Caught in Play: How Entertainment Works on You

Caught in Play

How Entertainment Works on You

Peter G. Stromberg

For Nelly

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

© 2009 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Stromberg, Peter G.

Caught in play: how entertainment works on you / Peter G. Stromberg. p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

9780804771276

1. Amusements—Social aspects. 2. Play—Social aspects. 3. Recreation—Social aspects. I. Title.

GV1201.38.S78 2009

306.4’81—dc22

2008041877

Designed by Bruce Lundquist

Typeset at Stanford University Press in 10/14 Adobe Garamond

Table of Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Copyright Page

Foreword

Acknowledgments

Caught in Play

1 - Caught Up in the Game

2 - Romantic Realism

3 - Romanticism and the Birth of Consumer Culture

4 - Role Playing

5 - Looking Under the Hood

6 - Meta-Action (the Bird’s-Eye View)

7 - Romance and the Romantic

8 - Play and Agency in Legal Drug Use

9 - The Oscillation Between Boredom and Stimulation

10 - Entertainment and Our Understanding of the Self

Conclusion

Notes

References

Index

Foreword

WE ALL KNOW what it means to be completely in the grip of an activity—playing a game, watching a film, pursuing a hobby, reading a book. So absorbed are we that we somehow lose track of time and place and are carried away into an alternate, imagined universe. Peter Stromberg calls this experience being caught up. His book is a high-flying set of reflections on what lies behind our capacity to get caught up in this way. In this landmark study, Stromberg carves out a new terrain for anthropological analysis: the world of entertainment. It’s almost shocking to think that it took so long for anthropology to stake its claim.

What makes entertainment an apt subject for an anthropologist rather than a sociologist, psychologist, or historian? Obviously, entertainment is a cultural domain of great significance in modern life. But in Stromberg’s synoptic vision, the modern notion of entertainment straddles general human capacities and specific historic and cultural circumstances. It’s perfect grist for the holism of the anthropologist’s mill. To understand the relation of this general capacity for being caught up to the historical evolution of modern forms of entertainment requires the kind of bridge between human nature in general and human culture in particular that can best be provided by a psychological anthropologist.

On the human nature side of the equation is Homo sapiens’ evolved capacity for simulation of experience and what Stromberg calls meta-action. People, it turns out, don’t occupy only the world of immediate physical reality. They have the ability to place themselves in imagined worlds and take on alternative roles in those worlds that may be very different from any role they play in real life. Stromberg explores this kind of role taking through captivating analyses of kids playing role-playing games and the impact on readers of romantic fiction.

He argues convincingly that these capacities to create and occupy imagined roles in imagined worlds, to mentally put ourselves in others’ shoes, are crucial cognitive skills that are basic to human socialization and social learning. Whereas mental simulations cannot always be observed from the outside, Stromberg’s data—role-playing games caught on film—shows in a powerful way the kind of virtuosic role switching between physical and imagined realities that is an essential aspect of being human.

Particularly important are Stromberg’s insights that, although play occupies a liminal zone between fantasy and reality, it is not normally confused with reality. So getting caught up in imagined worlds does not entail confusing that world with ordinary life. In this context, Stromberg’s discussion of the research on the complex effects that romantic fiction has on readers is especially illuminating. What all this implies is that these forms of play serve very special and nonobvious functions in relation to those ordinary realities that they at once simulate and oppose.

However potent these general insights about simulation and meta-action, taken by themselves they don’t make complete sense of the contemporary entertainment scene. Entertainment may be a variation on the general theme of human play, but there is something distinctly modern about the world of entertainment Stromberg describes, and he knows it. Stromberg wisely avoids reducing entertainment to its universal cognitive features.

The world of contemporary entertainment has a history, and Chapter Three takes us on an eye-popping tour of what Stromberg considers key historical moments in the evolution of the modern culture of entertainment. It may be self-evident that modern entertainment has been significantly shaped by recent developments in technologies of representation. But Stromberg goes well beyond the obvious, tracing the roots of the culture of entertainment to the emergence in the 18th century of an ideal of a kind of rapt engagement in aesthetic representations such as novels and paintings. This idea of psychological engrossment in art forms grew out of an older ideal of aesthetic contemplation as a path to religious devotion, an idea brilliantly explored by the art historian Michael Baxandall in his book Painting and Experience in 15th Century Italy.

