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.

The new year is now upon us, and with each new year comes the pressure to reassess ourselves and our lives, to figure out what we should do differently. I will exercise more! Eat less! Volunteer more! But it’s hard to fit anything new in, because we’re all so busy, we’re all going at 90 miles an hour, right?

Well, here’s some surprising news from the world of facts: Sociologists John P. Robinson and Geoffrey Godbey point out that researchers have been having people fill out time diaries since the mid-1960s or so. And, taken as a whole, what these records show is that there has been little aggregate change in the amount of time we spend on the various basic activities of life: working, sleeping, time with family, leisure. As a matter of fact, on average people have nearly an hour more of free time today than they did in 1965.

How can this be? Like you, I’m absolutely convinced I get busier every year. Maybe it’s a statistical problem: although the averages of time spent on various tasks have remained constant over decades, perhaps that’s because some people have become super slackers while others–such as you and me—have become super busy. However, this probably isn’t the right explanation; the ratio of slothfulness has probably remained more or less constant in the last half century.

Anthropologist Chuck Darrah is among the researchers who have been exploring some other possible reasons for the perceived busyness epidemic. One thing that has indeed changed in the last forty years is there are far more dual career couples now and the partners in these couples are working more hours. As this has happened, available time in dual career families for things like preparing meals and driving the kids to soccer practice has become more scarce. So, if you are in a dual career family, you may in fact be busier than your parents were.

Darrah also points out that as we have become convinced we are insanely busy, a whole new realm of activity has emerged, that of managing busyness. It’s great that now you can keep a calendar on your smart phone and co-ordinate activities with others by constant texting, but these things actually take a lot of time.

Finally, I’d like to add that if you listen closely to yourself or others talking about busyness, you are likely to detect a tone of pride. People may complain about how busy they are, but underneath the complaining is the message: look at me, I’m so busy! I’m getting so much done! My time is in demand! I mean, what if you aren’t busy? Doesn’t that suggest that the world doesn’t really need you?

In contemporary entertainment culture, we expect to be stimulated more or less continuously. Moments when we aren’t doing something specific are in fact likely to seem boring to us. One reason we are all so busy is that our culture has programmed us to only be comfortable when experiencing high levels of arousal. We say we want to slow down, but do we really?

Photo by MCCChurch.

The rules of the most basic celebrity game are simple. We watch the celebrity, so the celebrity is a special being. But the celebrity is in our world, so…we too are special! Thus you might want to watch a TV program with lots of pictures and video of the glamorous celebrity but with plenty of stories about how the celebrity messes up his or her life. The celebrity is at once elevated and brought down to earth.

Let’s face it. We human primates are just awed by high status individuals in our presence. We are wired to be excited by harmonious interaction with our fellows—think of the bliss that a successful sexual interaction or even a lively conversation brings. And when the interaction occurs with one we idealize—as in a romantic crush or even a tangential encounter with a celebrity—the level of our excitement is nearly overwhelming.

If you think about it, our games are often set up situations for stimulating our basic drives–competition, close cooperation, physical dominance, etc.—and we enjoy games because they can provide a significant emotional rush. The celebrity game stimulates the basic social pleasure of harmony with an admired person. But why is this game so popular in our society?

One of the basic problems in a society where fabulous accomplishments are revered and celebrated is that what most people do can’t be considered a fabulous accomplishment. Sure, it’s pretty meaningful to work hard at a challenging job or raise a child, but by definition fabulous things only get done by a few. And if fabulous things are what matter, most of us don’t. So our society provides a way for us to commune with the fabulous in the celebrity game, to briefly feel the excitement of interaction with the celebrity idol.

In every human society, such experiences of ecstasy are a way of cementing important commitments. And such is the case here: through our dealings with celebrities we learn that we should strive for something extraordinary, and we are given a small taste of the ecstasy that extraordinary accomplishments are said to provide. That helps us keep going, long after it has become obvious that we are not destined for greatness. But it also may leave us with a nagging feeling that our lives never really measured up.

Photo by Richard Yaussi

Photo by Annia316

I was a late bloomer. There’s some self-praise embedded in that statement, because it implies that I bloomed, a point that could be disputed. So we’ll just say that to the extent I bloomed, it happened late. Specifically: I didn’t start dating until my late teen years, and it was also then I finally stopped growing and discovered my admittedly limited athletic abilities. Maybe most important, it was when I was around 17 when I rather suddenly gained some self-confidence and awareness of who I was.

