 Iconic and verbal representations of various familiar traditional kinds—dolls, hobby horses, statues, paintings, novels—are inanimate props, artifacts whose whole raison d’être is to help generate fictional content in make-believe games of various familiar recurrent kinds. What such representations represent is a matter of how they stand ready to function as props, how they stand ready to shape fictional content by helping to generate it when games of these familiar recurrent kinds actually get played. Actors, on the other hand, are animate props, props of a peculiarly active and self-conscious kind. They help to author and direct (in their capacity as autonomous agents) the fictional content they help to generate (in their capacity as props) and go on to consume (in their capacity as obedient imaginers). Actors behave so as to deliberately shape what comes out fictional in the games they play with one another and with salient inanimate bits of the world around them, thereby deliberately orchestrating their own imaginings and those of their fellow players.