With the development of modern consumer capitalism in the 18th and 19th centuries, the ideal of cultivating religious devotion became secularized. Religious devotion became aesthetic sensibility and eventually evolved into an ideal of the cultivation of desire as an end in itself. So modern entertainment develops in tandem with modern marketing, and the result is a harnessing of some universal cognitive capacities for some very new and special ends.

What we have here is nothing less than retooling of the human psyche to lay the cognitive foundations of modern consumer culture. After all, capitalism proposes a world of action governed and justified by private desire. So it is no surprise that cultivating the inner experience of desire eventually becomes an end in itself, and a pivotal goal of modern entertainment.

Stromberg’s brilliant synthesis of this historical material covers a lot of ground in short order. But it is ultimately provocative and convincing. His excursion into the history of modern desire gives us a new way to think about some of the lessobvious forces shaping the world of contemporary entertainment.

Although Stromberg explores the many faces of entertainment, he avoids the trap of passing easy judgment on modern entertainment as good or bad. It is telling, however, that many of his case studies describe pathologies of engagement. In contemporary American youth culture, there seems to be a thin line between getting caught up and becoming addicted; this book does not skirt the issue.

I was especially intrigued by the role that boredom plays in the culture of smoking and drinking among college students. Stromberg stresses that boredom is a universal human experience that is culturally malleable. The modern fear of boredom that Stromberg’s research with college students uncovers is a powerful example of how boredom is culturally conditioned. This particular species of boredom is characteristic of late modernity. It cannot be fully understood without exploring the deliberate cultivation in consumers of ever-intensifying stimulus hunger, an appetite that is surely a hallmark of late capitalism.

What is especially notable here is that even though modern play may appear to privilege a rich inner life, college students seem to most fear being alone and understimulated. Stromberg’s analysis embraces the many contradictions illuminated by the study of entertainment. It turns out that the surfaces of play mask some surprising hidden dynamics of modern life.

But we don’t want to give too much away. Enough of coming attractions! I only hope I have convinced you to stay tuned for the main event. It’s a thriller, I assure you, so hold onto your seats and turn the page.

Bradd Shore

Atlanta, Georgia

July 1, 2008

Acknowledgments

I HAVE BEEN WRITING this book for fifteen years, and in that amount of time one can get a lot of help. I continue to be astonished and humbled by the willingness of others—including scholars who are very busy—to devote hours of their time to reading and offering suggestions on my work. Of course, the long-term result of this is that much of what is good in this book is the accumulated insight of others. I have undoubtedly lost track of some of the people I should acknowledge, and to them I apologize. But I do remember these people who have read parts of this book in manuscript or who otherwise have offered their help: Jessica Kuper, William Arens, Greg Urban, Vincent Crapanzano, Don Brenneis, Keith McNeal, Steve Duck, Lamont Lindstrom, Michael Nunley, Michael Mosher, Jennifer Helé, and Maija Stromberg. I am also grateful for financial support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the University of Tulsa Faculty Research Grant Program.

I owe special thanks to the men and women who taught me what I know about being a social scientist, some of them now gone: Michelle Rosaldo, Ann Swidler, Robert Paul, Mel Spiro, Roy D’Andrade, Guy (Ed) Swanson, and Jane Hill. Each of these people is, or was, more than a teacher or senior colleague to me; these people have given me a career that I have found meaningful.

I would also like to thank my colleagues in a number of disciplines (history, sociology, cognitive science, developmental psychology, to name a few) who have done so much of the careful research on which the argument in this book is based. I have had to read broadly to write this book, although any expert will immediately spot important books and articles that have not been consulted here. Nevertheless I have learned an enormous amount from several books that are cited again and again throughout this work. Careful readers will know which authors I am talking about, and I want to thank these scholars and encourage those who have an interest in this topic to begin by reading some of these books. There is a tremendous volume of high-quality work bearing in one way or another on the culture of entertainment.

Finally, I especially want to thank a few people who have made special contributions to the process of writing and finishing this book, while stressing that none of these people can be associated with any of my errors. Alex Hinton organized the publisher’s review of this book. He figured out very quickly what I wanted to do in this book and then efficiently set about helping me do it. Ron Jepperson has been a valued intellectual interlocutor and friend for decades and has intervened repeatedly with excellent advice. Bradd Shore encountered the book in a late version, but his extraordinarily detailed comments and hours of conversation have decisively shaped the final form of the argument. The most substantial study reported on in this book was planned and carried out with Mark Nichter and Mimi Nichter, and surely some of the sentences in Chapter Eight began their lives as collaborations with these two. But more broadly, I started talking to Mark Nichter about this topic years before I started writing about it, and my numerous conversations with him are so much a part of this book that I could never say for sure where his influence stops.