That’s enough self-disclosure for now, in fact for the next year or so; now I’ll turn to late bloomers more generally. We regard late bloomers as somewhat odd, they are not typically the popular kids in high school, they seem a little lost, often they are rather nerdy. In fact, to say that someone is a late bloomer is usually a nice way of saying they are sort of a loser.

But here’s a counter-intuitive spin on late bloomers: Rather than being slow to mature, maybe in fact they are actually ahead of their peers. Maybe they don’t fit in because it takes several years for their peers to catch up to them. Because if you think about it, the sorts of things that late bloomers don’t fit into are not exactly mature and adult behavior: an overwhelming concern with how you are seen by your peers, conformity to prevailing social norms, participation in fads, precocious sexuality, fanatic competition for position in the social hierarchy.

I don’t really mean to suggest that early or middle bloomers are immature, that’s a generalization that is surely unwarranted. But I’m interested in the fact that people kind of look down on late bloomers, which suggests that our cultural standards in fact encourage those behaviors I just mentioned in the previous paragraph, because when somebody doesn’t act this way he or she is considered a weirdo.

Now we’re back to something that I have often pointed out in this blog, the fact that our values are not always what we claim they are. Our society (and probably other societies as well) has a set of shadow values—behaviors that we officially we claim to deplore, but actually we do much to promote.

So why should our society encourage teen-agers to be highly conformist, obsessed with popularity and the latest fads, and to flaunt their developing sexuality? The reason is that these behaviors are in fact highly compatible with a culture based in entertainment and consumption, as ours is. Children who are very concerned with displaying how they are in touch with the latest trends are fabulous and dependable consumers, and their concerns drive the larger economy of trendiness. And children who are highly oriented to physical arousal are going to pursue it where they can find it, in drugs, entertainment and sex. The fact is that our social and economic system encourages a number of values and behaviors we claim to deplore. Our mild disdain for “late bloomers” is just one more example of this.

Photo by Jamie Campbell

One of the most important reasons that we love entertainment such as dramatic movies and sports events is that they are suspenseful. If one football team leads another by 63 points in the third quarter, most spectators will lose interest in the contest, because there is no suspense about the outcome. Likewise, a dramatic movie has to make us wonder about the fate of the hero; without such suspense we will experience the movie as flat and boring.

This leads to an obvious question that, strangely enough, is rarely asked: Why the heck should we find such pleasure in not knowing how things are going to turn out? Generally speaking, don’t we prefer security and understanding to insecurity and uncertainty? Why do we so enjoy putting ourselves in situations in which we feel anxiety about the outcome?

The first clue to the answer here is that we don’t really put ourselves in such situations, because the circumstances that produce suspense are always in some sense imaginary or fictional. We can feel suspense about the outcome of a game, even if we are playing in it ourselves, but we don’t say that we feel suspense about whether the boss is going to fire us in the meeting later this morning (Our feelings in this case are more likely to be anxiety and uncertainty). So it must be something about experiencing uncertainty in an imaginary situation that is the basis for the pleasure of suspense.

Some authors have concluded that since the situation in a fiction (like a movie or a book) or a game is imaginary, the emotions we feel themselves have an imaginary quality, and that is why we can enjoy what would otherwise be an unpleasant emotion, such as anxiety or uncertainty. The problem with this position, among other things, is that it is difficult to understand what an imaginary emotion is, and how it could be clearly distinguished from a real emotion.

There’s a simple solution to this problem: As any anxiety sufferer will tell you, it is completely possible to generate very real emotions just by thinking about certain situations, you don’t have to actually be in those situations. The limbic system, the part of the brain that produces the basic feeling of anxiety, reacts to thoughts that the more advanced parts of the brain can recognize as imaginary.

So this is at least part of the answer to our question. Suspense is real emotion that is provoked by a situation that we recognize as not real. Because we recognize that the situation is not real, we can allow ourselves to feel enough of the anxiety to feel stimulated, but then control that anxiety by reminding ourselves that the situation is imaginary.

But there is another part of the question—why should that be so much fun? I can’t say that I know the answer the answer to that one, but I have a guess: Conscious human beings can’t avoid at least occasionally confronting the fact that the future is uncertain and that in fact the current moment could be their last. We love stories and other situations that have happy endings because they provide a sense of relief. They give us hope that the uncertainty and anxiety we often feel may be simply temporary, and in the end everything will work out just fine.

