Games can be so much fun that people devote much of their waking time to them. As they do so, their skill grows, which can make the game even more compelling. At some point, for some people, the game becomes so important that it begins to impinge upon the player’s other valued activities, such as other interests or social relationships, and the player’s life begins to deteriorate. How can this happen?

In a recent book on one of the oldest and purest competitive games—chess—anthropologist Robert Desjarlais takes up this question (among many others). He suggests the possibility that those who play a game seriously may do so because it is a haven of meaningfulness in a world that often seems meaningless.

Desjarlais writes (Counterplay, p. 114): “To begin a chess game is to step into the unknown, to foresee vague possibilities, to encounter formations at once familiar and unexpected.”A game is like a highly simplified version of everyday life. One’s decisions have consequences for the future. We know that each move we make, in life or in a game, determines a unique path for the future. In both chess and life, our possible paths are in practice infinite. However, in chess it will become obvious relatively quickly whether you made the right choices, because there will be an ending, in which you will win, lose or draw. In this, chess is like a story: there is an ending that makes it clear what it all meant.

In life, there is an ending, but we don’t get to know what it is, because we are dead. The point is that games are like living life—we make decisions that influence the outcome—but in games the situation is set up so that we can know how it all adds up. This adding up, this meaningfulness, is one of the most important things that draws people to games.

But it is not at all unusual for players of chess, like players of many other games (role-playing games, video games, games of chance, etc.) to begin to feel that the world of the game is more meaningful than the world of everyday life. It could be the personality of the player, or it could be the nature of the player’s everyday world, or it could be that the player is really good at the game and falls for the rewards of playing.

Whatever the reason, when the meaning of the game outweighs the meaning of the world, something than enhances life has slipped into something that detracts from it. It’s an open question whether this situation should be called addiction. After all, classic drug addictions aren’t typically based in the search for meaning. But it is useful, in our attempt to understand why a person can get pulled into something that begins to take over their life, that the problem can even be based in something that virtually defines our humanity: our quest for meaning.

Photo by Sourabh Massey.

The perennial debate on whether to end the “war on drugs” seems to be heating up again. Prison over-crowding and the unprecedented violence in some parts of Mexico are two of the factors leading some to question whether it is time to try something other than harsh criminal punishments for illegal drug use.

And indeed, it would be difficult to argue that the war on drugs has been a success. I live in Oklahoma, the state with the highest incarceration rates for women. A high proportion of these—over 50% in some areas—are in prison for drug-related offenses. Now, many of these women have children. And those children, separated from their mothers for years at a time, are—guess what?—likely to use drugs. So they too are likely to end up in prison. This does not appear to be a very intelligent social policy.

This, among other examples, makes some level of legalization of drug use sound like the way to go. Perhaps it is. But then we run into the fact that, as David Courtwright has pointed out, throughout history probably the best predictor of addiction rates in any place is simply the availability of drugs. When drugs are more accessible more people use them, and more people begin to exhibit the patterns of use we call addiction.

It’s sad, but the process of evolution is oriented more toward survival of the species than providing pleasure for individuals. Strong pleasures do occur but we are built so that they are relatively infrequent; these pleasures tend to be associated with vital processes such as reproduction. If human beings were constructed so that they tingled with maximum pleasure every moment of their existence, they would simply lie around and enjoy themselves, rather than grappling with the rigors of the environment and assuring the continuation of the species.

Clever animals that we are, we have nevertheless figured out a lot of ways to artificially stimulate the pleasure centers of the brain and thereby circumvent the natural stinginess of our pleasure systems. Lots of people find these techniques difficult to resist. Thus I would put my money of the possibility that if we make it less difficult and dangerous to get mind-altering drugs, many more people will use them, and we will have traded a criminal problem for a public health problem.

And in fact, it’s worse than this, much worse. Here in the United States, we have created an entire culture based on stimulating ourselves through entertainment. Some cultures throughout history have valued honor, or piety, or moderation. We value enjoyment and personal pleasure. For this reason, neither a war on drugs nor legalization will work to keep drug use under control. We live in a society that, in its attempt to keep a high consumption economy humming, tells its citizens that pleasure and arousal are the most important goals in life. It cannot really come as a surprise, then, when many people are inexorably drawn to drug use.

Photo provided on Flickr by Tomas de Aquino, from Wikipedia.

