ABSTRACT
Digital games are a modern catalyst for a large set of cognitions and behaviors with firm evolutionary roots. From the pretense play perspective, however, every action in a digital game is a reference to the contra-factual nature of the game environment and is, therefore, more or less unrelated to behavior in the physical world. In combination with their high safety level, digital games—through their biological imperative to elicit a playful mode of thinking—can offer their players an opportunity to exceed the natural limits of pretense play, both in its width, and in its depth. Adaptations more oriented towards action selection, however, are more likely to operate in an organizational mode, as players voluntary take on different roles in digital games as a modern form of pretense play and show atypical actions as a result from a more general pretend mode of thinking.