Photo: Save vs. Death

Most of what we regard as entertaining is suspenseful. Turn on your television and you will see contests (which man will she choose? Who will lose the most weight?), sporting events, murder mysteries, all sorts of different ways of generating suspense. Even the news attempts to be suspenseful (“Coming up after the break…”)

A few academics have studied suspense, and one thing that they agree on—indeed it seems rather obvious—is that suspense is a form of uncertainty. We feel suspense because we aren’t sure how the story or the game will turn out, and we become very interested in finding out. But here is where the mysteries start to emerge. First, obviously we find suspense to be very appealing, but what is so appealing about uncertainty? In fact, in the abstract at least, uncertainty is anything but an inherently pleasant experience. Second mystery: if suspense is uncertainty , then why is it possible to enjoy seeing a movie or reading a book more than once? You already saw the movie, you know what is going to happen, but still you are sitting on the edge of your seat. How can this be?

These questions are tough enough on their own, but I’m going to raise the bar by adding a third mystery, one that is relevant not just to suspense but to the broader question of our response to fictions. Why do we have any emotional response to fictions at all? Why is it that we can care so much about the fate of a movie hero that we know perfectly well does not exist?

In  Caught in Play I argue that all these mysteries can be resolved if we follow those simulation theorists who assume that the human brain is specifically adapted to adopt the perspective of others as it assesses situations. We are social mammals with what could almost be called a super power, the capacity to see and even feel the world as others see and feel it.

This capacity probably evolved to facilitate cooperation. But once it is present, it becomes useful in many other ways. One of them is that the ability to adopt perspectives that we know are fictional is basic to the robust human imagination, And, again, our imaginations entail feelings as well as thoughts: We can not only imagine a scary dragon but be terrified of it.

That’s why we can care about a story we know to be fictional. It also explains how we can feel suspense even when we know how the story ends. Knowing the ending doesn’t interfere with our ability to place ourselves in the situation of the characters in a story, and once we do that we can suspend our knowledge of the ending in the same way as we suspend our knowledge that the situation is fictional. Our ability to enjoy suspenseful games and fictions is based on our easy ability to separate these from our knowledge of the world from our own perspective.

That goes a long way towards addressing the first and third questions above, but not the first; it still remains unclear why we should find uncertainty so enjoyable. I’ll have something to say about that in a future post.

We live in a culture of entertainment, a society in which being entertained is so highly valued that at times it seems that if something isn’t entertaining, it should be avoided or ignored. The demand for just about everything to conform to the standards of entertainment has, in the last few decades, extended to the person. You have to be entertaining, or you will be avoided or ignored.

Therefore a small industry has arisen to help you develop your personal brand. As you know, big corporations spend millions to develop brands with flashy logos that encourage consumers to view the corporation and its products as exciting, cool, edgy, etc. Well,, if products need brands, why not individuals? Inevitably, “branding coaches” have started popping up offering advice on topics such as “Here’s what it takes to be the CEO of Me, Inc.” Most of the advice comes down to this: figure out your strengths and then figure out how to market them, thereby creating a public relations image for yourself.

This approach is generally oriented toward career management, but there is also a much larger (and somewhat harder to spot) process of self-branding going on in contemporary society. People have always used consumer products such as their cars and clothing to advertise who they are, but in recent years that process has accelerated. These days many high end houses are built not only to display the owner’s wealth, but also to assert claims about who the owner is: “I am the master of a Tuscan villa”, or “I am royalty” (I see lots of houses these days with turrets, which I suppose might be useful if you need to defend your house in a siege, otherwise they are just a way of saying, “I own a castle”).

Or , to take a different sort of example, I don’t listen to much country music, but I get to hear it sometimes at the gym, and these days it seems to me that a lot of it is about the sort of people who listen to country music: “I’m proud to drive a tractor and salute the flag” etc. Back in the day country music was about things like cheating spouses and drowning your sorrows at the bar; now a popular theme seems to be “I’m the sort of person who listens to country music.”—more self advertising. My final example is one that is so obvious it almost doesn’t need to be mentioned: social media. What is Facebook other than a vast platform for creating brand you?

Why do people feel they have to shout so loud to establish who they are? My answer would be: This happens for the same reason that movies get louder and brighter and more violent each decade: there’s a competition going on for people’s attention, and the competition will be won by whatever is the most stimulating. And increasingly that holds for people as well: people who are able to put together an impressive and eye-catching brand will be more likely to get noticed, get hired, be popular, etc.

I do have one question, however: What’s the difference between marketing yourself and simply being yourself?

Photo provided on flickr by austinevan.