Much of the scholarly literature on play shows how play can help people—both children and adults—to adapt to the challenges of the real world. Through play we can engage in battle with others without real-world consequences. Or we can experience strong feelings without putting ourselves in dangerous situations. Play happens in an imaginary world, a world that doesn’t count.

That’s true, but it’s also false. Here’s an account of a match—a game—of a sport called “rough and tumble” played on the American frontier about 250 years ago. A man from Virginia is taking on a man from Kentucky:

“The contestants were asked if they wished to ‘fight fair’ or ‘rough and tumble.’ When they chose ‘rough and tumble,’ a roar arose from the multitude. The two men entered the ring, and a few ordinary blows were exchanged in a tentative manner. Then suddenly the Virginian ‘contracted his whole form, drew his arms to his face,” and ‘pitched himself into the bosom of his opponent,’ sinking his sharpened fingernails into the Kentuckian’s head. ‘The Virginian,’ we are told, ‘never lost his hold…fixing his claws in his hair and his thumbs on his eyes, [he] gave them a start from the sockets. The sufferer roared aloud, but he uttered no complaint.’ Even after the eyes were gouged out, the struggle continued. The Virginian fastened his teeth on the Kentuckian’s nose and bit it in two pieces. Then he tore off the Kentuckian’s ears. At last, the ‘Kentuckian, deprived of eyes, ears, and nose, gave in.’ The victor, himself maimed and bleeding, was ‘chaired round the grounds,’ to the cheers of the crowd.” (page 737, Albion’s Seed, David Hackett Fischer)

So, as the Kentuckian will tell you, the imaginary world of play is also the real world, and has real consequences. These men weren’t fighting—at the outset of the match they had no problem with one another—they were playing at fighting. But at the end, that’s sort of an abstract fact for the man from Kentucky.

Furthermore, that’s not the most important conclusion to draw from this breathtakingly violent game. The thing that’s almost impossible to grasp here is that the Kentuckian, as he is getting his eyes torn from their sockets, and even after that, wants to keep “playing.” He is so caught up in the match that some part of him decides to keep going.

If you think about it, many people have a milder version of this experience: Video game players who find it difficult to pull away from the game. Gamblers who can’t stop. Those who neglect friends and family for role-playing games. In fact, almost any form of play can beckon people away from the world, can eventually become painful and destructive. We wouldn’t be human beings without our love for play, but our love for play can lead us into a world from which we never return.

Photo by Polina Sergeeva.

I recently watched a documentary about Harry Potter fans called “We Are Wizards.” I’m afraid I can’t recommend the film, it’s pretty incoherent. But it was also fascinating in a disturbing sort of way, because it depicted a sort of behavior I’ve never really noticed before: fans of fans. There are some people, actually lots of them, who are so besotted with the Harry Potter books that they come to idolize people whose only accomplishment is that they are public and visible Harry Potter fans.

Maybe you already know about this, and I’m just behind the curve (it’s happened before). Here’s an example: Most of the film focuses on “wizard rock,” a genre of music that is about the Harry Potter series. (“Harry, I love you but you don’t love me; let’s get together and live in a tree.”) (I made that up). And the wizard rock musicians depicted in the movie are, for the most part, utterly incompetent. Most of them cannot sing and seem to have been playing their instruments for a few weeks at best. All this sounds very appealing, right? But here’s the fascinating part: People flock to wizard rock concerts, idolize the bands, etc. If I were an 18 year old not very talented musician (which, come to think of it, I once was) I would swallow my pride and get into wizard rock, because I would notice that there were lots of girls in the audience.

The part that I just can’t wrap my mind around is that the fans of wizard rock are willing to endure hours of listening to bands that should never get out of the basement simply because they are singing about Harry Potter. Any reference to the stories and characters is so exciting that the musical part doesn’t matter. In other words, a person can become a celebrity simply by getting up on a stage and referring to the series, he or she needs have no other talent whatsoever.

What does this tell us about fans? It hints at a little secret that we all already sort of know: Presumably we admire celebrities for their talent, but there are many celebrities who don’t actually have any talent. (Kim Kardashian, Paris Hilton, etc.) The one thing that underlies all fan behavior is popularity. We get excited about something because other people are excited about it. Usually, something becomes popular because it is appealing in some way—catchy music, an attractive face, a dominant sports performance—but sometimes there is no apparent reason for popularity. However, once something starts to catch on, more people want to join in. An important part of the appeal of wizard rock, like anything else, is that others are getting excited by it; that excitement is itself exciting. The music doesn’t have to be any good.

Although I’m baffled by the bad music part, I don’t think that wizard rock is a bad thing. For the most part, wizard rock fans (like other fans) just want to have some fun. There’s nothing wrong with that. But at the base of fandom is something very powerful, something that can occasionally be turned in ugly directions. If bad music can be exciting, so can bad ideas. As we know from our history, even evil ideas can be exciting. That’s probably the most important reason to try and understand fan behavior—it can offer insight into the strange and powerful collective mind.