We live in an entertainment culture. The most obvious indication of that is that much of what people care about is entertainment: Lady Gaga, the NBA, American Idol, Charlie Sheen, etc. An obvious question is whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, and usually I’m reluctant to try and answer that question. Sure, it’s easy to make fun of fans and celebrities and Americans riveted to their televisions watching obese people exercising and getting weighed, but who says people have to engage in serious activities all the time? If we look at what most people have been doing most of the time throughout human history, it’s probably not discussing moral philosophy and inventing calculus. And part of the reason for that is that people need rest and recovery time and enjoyable activities: without some sort of stress relief we would self-destruct.

Yet there are some serious questions we should ask about people’s engagement with entertainment. One of them concerns those who seem to get so deeply immersed in entertainment that they begin to neglect the possibilities and responsibilities of the rest of their lives. Whether or not we want to use the word “addiction” to cover this sort of possibilities, the results of an overuse of entertainment can be much the same as an overuse of a drug: A person can become so obsessed with a form of entertainment (such as an online game) that it begins to destroy his or her life.

And that leads us back to the question of whether an entertainment culture is a good thing or a bad thing. Recently Anthropologist Jeff Snodgrass and his colleagues have published research that is intended to answer this question in one specific context, that of the online role-playing game, World of Warcraft (WoW). As anyone who has played these games knows, they can be extremely absorbing. Players often report that they lose track of time, even of their everyday surroundings and identities and feel like they become the characters they portray in the game. And of course—as I point out in my book Caught in Play–such experiences occur in many different forms of entertainment, from reading a romance novel to watching an exciting movie.

Snodgrass leads a team of researchers who are themselves long-term WoW players. They have interviewed many other players and have posted online surveys that have been completed by hundreds of WoW enthusiasts. The research team has discovered a complex web of relationships that help us to get a handle on the “good or bad” question. But if we simplify it all down to a bottom line, the answer is that becoming deeply immersed in WoW can be both and good thing and a bad thing. WoW—along with many other forms of entertainment—can be an effective form of stress relief, for it allows the player to so completely forget real world problems and thus relax for awhile. But precisely because the experience can be so relaxing and pleasurable, some players—by their own admission—overuse it. One of the valuable results of this research is that maybe it can help us put an end to the debate over whether entertainment is good or bad, and get down to the more interesting question of exactly what factors produce positive and negative mental health outcomes for entertainment users.

Photo by Ran Yaniv Hartstein

What do we mean when we say that someone is a fanatic? One variety of fanaticism has to do with religious or political views. This sort of fanatic is a person who is so sure that his or her views are the truth that they see anyone who holds different views as evil or inhuman.

But we could also say, for example, that Bob is a “snow-boarding fanatic.” In this case we may mean the label as almost a compliment. We simply mean that Bob loves to snow-board so much that he would rather do this than just about anything else.

A third sort of fanaticism is usually designated by using the shorted form of the word, that being “fan.” We could say that Jillian is a Justin Bieber fan, and what we would mean is that Jillian not only loves the music of Justin Bieber but that she is completely fascinated by him as a person, that she may have started eating his favorite foods and that she fantasizes about meeting him.

Most people regard the first form of fanaticism as potentially dangerous, and the other forms as harmless, if sometimes a little over the top. But the fact that we use the same word for all of these behaviors also suggests that they share something in common—a person becomes involved in something to a degree that is so excessive that it pushes other ideas or activities out of the way. Fanaticism always entails a lack of balance in a person’s life and thoughts.

In this, fanaticism seems like addiction. By making that comparison, I don’t mean to imply that addiction is equivalent to being a Lady Gaga fan. Addiction is a life-threatening problem that causes untold suffering in our society. But it is also true that addiction is similar to fanaticism. Addiction too entails a lack of balance, a situation in which one substance or activity crowds the rest of a person’s life out of the way.

In fact, some addiction experts (such as Bruce Alexander) define addiction in this way: An addict is likely to be a person who is adrift from their moorings in the values of their community and as a result they are desperate for self-definition. Thus, like the fanatic, the addict loses his or her balance and becomes focused on just one desire. And that desire can become like a cancer, spreading and taking over a person’s life.

This brings me to the point of this post: Why is it that addiction and fanaticism (including fandom) are so widespread in our time? I think Alexander comes as close as anyone does to answering that question: Just as fanaticism and addiction grow by crowding out a person’s other values, a person who is firmly committed to a wide range of personal values is better able to resist addiction or fanaticism. In its relentless pursuit of economic growth and profit, contemporary society erodes people’s commitments to their families, their traditions, their communities, and their ideals. And in so doing, our society leaves people more vulnerable to addiction and fanaticism.

Photo by Ed Yourdon.