Year in and year out, writing this book was made possible by my wife, Nelly Vanzetti. Authors sometimes—appropriately—thank their spouses for picking up more than their share of life’s tasks. I am lucky enough to have a spouse who can not only do the laundry and take the dog to the vet but is a gifted writer and researcher in her own right, and she has been editing, commenting, and playing devil’s advocate with chapter drafts for all of those 15 years. It is to her I dedicate this book.

Caught in Play

1

Caught Up in the Game

SKIP CRACKS HIS KNUCKLES as he prepares to roll the dice. With his bulky body, his unkempt, cascading hair, and his pharaoh-style beard, he looks like an imposing warrior from a bygone age. Indeed, Skip is currently engaged in battle, handto-hand combat with an upstart who has issued a challenge to fight. Raising the left side of his body out of his seat, he grimaces and bellows wham as he kicks out with his left leg, contacting his enemy in the stomach.

Some of Skip’s friends are focused on the fight; one shouts Stay down! as the kick is completed. Others seem oblivious to this altercation, which has been going on now for six or seven minutes. The latter chat with one another and help themselves to repeated servings from an enormous receptacle containing malted milk balls. Skip himself looks proud of his kick, for an instant, and then slightly anxious as he returns to the task of his next dice roll. The game continues with further powerful strikes by Skip and loud grunts of pain, also issued by Skip as he acts the part of his imaginary opponent.

Skip is participating in a role-playing game, a form of entertainment in which players pretend to be characters in imaginary worlds¹. Players might, for example, imagine themselves to be the crew of a spaceship or a group of adventurers seeking a treasure. Although the kick described here seems a natural part of playing the game and might pass unnoticed, something about it strikes me as peculiar. My question is this: If Skip is really just imagining the character he is representing in the game, why does he kick with such obvious emotional intensity? An even more basic question: Why does he kick at all?

Some might answer by saying something like, Well, he’s playing a game and when he pretends to kick the guy he’s fighting, he’s just really getting into it. But getting into it is a matter that deserves some thought. This kick is really sort of odd: as he strikes out with his leg Skip is not only imagining himself to be his character but going a step beyond that—he is doing what his character would do.

Anecdotes circulating among Skip’s peers make frequent reference to overthe-edge role players who lose track of the line between fantasy and reality, who become the characters they portray (see Fine 1983: 211ff). Role players are scary, says Chris, who off and on has immersed himself deeply in these fantasy games. He goes on to say that he has discovered there are two sorts of players: "There’s the people that are self-aware, and understand. And then there are the people who literally aren’t aware of what reality is."

Skip doesn’t seem to belong to the latter group. He is well aware that he is sitting in a shabby room with a group of male friends, the acrid odors of fast food—today’s and last week’s—permeating the atmosphere. Skip would smile at the suggestion that he or any of his friends ever lose track of the fact that the high-tech outer space setting of the game is imaginary.

But, then, there’s the kick. I have been able to study it carefully because I made a film of the game in which this occurred. Anyone who sees the kick would probably agree that it is a spontaneous gesture, unrehearsed, and certainly not presented to the group as this is the sort of thing my character would do. Everything points to the conclusion that Skip does not make a conscious decision to kick. Put it this way: Skip is playing a game, and he knows it is a game, but sometimes his body seems to forget that it’s a game, and at those moments what Skip is imagining is made incarnate; it assumes the status of a reality in the world.

Getting Caught Up in Entertainment

One way of labeling Skip’s kick is to see it as evidence he is very caught up in the game he’s playing. Of course, this is only one example of becoming caught up. There are dozens of other in-character gestures and speech on that tape, and they are all testimony to the players’ deep immersion in the game.² Johan Huizinga (1955: 14), the author of what is arguably our most influential study of play in Western culture, captures this sort of immersion in his description of a child engaged in pretending: The child is quite literally ‘beside himself ’ with delight, transported beyond himself to such an extent that he almost believes he actually is such and such a thing, without, however, wholly losing consciousness of ‘ordinary reality’.³

