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 anad hocmanner. 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. (shrink)

The study of the emergence of pretend play in developmental psychology has generally been restricted to analyses of children’s play with toys and everyday objects. The widely accepted criteria for establishing pretence are the child’s manipulation of object identities, attributes or existence. In this paper we argue that there is another arena for pretending—playful pretend teasing—which arises earlier than pretend play with objects and is therefore potentially relevant for understanding the more general emergence of pretence. We present examples of playful (...) pretend teasing in infancy before and around the end of the first year, involving pretend communicative gestures, mis-labelling and almost non-compliance with prohibitions. We argue that the roots of pretence not only lie earlier in human infancy than generally acknowledged, but also are rooted in playful emotional exchanges in which people recognise and respond to violations of communicative gestures and agreements. (shrink)

Play is a frequent and relevant activity during childhood, and developmental psychologists agree that it offers a unique window on development. Play, however, remains a fuzzy concept, and difficulties persist in its definition, often leading to obstacles in building and comparing experimental studies. This may be due to widespread tendencies to define play by referring to non-observable inner states, to consider playing something that occurs in the head rather than in-the-world and to overreliance on developmental stages. Enactive approaches to child (...) play have instead recently stressed the importance of play contexts, considering child play an activity in-the-world rather than a mental state, thereby de-intellectualizing play and pretense. Along these lines, in this paper the authors propose a novel approach to the definition of play types by considering the roles of organism, environment, and task constraints, within the framework of Material Engagement Theory. Focusing on the material world surrounding the child and the interactions which characterize play, we critically review the strategy of resorting to non-observable categories in the study of play, and we propose a new model (the Kaleidoscope Model) for play analysis. (shrink)