Photo by Melinda Stahl.

In the early 1970s, renowned anthropologist Clifford Geertz published his most influential book, The Interpretation of Cultures. The book was widely read throughout the social sciences and humanities, and influenced intellectual agendas in these realms for decades. One of the powerful arguments for which the book is known is Geertz’ attack on the idea of human nature. Geertz points out that human beings have evolved to be dependent upon culture to help them adapt to different environments. This flexibility allows human beings to exist on almost every corner of the planet, but it also implies that humans have had to give up instinctual, “wired-in” behavior patterns. We are able to learn many different ways of obtaining food because we don’t have any food obtaining instincts of the sort that guide other species. Therefore, says Geertz, there really are no basic, “natural,” human behaviors. There is no human nature.

One implication of this line of thought is a strong version of cultural relativism, the idea that knowledge and morals are not absolute, but only relative to particular cultural contexts. Geertz intended his argument as a strong defense of the traditional anthropological tenet that all cultures are equally worthy of respect, but many of his readers took this a step further. It became widely accepted that because there is no universal human nature, there can be no universal standards for truth or morality. These notions can only exist locally, and not globally. In some versions, for example, it was asserted that we can no longer say “X is true.” Rather we must say “X is true in this particular culture (but maybe not in another culture).”

I’m not a cultural relativist in this latter sense. There are plenty of facts that are true world-wide. But I also agree with Clifford Geertz that culture is a very strong determinant of human action. In fact, I think he and the strong cultural relativists who followed him got off track in part because they underestimate the power of culture in determining what people do. Contemporary neuroscientific research has shown that significant aspects of human behavior are in fact wired into our make-up. We do have instincts, plenty of them. But human communities also have powerful ways of promoting preferred behaviors, of making people behave in certain sorts of ways. These technologies of cultural learning are in fact so powerful that they can overwhelm humans’ natural tendencies.

One such technology, one that I have written about in Caught in Play, is forms of ritual and play that infuse certain ideas and practices with very strong emotions. Human beings are quite capable of ecstatic emotional states, emotions that are so powerful that they provoke the sense of a presence that comes from beyond the everyday world. This is what happens when people become possessed by spirits, or are overwhelmed by the powerful currents in a crowd. Or, to return to the example I have focused on, it happens when the powerful and stimulating feelings of entertainment come to be associated with particular persons or products or ideas.

Thus, for example, we develop the faith that the people in entertainment—celebrities—are special sorts of beings, fascinating creatures whose every action is worthy of our attention. It’s our culture of entertainment that creates this feeling, not some universal part of human nature. But it’s our universal human nature that makes it so easy for our cultures to shape us in ways over which we have little control.

I’ve recently been reading Forces of Habit by David Courtwright, a fascinating history of drug use in the modern world. The book has not only helped me to understand the genesis of today’s terrible drug problems, it has also given me some new insight into the character of contemporary entertainment culture. Here are some highlights:

You may be surprised to learn that in the early years of the drug trade—the 16th through the 19th centuries—psychoactive substances were often not only tolerated but promoted by Western powers such as the United States and Great Britain. In fact, the latter nation fought two wars in China during the 19th century in order to prevent China from enforcing its own laws against opium trade and use. Why? Because—to put the matter in the starkest terms—Great Britain made a lot of money from the opium trade.

Profit—and taxing that profit—was not the only reason the colonial powers encouraged the use of drugs. Many people found it easier to tolerate monotonous and physically demanding labor if they were taking, say, opium. So those who oversaw labor in activities such as laying railroad track allowed or even encouraged opium use. In fact, workers were sometimes partially paid in opium, a practice that more or less ensured that laborers remained trapped in their positions.

Thus today’s networks and institutions for the production and distribution of drugs are built upon the foundations laid by the government policies of earlier centuries. It has proved very difficult to dismantle the capacity for production and consumption of drugs that was built over several centuries. This raises the question of why Western powers changed course and began, about a century ago, to enact laws restricting and prohibiting the production and consumption of psychoactive substances.

There were a number of reasons for this reversal, but probably the most powerful of them were again economic. As the nature of work shifted from agricultural production and construction to manufacturing and white-collar work in bureaucracies, the usefulness of drugs for labor control diminished. You don’t want the worker who is operating machinery–or your accountant–to be taking opium. Even more basic was the fact that the new economy that was taking shape in the early 20th century offered consumers a wide range of stimulating pleasures that were enjoyable but not nearly as potentially dangerous as drugs. There was much more money to be made by providing such products as movies, music, and consumer goods than by providing drugs. And in fact, drugs get in the way of the consumer economy. People who are high much of the time are neither dependable workers nor dependable consumers, despite the fact that some drugs may give them the munchies.

