Religions in Fictional Worlds: Infernal Religious Mythology in Fantasy Series

How Fictional Worlds Are Created

Both adults and children have the ability to not only think about reality but also use their imaginations and create fictional worlds. This article describes the process by which world creation happens, drawing from philosophical and psychological treatments of this issue. First, world creators recognize the need to create a fictional world, as when starting a pretend game or opening a novel. T...

The Permeability of Fictional Worlds

Real people sometimes appear in fiction, for example, Napoleon in War and Peace. Readers may also believe that a person who never actually appears in a novel could potentially appear there. In two experiments, we find evidence that readers think that a real person could appear in specific novels and physically interact with a character. This effect is magnified when the person and character sha...

The Representational Challenges of Fictional Worlds

Modern computer games often have a strong narrative structure to the progress of their gameplay. In some genres, story is at the forefront of the interaction. As game makers seek to add new capabilities for procedurally generated content to their new releases, work on interactive narrative is growing in significance both as a basic research topic as well as a source for insight into the creatio...

A Non-Believer Reads Religious Fantasy

The Intuitive Cosmology of Fictional Worlds

Children spend much of their lives immersed in fiction, as they engage with stories in fairy tales, books, movies, and television shows. Because of this immersion, developmental psychologists have long been interested in how children make sense of fictional characters such as Batman and SpongeBob SquarePants. For an adult, there is a sharp division between what is real and what is not, but this...