As those who have read this blog in the past know, I consider entertainment to be very important in our culture. It’s important because much of what people want to do comes down to being entertained—watching TV, movies, and sports, playing games, amusing themselves online, going out to eat, drink, and party, etc., etc. In that sense, although we are unlikely to put it in this way, entertainment seems to operate for many of us as the very purpose of life.

Entertainment is also important because our lust to be entertained infects many areas of life that aren’t in themselves entertaining—we want our food and our cars and our politicians and our classes and our friends to be entertaining, just for starters. The result is that certain kinds of products and activities—for example, an honest and competent, but ugly and boring politician—tend to disappear.

In a number of recent posts, I have been trying to point out another aspect of the importance of entertainment—entertainment can only flourish in a particular sort of cultural environment. Whether it’s a strange coincidence or not, the mass entertainments of the turn of the 20th century (motion pictures, followed by radio and TV) were accompanied by new ways of thinking about people and values. At this time there was a growing emphasis on the importance of people being amusing and being able to create a good first impression, and there emerged a new flexibility about moral values. Above all, this is the period when it began to be widely accepted that the possibilities of fulfillment and self-realization opened up life’s most important quests. And what better way to find fulfillment than in entertaining activities and the acquisition of the flood of consumer goods that was starting to appear around this time?

I don’t claim that entertainment caused all these things, but I do claim that they all emerged in our culture at roughly the same time—around the turn of the 20th century. As I pointed out last time, that’s also the time period in which an increasingly vocal protest started to emerge against this culture of entertainment, a protest that usually took the form of religious fundamentalism.

So, what’s the point? Is entertainment good or bad? The point has nothing to do with entertainment being good or bad. Sure, there are social problems that are associated with entertainment; here are a few possibilities that come immediately to mind: childhood obesity, addiction, political polarization, widespread boredom. I’ve discussed all of these in this space.

But there are lots of good things associated with entertainment as well: tolerance of diversity, effective communication, and–can’t forget this–it’s fun. In the end, the point isn’t to pass judgment on our culture of entertainment, it’s to better understand that culture. Because we are more likely to be able to control what we understand. And what we don’t understand is more likely to control us.

Photo by Bandita

Here’s a headline from MSNBC.com the other day: “Health reform idea: Put down the doughnut.” Largely missing from the health care debate, says the author, is a discussion of the role of personal choice in creating health problems such as obesity. Some people wonder why their tax dollars should be used to care for people who are ruining their own health by eating too much.

In contrast, a few days earlier Ellen Goodman had written an op-ed piece in the Boston Globe arguing that the nation’s obesity problem has something to do with the way food is marketed. The food industry has invested billions in advertising and food processing techniques in order to make food irresistible, and Goodman opined that this just might have something to do with why so many people eat too much. A lot of Goodman’s readers seemed to incline more toward the “personal responsibility” explanation; several of them combined this view with the opinion that Goodman was a sicko commie witch for even suggesting that the food industry bears some responsibility in this issue.

From my perspective, this debate is never going to get past the shouting stage until we recognize that some of our ethical concepts—in particular the way we think about intentional behavior and responsibility—have not kept up with the research on why people act the way they do. Morally, we are stuck in the Middle Ages, with assumptions like “except for reflexes, people’s actions are intentional and voluntary.” In this view, almost everything sane people do is the result of conscious decisions to act.

There is by now overwhelming evidence, from fields such as social psychology and cognitive neuroscience, demonstrating that this is flat wrong. In fact, most of what we do is orchestrated by mental processes that never reach full consciousness: deeply ingrained habits, unconscious cognitive schemata and stereotypes, and so on. My own work in this area has been especially concerned with the role of imitation: human beings are imitation machines. To take a single example, a person will closely imitate the facial expressions of a conversational partner, without any intention or even awareness that he or she is doing so.

That point has enormous implications for understanding the efficacy of advertising. Social psychologist John Bargh and his colleagues have done a number of relevant studies here; a recent paper shows that watching people eat increases eating behavior in viewers. As I argue in Caught in Play, imitation is also central for understanding the effects of our participation in entertainment more broadly. Entertainment is another domain in which automatic mental processes shape our values and behavior.

So, what’s the point? Simply this: I have no argument with those who urge consumers to be responsible. People who eat too much need to take responsibility for that. But we now know that eating behavior—to stick with this example—can be powerfully encouraged by mental processes that occur outside of conscious awareness. Who is responsible for that? Isn’t it the people who intentionally design advertising and food processing to generate over-consumption? If you demand that consumers be responsible, why not be consistent and demand that the industries promoting consumption be responsible as well?

