Long before novels, films, or video games, humans were already building places that did not exist. Islands of one-eyed giants, underworlds, heavens, animal kingdoms that spoke, cities of gold that no map could locate. Today the impulse is only more elaborate: secondary worlds with their own languages, histories, and laws of physics. The question is not whether we create fictional worlds. The question is why a species that must survive in the real one spends so much time inventing others.
The short answer is that fictional worlds hijack and satisfy deep cognitive preferences. They let us explore without risk, practice social understanding, regulate emotion, and expand the range of what we can imagine. Creating and inhabiting them is one of the distinctive things human minds do.
Humans create fictional worlds because our minds are built for exploration, simulation, and meaning-making—and non-existent places are extraordinarily efficient at feeding those drives.
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Cognitive scientists have proposed that the strong appeal of imaginary worlds co-opts evolved preferences for exploration. Just as real organisms are drawn to novel environments that may contain resources or information, humans are drawn to richly detailed fictional environments that offer the feeling of discovery without physical cost (Dubourg & Baumard, 2022).
Exploration Without the Danger
Animals, including humans, possess exploratory drives. Novel environments can contain food, mates, shelter, or useful knowledge; ignoring them can be costly. Fictional worlds appear to activate some of the same motivational systems. They present new landscapes, new rules, new possibilities. The brain responds with curiosity and the reward of discovery even though nothing “real” is at stake.
This helps explain the cultural success of high-fantasy and science-fiction settings, elaborate game worlds, and long-running franchises whose maps and lore expand across books, films, and interactive media. The more a fictional world feels large, coherent, and not fully exhausted by a single story, the more it rewards the exploratory impulse. We keep returning because there is always more territory—literal or conceptual—to enter.
The same logic applies at smaller scales. Even a short story or a child’s pretend game constructs a temporary elsewhere. The capacity to step outside the immediate environment and mentally inhabit another one is ancient and widespread.
Part of the attraction of The Lord of the Rings relies on the intrinsic feeling of reward we experience when viewing far off an unvisited island or the towers of a distant city.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Simulation, Practice, and Social Cognition
Fictional worlds are also powerful simulation devices. Inside them we can rehearse social situations, moral dilemmas, power dynamics, and emotional extremes without real-world consequences. Research on narrative and the brain links engagement with fiction to systems involved in theory of mind—the ability to represent other people’s beliefs, intentions, and feelings.
By following characters through complex social landscapes, readers and viewers exercise the same networks used in real social understanding. The “protective fictionality” of made-up worlds may make this practice safer and more intense: we can fully enter another perspective without the defensive caution that real relationships sometimes require.
World-building intensifies the effect. A fully realized secondary world supplies consistent rules, histories, and cultures against which characters act. The result is a richer, more demanding simulation than a bare plot outline. We do not merely watch events; we learn to navigate an entire imagined social and physical ecology.
Warning!
Not every fictional world is equally useful or benign. Worlds can reinforce harmful stereotypes, romanticize violence, or become so absorbing that they displace engagement with actual life. The cognitive machinery that makes world-creation rewarding does not automatically guarantee positive outcomes.
Meaning, Emotion, and Identity
Beyond exploration and social practice, fictional worlds help humans manage emotion and construct identity. They offer controlled exposure to fear, loss, triumph, and wonder. They supply metaphors and narrative templates that people later use to interpret their own lives. A person who has lived imaginatively through exile, loyalty tested, or the fall of a city carries those patterns into how they understand real upheaval.
Creating such worlds is also a form of agency. In ordinary life, many constraints are fixed. In a fictional world the maker decides the physics, the history, the moral weather. That freedom can be deeply satisfying. It is a way of testing values, rearranging power, and asking “what if” at the scale of an entire reality.
Anthropologically, storytelling and world-making appear across cultures as ways of transmitting knowledge, reinforcing group identity, and making sense of existence. The specific contents change; the underlying practice of inventing coherent elsewheres does not.
Entertainment Technologies with Deeper Roots
Some researchers describe narrative fictions as “entertainment technologies”—cultural inventions crafted to capture attention and, once attention is held, to serve further social or individual goals. Imaginary worlds are especially effective versions of these technologies because they sustain prolonged engagement. A single story ends; a world can keep generating new stories, new corners to explore, new relationships to follow.
This does not reduce fictional worlds to mere distraction. The same systems that make them gripping also make them useful for simulation, emotional regulation, and the expansion of imaginative range. What begins as attraction to novelty can end as a richer internal repertoire for thinking about real possibilities.
Humans create fictional worlds because our minds are restless explorers that can travel without moving. We build places that never existed so we can discover, practice, feel, and mean more than the single life we are given. The worlds are imaginary. The needs they answer are not.
Selected sources:
Dubourg, E., & Baumard, N. (2022). Why imaginary worlds? The psychological foundations and cultural evolution of fictions with imaginary worlds. Behavioral and Brain Sciences.
Research on exploratory preferences, narrative as social simulation (Mar & Oatley and related work), and fiction’s role in theory of mind and emotion regulation.
Discussions of fictions as entertainment technologies and the adaptive value of imaginative simulation.
Additional insights from cognitive science on world-building, pretend play, and the use of fictional memory in mental simulation.