Photo by Ville Miettinen

For the benefit of my readers who don’t get out much: Role playing games are a popular form of amusement in which players assume the identity of fictional characters and embark upon adventures. Some of the parameters of these adventures are specified by the game one is playing, but these games also allow for lots of imaginative improvisation by the players.

When I began researching role-playing games for Caught in Play, I read stories about players who had gone over the edge and had been swallowed up in the imaginary world of the game. I also heard such stories from many of the role-players I interviewed. But I never met such a person, and I began to be a little suspicious of the stories. While it’s not impossible that there are such people, I’ve come to believe that they must be vanishingly rare.

Why tell these stories, then? My guess is that a role-player is likely to tell such a story to affirm that although there are people who confuse the fantasy of the game with the real world, he (or she) is not one of them. In other words, “I’m aware of this possibility, and because I’m aware of it, it can’t describe me.”

This in turn raises the question of why so many role-players are so eager to claim that they have no problem with maintaining the boundaries of reality. My research suggests an answer to this question: Role players do in fact have very powerful experiences of becoming lost in the fantasy of the game, so much so that they sometimes wonder if they are in danger of crossing this line themselves.

For example, I found that role players—without conscious planning—make gestures and movements oriented to the fantasy they are acting out, and they easily and consistently speak as their characters would. The markers of time and place in their speech (words like “now” and “here”) consistently refer to the imagined fantasy rather than the real world. In times of intense focus of the game, many role players express and feel the emotions that their imaginary characters would feel. In some very important ways, they are living in their fantasies.

But none of this means that role players have a tenuous grip on reality. In fact, these things are very similar to what happens when us non-role players get so caught up in a novel that we can’t put it down or get so focused on a spectator sport that we feel like are on the field ourselves. This capacity to get caught up in fictions and games is also the basis of pretend play in children.

Role players are not insane, rather they—like most other humans—have extraordinarily powerful imaginations that allow them to become caught up in, and carried away by, games and fictions. And this ability is not only the basis for play, it is one of the fundamental cognitive capacities that makes human ways of life possible.

Photo by Johnny Henriksen

A recent (and widely commented on)  CNN.com article reports that some viewers of the film Avatar are so desperate to occupy the fantasy world of the film that the thought of having to return to day-to-day reality here on earth leaves them depressed or even suicidal. “When I woke up this morning after watching Avatar for the first time yesterday, the world seemed … gray. It was like my whole life, everything I’ve done and worked for, lost its meaning,” wrote one young man on a fan forum.

This may sound somewhat extreme, but this is simply an example of a common phenomenon I call “getting caught up” and which a number of psychologists have studied under the label “narrative transport.” The fact is that it’s fairly normal for human beings, at least in our society, to become so immersed in stories that we feel like we are actually there. And if we really like the story we become caught up in, we don’t want to leave it—as when you don’t want to put down a book you’re reading, or don’t want it to end.

The work of developmental psychologist Paul Harris helps us to understand why human beings are so likely to become caught up in stories. By the age of two, children’s play includes complex pretend episodes that are based on imagining what some situation—such as being a firefighter or a princess—would be like. In other words, even very young children can project themselves into an imaginary situation and proceed to consistently think and talk from that situation, keeping it separate from the real world. They don’t have to plan this, they just take off and go.

Michael Tomasello’s work on the differences between cognition among non-human primates and humans provides a compelling explanation for this remarkable ability. Tomasello attributes much of the difference between the mental abilities of humans and our closest relatives to our unique ability to put ourselves “in the mental shoes” of others and easily grasp what they are up to. This cognitive ability to adopt other perspectives is what makes elaborate pretend play so easy even before our brains are fully developed. And it is also what makes it possible for adults to plunge themselves into a fiction so deeply that—for awhile—it seems and feels like the fiction is real.

For better or for worse, we live in a society in which the capacity for becoming caught up in fictions like movies, television, novels (as well as games like sports contests) is a fundamental part of our way of life. The joys of becoming caught up in entertainment are a big part of what many of us live for. In this sense, we are like those of firm religious faith who believe that a genuine paradise awaits them, except that we don’t even have to die to get there.

So, when we read about weird people who don’t want to come back to this world after visiting the vivid reality of another, we might want to consider if they are really so weird. I suspect that most of us have had the same experience at some point.