 Kendall Walton urges that we should take seriously the element of make-believe, or pretense, inherent in the telling of a fictional story by the author and the listening to it by the audience (Walton 1990, also Evans 1982: 353–68, Kripke 2013). According to this pretense theory, the pretense involved in the language game of fictional discourse shields the whole language game from a separate language game aimed at non-fictional reality, and it is in the latter language game that we seek theories of objects of various kinds as real objects. If this is right, any search for the real ontological status of fictional objects appears to be misguided. For the view that the pretense theory is compatible with a theory of fictional objects as real objects, see Zalta 2000.