What this means, if you think about it, is that our entertainment-based economy competes with drugs because the two forms of pleasure are in some ways similar. Courtwright quotes a passage from the Catholic mystic Thomas Merton (page 110): “We live in a society whose whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension, to strain every human desire to the limit and create as many new desires and synthetic passions as possible, in order to cater to them with the products of our factories and printing presses and movie studios and all the rest.”

Merton wrote that in 1948, and the situation he describes is to say the least much more extreme today. Little wonder, when people are brought up this way, that some proportion of them reject the path of entertainment and follow instead the more potent, and less challenging, path of stimulating themselves with chemicals.

Photo available on Flickr from the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library.

Here’s a little secret about human beings: we find the raw emotional stimulation of sex and violence and intoxication so compelling, such a turn-on, that we either spend our lives trying to get more of these things or making sure we avoid them. Oh, almost forgot. There is one other possibility, the ever-so-popular “have your cake and eat it too” alternative—get the stimulation, but also control it.

Thus all human cultures that I have ever read about have institutions that both allow for and limit strong emotional stimulation. You can take this drug but not that one. You can have sex with this person, but not that one. You can read about violence or watch it on a screen, but you can’t actually commit violence.

Which brings me to today’s topic, vampire stories for children. Vampires hit two of the big three sources of arousal—sex and violence—which virtually guarantees an avid following. On top of that, vampires have large canine teeth, almost the perfect sex/violence combination. Do you know how the ancestors of human beings established dominance over one another? The same way that non-human primates today do: mostly by displaying their large canines. It’s sort of built in to you that large canines are scary. And then there’s the other part: canine teeth are also hard shafts that penetrate the body. You get the picture.

Somebody who can spin a good vampire yarn, and pitch it for children and adolescents (somebody like Stephenie Meyer, say) has a license to print money. Most (unfortunately, not all) children and younger adolescents can only experience sex and bloody violence in their imaginations, and through vampire stories our culture is happy to provide them the opportunity to do so. As I have noted, this is a big part of what human cultures do: they channel our raging desires into acceptable and sometimes even productive activities.

In a recently published collection called The Psychology of Twilight, a group of psychologists and other academics (like me) try and figure out why something like the “Twilight” series is so appealing and what sorts of effects it has on people. Unfortunately, for most folks analysis about why people like sex and violence isn’t as appealing as sex and violence itself. But if you have made it this far in this post, you may be one of the odd ones. Check it out.

Recently—especially over the past thirty years—there have been significant changes in the way middle class American children play. Whereas children and adolescents used to spend a good deal of time engaged in unsupervised play and games, today sports are much more likely to be pursued through organized private sports leagues.

The entry of these organized leagues into the world of older children’s play has changed the nature of that play. For one thing, these days, among younger adolescents, the level of play in sports such as basketball and soccer is noticeably higher than in the past. That’s the result of an explosion in the amount of instruction and coaching available to aspiring players.

Although some of the adult involvement in these leagues is on a voluntary basis, for the most part club sports like volleyball or hockey cost money, often lots of money. Children’s sports have entered the economy, and this has changed their character: they have become consumer goods and services that must be purchased. And often there is a genuine correlation between the product and the cost—to excel, children need good (often high priced) coaches, they need to travel nationwide to compete with other top athletes, etc.

One unfortunate consequence of these changes is that in many cases children are pushed too hard on the physical level, they are trained to use their bodies in ways that aren’t developmentally appropriate. A striking example from Mark Hyman’s book Until it Hurts: These days little league pitchers often learn to throw curve balls, a pitch that puts considerable strain on still-growing arms. That may be part of the reason that so few of the players who are stars in the Little League World Series ever make it to the major leagues. And baseball is by no means the only sport where these sorts of things are happening. In a number of youth sports it is increasingly common for children of high school and even middle school age to undergo major surgeries to address over-use injuries.

So, why did our society substitute this new more expensive and dangerous form of play for the older one? The answer has to do with what I have called the culture of entertainment. We love to be entertained, and the result is that entrepreneurs have a financial incentive to convert as much of life as possible into entertainment. The fact is that intensely competitive children’s sports are hugely entertainment for the parents of these children. And if you happen to be the parent of a child with genuine talent or skill, it’s even better: The child can become a small scale celebrity, and the parent can bask in the glow of junior’s success.

The adults who coach the teams and sell the equipment and run the tournaments promote youth sports in part because they can make money in these ways. The adults who get to watch entertaining competitions starring their children are happy to participate by spending the thousands of dollars needed to support this system. It’s a win-win for these adults. But sometimes it isn’t a win for the children who are pressured to perform and may even end up with painful injuries that limit their activity for the rest of their lives. If you asked the kids, many of them might be just as happy putting together pick-up games at the playground.