Photo by Kr4gin

We have a severe drug abuse problem in our society, and anyone who has struggled with an addiction (or watched a loved one do so) knows the agony that addiction brings to sufferers and their families. For the most part, addiction is understood to be a result of biological factors and similar to a disease process: the interaction of a powerful chemical with the human nervous system can create a situation in which the body becomes dependent upon the chemical, and withdrawal from that chemical leads to great suffering.

A number of addiction experts dispute the disease model, however, and they offer some convincing counter-arguments. To take a single obvious example, some people seem to develop addictive relationships to activities that don’t involve ingesting chemicals, activities such as gambling or playing games on the Internet. In fact, we seem to be a nation of people who fall rather easily into being controlled by our desires; even those who have no addictions often struggle to control their spending or their food intake.

From my own work on addiction and my reading of the literature, I have no doubt that biological factors are an important part of addiction, but I also agree with those who point out that the disease model simply cannot explain the broad range of problems we group under headings like addiction or dependency. Until someone comes up with the data to show that all addictions are the result of a single underlying biological mechanism—something akin to the measles virus, say—we are better off trying to understand addiction in the as the result of complex interactions between biological, social, and psychological factors.

So, in that spirit: What if we try re-conceptualizing some sorts of addiction as one part of a larger issue, the issue of feeling controlled by desires so strong that we cannot resist them? Then the question becomes, “why are we so likely to become convinced that we are helpless to control our desires?” The answer is that our society has an extraordinarily effective means of creating and strengthening certain social values. We call this system entertainment.

In Caught in Play I pay special attention to the importance of the emotionally powerful experiences we can have when we become “caught up” in entertainment activities. I suspect everyone is familiar with such experiences—who hasn’t had the feeling of being so absorbed in a book that it’s hard to put down, or so immersed in a game that one loses track of everything else? In such experiences we have the sense that we are to some extent being controlled by something beyond ourselves, and we are bound to wonder what that something is. The answer that comes most easily to mind is that we are controlled by the ideas or practices or substances that are prominent in whatever fantasy it is that we are caught up in.

For instance, we become caught up in a tale of romance and we conclude—more on the basis of our feelings than our thoughts—that romance is a powerful force, impossible to resist. We become caught up in an advertisement for a car and we conclude that certain cars (or material products generally) can transform our experience. We become caught up in an acting performance by an attractive celebrity and we conclude that the celebrity is irresistible. When much of the population has such experiences repeatedly throughout the day, many begin to feel that they are powerless to resist potent emotional experiences.

In such an environment, many people are likely to understand their experiences with drugs along the same lines: the drug (like the potent experiences of entertainment) has the power to overwhelm the will. That’s not the whole explanation of our addiction problem, but it’s not irrelevant either.

This blog is about “entertainment,” and in writing it I feel like a salmon trying to talk to other salmon about water. Not only is entertainment all around us, but various factors conspire to make it difficult to assess, even difficult to notice. For example, what we mean by entertainment is diversion, that which takes us away from serious pursuits. But one of the things I want to say is that entertainment has some very serious consequences for our culture and our way of life. In doing so, I may seem like someone who needs to loosen up. “It’s just fun! Don’t take it so seriously, dude!”

If you are an academic calling attention to entertainment, many people automatically assume you are a bore. There have always been plenty of people who do try and take entertainment seriously, pointing out, for example, that television watching is a less worthy pursuit than, say, reading poetry. Or perhaps that violence on television is bad for children. These commentators on entertainment often have valid and important points to make, but sometimes they are also sort of annoying, preachy even.

No preaching here, I don’t mean to tell you not to partake of entertainment. Instead, I just want to urge you to think about your engagement with entertainment. Like, let’s talk honestly about Brad and Angelina. You don’t give a shit about Brad and Angelina, do you? You’re not some tabloid junkie, you’re reading this for God’s sake, you’re a different demographic. Why then, if it so happened that you saw Brad or Angelina in an airport, would you tell everyone you could about it? What’s up with this?

You can at least begin to see how this sort of matter has some relevance for addictive behavior, because at heart this is question is similar to: “Why do some people keep drinking when they recognize that it would be better for them to quit? Why do some women keep dating the same sort of guy when they recognize that it would be better to change the pattern? Why are some people—you, for example—intrigued by celebrities when you recognize that really it’s sort of silly? Why is your behavior not entirely under your control here?

(This is a lightly edited version of a post that first appeared in Psychology Today, further comments available there)