It is not only children and role players who become caught up in play.⁴ Presumably, most of us have at some point become immersed in a book or game or movie such that—on the cognitive and emotional levels—the activity temporarily assumes a profound significance and the importance of the outside world begins to fade. Other authors have used their own terms to designate this experience; Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi (1990) talks of flow, for example, while Diane Ackerman (1999: 12) has described the ecstatic form of play as deep play.⁵ Although I have learned much from these authors, I have not adopted their terminology, because even though their formulations overlap with my own, they are not the same. Most significantly, both Csikszentmihalyi and Ackerman place a moral value on this sort of play, stressing that this is a form of activity human beings everywhere should cultivate for reasons of personal growth. They may be right, but I prefer to remain agnostic on moral questions of this type. In this book, I look instead at the social role of this sort of play. My question is not whether we should seek to engage in this sort of play, but rather what happens when we do so.⁶

This brings me to another difference between my approach to the subject and those of previous authors. Both Ackerman and Csikszentmihalyi extend their terms to cover ecstatic experiences that occur in such domains as skilled work or religious experience. Although I would not deny that one can become deeply absorbed in many activities, for my purposes it is not useful to lump them all together, and in this book for the most part I confine myself to the possibility of becoming caught up in play.

For me, becoming caught up in play is worth our notice because this phenomenon can be the basis for an approach to understanding entertainment, a broad term that in my usage includes parts of consumption and advertising as well. Entertainment is by now so thoroughly woven into the fabric of our existence that we rarely stop to think about our relentless quest to be entertained, and if we try to do so the appropriate language and concepts seem elusive. This difficulty is one hint that entertainment is at the hub of our culture. Of course, its importance extends well beyond the Americas and Europe. For its effect on contemporary human life and especially for its sheer exotic weirdness, the culture of entertainment is arguably the most influential ideological system on the planet. Yet precisely because it is so pervasive and close to us, entertainment is difficult to understand, and even to talk about.⁷

Some readers might find this last statement odd, because there is a nearly incomprehensible volume of written material, in both scholarly and popular discourses, about entertainment. Simply reviewing the literature on entertainment in all social science and humanities disciplines would itself entail a multivolume work. But much of the laudable work that has been carried out in sociology, communications, cultural studies, and related fields has focused primarily on questions of aesthetics, politics, technique, and so on, while for the most part avoiding the kinds of general cultural analysis that anthropologists have pulled off in distant lands. How does entertainment fit with other parts of our culture? That is, how is it part of a pattern integrated with our world view, our ethics, and our concept of person? For all that has been written on individual pop icons and sitcoms and the liberating (or oppressive) power of popular culture, such basic questions remain for the most part unanswered.

Think of it this way: What do we know about the overall effect of living in a society in which entertainment is so central? What do we know about how entertainment affects society and the people who participate in it? Consider a contrast to religion: although there remains much to be learned, social scientists have a solid and reasonably consensual understanding of such matters as how religious rituals support values and social norms, how religion can be called on to facilitate social change, how it helps believers face life’s difficulties. Scholars interested in specific issues such as sacrifice or religious language can build on a solid foundation of broadly accepted work and attempt to offer refinements or extensions of our knowledge.

There is, sad to say, no parallel foundation in the study of entertainment. One could unearth authors from the Frankfurt school who sought to demonstrate the importance of the culture industry in maintaining the domination of the capitalist class in industrial and postindustrial democracies. One can cite somewhat inflated claims, most famously associated with the French sociologist Baudrillard (1981), that we now live in a cultural climate of hyperreality, in which the boundaries between reality and image are blurred or even indistinguishable. Or one could turn to more recent work, mostly in cultural studies, that sees entertainment as a site for creative and heroic resistance to dominant discourses. One will search in vain for any consensus, among the social science disciplines or anthropology in particular.

There are any number of reasons this might be so in anthropology. Among the more important: first, in spite of much effort, cultural anthropology has yet to completely exorcise its increasingly covert agenda of focusing on the exotic. Hence a study of television in Nigeria seems somehow less prestigious than one of a religious tradition that has survived in a rural region. But either one carries more panache than a study of how people respond to sitcoms in Bakersfield. Faye Ginsburg (2005: 17), admitting that until recently the study of mass media was almost a taboo topic for anthropology, sees the end of such attitudes in recent work. I am less optimistic. As she goes on to note, entertainment has become less off-putting for anthropologists now because it has increasingly penetrated non-Western settings. However, it would seem to me that a strong theoretical framework for interpreting the cultural effects of entertainment would require first of all an understanding of its place and significance in the societies that have led the way in the development of entertainment.