Photo by Edwin Martinez.

If Martians landed on earth and they turned out not to be invaders but anthropologists, we can be certain that they would find many human activities rather puzzling. Head hunting and strange initiation rituals would surely seem bizarre to them, but perhaps nothing would seem so odd as millions of people sitting glued to their televisions watching obese people try and lose weight. “Look! She is exercising! Look! He is changing his diet! This is so gripping, I can’t wait until next week.”

It isn’t only weight loss; as far as I can tell, any sort of personal transformation makes for compelling television. Addicts who try and get clean, dumpy dressers who try and improve their wardrobe, heck, even the transformation of houses is irresistible. But weight loss is probably the most satisfying form of transformation, both because it’s easy to measure and because so many viewers identify with the challenges of losing weight. Nevertheless, that doesn’t fully explain why stories about transformation are irresistible to so many Americans.. A few weeks ago, a formerly overweight woman won a State Beauty contest, and of course this made the national news.

For many viewers, I suspect, watching people be transformed provides hope that they too can escape the parts of their own lives that are making them miserable—whether that is their weight, their appearance, their addiction, their poverty, etc. But more broadly, personal transformation touches on something that is absolutely central to American culture—after all, “the American dream” is about being transformed into the person that you have dreamed of being.

And this brings me to psychology, because one of the reasons that psychotherapy is so popular in this country is also that people are fascinated by the possibility of transforming themselves. Where does this come from?

America is, and has always been, a deeply religious culture. Our national origin myth assigns special importance to the Puritans who formed many of the earliest colonial settlements, and these Puritans—as well as other brands of Protestants—were concerned above all about their state of salvation. For all practical purposes, all Christians of the colonial era believed that all human beings are bound for either eternal salvation or damnation (and of course, this belief persists today). Naturally, these people were interested in the question of their fate after death, and from the earliest days of Protestantism a strong “conversion” experience was felt to provide the best evidence that one was bound for glory.

A strong conversion experience typically had a particular format that began with a state of sinfulness, a period of despair as the believer acknowledged that he or she was trapped in their evil condition, and finally an experience of bliss as the believer received release from this state via the saving grace of God. In short, the best proof of salvation was a re-birth into a new life, a profound personal transformation. Today, this has become part of American culture, and even those who are not Christians continue to see personal transformation as somehow the very purpose of life.

That’s why we can’t stay away from stories of transformation. But there is at least one downside. Suppose I were to say that I’m basically the person I want to be, that although I have ample flaws I don’t see any reason to strive to be something different. Doesn’t that sound sort of smug, lacking in self-awareness, complacent? That’s the downside. On some level, there’s a widespread cultural assumption that everybody could use a transformation, which means that nobody is ever good enough as they are.

Photo by Tony Alter

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

I did a radio interview on romance the other day in which they played a clip from Casablanca and pointed out that it has been named the most romantic movie of all time. Now why does the movie merit this distinction? Lots of reasons, I suppose, but one of the most important is the fact that the wildly romantic couple—played, as everyone knows, by Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman—part at the end of the movie, never to meet again. That’s even more romantic than the movies that present about 90 minutes worth of evidence that the couple will never get together and then, in the last five minutes, bring them into happily-ever-after coupledom. I mean, what could be more romantic than a couple who never becomes a couple?

Of course, the fact that the best romance is exemplified by people who are permanently separated is somewhat odd in a society in which it is taken for granted that couples who love each other will be together permanently, as in married. It’s also kind of odd that we, probably without ever thinking about it, use the word “love” to refer to two completely different experiences: the feeling of commitment between family members and long-term couples and the feeling of longing one can develop for a person one is not or cannot be together with. And using the same word for these two things leads to the confusion that they are the same thing, that one should feel longing-type love for someone one is not separated from.

This isn’t just some strange social and psychological mistake. All societies have stories and myths that reinforce their fundamental values. In North American society, one of the most important values is romance. Romance is love as we imagine it, perfect love, not love as it actually plays out in reality. And this perfect love is so satisfying and exciting that most of us are convinced to enter into, and to try to sustain, life-long commitments. Romantic stories keep perfect love alive. and in so doing help to bring people into real world commitments.

But romantic stories aren’t necessarily the best resource for understanding how to make a life long commitment work. Once your partner exits your imagination and enters your life, he or she loses the perfection that is only possible in the world of the imagination. But our culture continues to tell us that real world love should be perfect love.

So here’s a Valentine’s Day message to everyone who is in a real, long term relationship: Romance is fun and playful, and maybe you can be successful in bringing romance into your relationship, but don’t fall for the myth that romance is the only real form of love. Real love isn’t enchantment, it is more like work. The good news is that it can be very rewarding work.

Photo provided on flickr by Fr. Dougal McGuire.