the insistence on high fantastical play may be a uniquely modern and American one (Lillard & Taggart, Reference Lillard and Taggart2019).

In addition to the ways neglecting evidence around pretend play impoverishes the authors' argument on why humans engage with imaginary worlds, it also results in an unchallenged Eurocentric perspective on the imaginary within the target article. The evidence presented on engagement with fantastical worlds does not take into consideration developmental and anthropological evidence on varying realism and pretense preferences in pretend play across cultures. For example, some Mennonite and Amish communities in the United States actively discourage fantasy-orientated pretend play for their children (Carlson, Taylor, & Levin, Reference Carlson, Taylor and Levin1998; Hostetler & Huntington, Reference Hostetler and Huntington1971). More mainstream Christian communities tend to support children's involvement in fantasy activities such as participation in rituals involving fantasy characters such as Santa Claus (Clark, Reference Clark1998), but these same communities often ban or discourage fantastical books and games while allowing for other types of fiction (Waldron, Reference Waldron2005). Mayan children in the Yucatán engage in play that is both less frequent, less fantastical, and ceases earlier than European-American children (Gaskins, Reference Gaskins and Göncü1999). Pretend play observed in a Taiwanese community is highly valued as a way for mothers to explicitly instill models of proper conduct, and thus is highly realistic (Haight, Wang, Fung, Williams, & Mintz, Reference Haight, Wang, Fung, Williams and Mintz1999). Research with hunter-gatherer societies shows pretend play behaviors as highly dependent upon both the age and gender of participants, and that pretense is consistently realistic and tied to either rough-and-tumble simulations of fighting, or work-themed play (Lew-Levy, Boyette, Crittenden, Hewlett, & Lamb, Reference Lew-Levy, Boyette, Crittenden, Hewlett and Lamb2020). Thus, culture heavily influences engagement with the imaginary; claiming high fantasy is an evolutionary derived behavior is not supported by play in other cultures. Until further research is undertaken that actively includes cultural variances in engagement with pretense, the authors can claim only to describe the foundations and evolution of fictions with imaginary worlds within specifically Western contexts.

The “fictional frame” that differentiates the unreal from the real appears across cultural, developmental, and aesthetic domains. This suggests that high fantasy is not a prerequisite for high exploration. The authors' focus on the fantastical in their examples of “imaginary” loses the distinction between the non-real and the fantastical, and provides no commentary on exploration that could exist within any framed fictional non-reality. By understanding that the proposed highly fantastical fictions are but one narrow, Western slice of how humans engage with the non-real, then the argument that “Imaginary Worlds” are what all humans desire for evolutionarily relevant exploration cannot be universally applied. In future work, researchers should begin by operationalizing how distance from reality is correlated with desires for safe exploration of self and emotions, and consider culturally specific developmental trajectories and outcomes.