In its earliest incarnation, “culture” was about a shared worldview, a means for groups to unite around core ideas and concepts. It has evolved to designate social status by distinguishing between high and low culture, while pop culture, mass culture and trash culture point to a range of shared and guilty pleasures in certain kinds of books, movies and music. Youth culture is yet another cultural category, and in some ways aligns well with play, where the concept of a magic circle separates game space from ordinary space, enclosing us within its magic. The wonderful otherness of play reminds us of the otherness of children and youth, who inhabit their own culture, rife with its own rules, pleasures, dreams and demons. While disciplines such as cultural studies and anthropology offer scientific methods for studying cultures and their creators, how can we understand the many cultures of fiction and their corresponding worldviews?