Second, in recent decades much of cultural anthropology has been gripped by a neoromantic fervor in which coherent explanations and generalizations are regarded as oppressive imposition of a rationality that is simply one culturally determined form of understanding the world. From this perspective, a gradual accumulation of consensual knowledge about a topic such as entertainment is not a goal to be pursued.

Such views (which are often associated with the label postmodernism) are understandable as an attempt to come to terms with anthropology’s history of rendering the lives of others as mere grist for the mill of social scientific theorizing. However, I cannot accept that the solution to such problems of exploitation is to abandon the attempt to generalize about human action. Those who have the privilege of being paid to study social and cultural life incur an obligation to the society that supports them. The obligation is to articulate in the clearest possible way useful statements about the societies they observe. These useful statements may bring injustices to light or point to more effective ways to deliver health care or increase our general fund of knowledge about human social life; there are many possibilities. Entertainment is a dominant force in contemporary life, and the more we understand about it the better off we will be.

Careful analysis of entertainment should take us a certain distance down the road toward understanding our own odd relationship to entertainment: why we find entertainment so compelling while claiming to regard it lightly, why entertainment often seems to clash with dominant moral values in the society, why so many of us come to focus on fame and celebrity as the most available models of our purpose. Entertainment, in ways that are difficult to articulate and therefore troubling, is closer to defining the meanings in our lives than we would like to admit. Any progress toward the goal of sorting out how entertainment influences us and our social life would be a contribution to our self-understanding and ultimately to our civic life.

Entertainment, Pleasure, and Play

I have said that entertainment is important and—despite its utter familiarity—somewhat mysterious. I have suggested too that getting caught up in the playful activities of entertainment might offer a useful foothold in the challenging task of beginning to grasp the most general effects of entertainment in our society. But I have not yet defined what I mean by entertainment, and before I proceed it is probably advisable to do so.

When I refer to entertainment I am talking at once about a kind of activity and a social context in which the activity occurs. If this seems abstract, consider a simple example, that of playing a game. When I play a game such as tennis, I engage in certain activities, such as swinging a racket. But swinging a racket does not count as playing tennis if I am idly doing so in my living room. Rather, I need to swing my racket in a particular context that includes things like a tennis court, an opponent, and a commitment to follow the rules of the game of tennis.

Focusing for a moment just on the activity, how can we characterize it? At the core of the idea of entertainment is that it is activity that provides pleasure, especially a particular kind of pleasure my dictionary (the Oxford English Dictionary) identifies as amusement. Not all pleasure-seeking behavior is entertainment, of course. One might find pleasure in the appreciation of beauty in poetry or music, in the love of one’s family, in sex. Happily, the possibilities are endless. So what is it about certain pleasurable activities that defines them as a component of entertainment?

The word amusement is helpful here, which is undoubtedly why the dictionary writers chose it. The word connotes diversion, a certain lightness; to return to my dictionary: pleasurable occupation of the attention without seriousness. I agree that we usually do not think of entertainment as serious activity, but we should also keep in mind that seriousness may enter into entertaining pursuits. It seems to me the heart of the matter is that when one is engaged in entertainment, one’s end is pleasurable amusement, and not some practical goal. I can play tennis for entertainment and diversion. I can also play tennis to practice my strokes or engage in a competition. To the extent I have the goal of winning a tennis competition, it does not seem correct to say that I am playing for purposes of entertainment; this becomes especially clear if it is a professional competition.

The word diversion is worth noticing as well. In years of discussion of the matter with hundreds of college students, I have learned it is not possible for something to be entertaining unless at least to some small extent it diverts us from our day-to-day reality. It is not just that we can become caught up in entertainment, it is that unless we become at least slightly caught up in something, we do not consider it to be entertainment. An activity must pull one in to be entertaining; if one observes or acts without this ever happening, one says something like Well, some people find that entertaining, but I don’t.

In sum, then, one part of entertainment is pleasure-seeking activity that diverts one’s attention from the day-to-day world. But perhaps this is enough to define entertainment. Go back to me and my tennis racket: if I am just swinging my tennis racket in my living room, isn’t it possible to say that I am entertaining myself? Is it really necessary to have the game of tennis to constitute what we call entertainment? Well, how long am I likely to keep up this racket swinging? If I were to do so for the length of a tennis match, and it was clear that I wasn’t practicing my strokes or imagining myself in an actual game, then an observer would have good reason to think me insane. In other words, a little bit of random racket swinging might be entertaining, but we know that the little bit is crucial. This may seem like a trivial consideration, but it is in fact important. Even though it may be possible for a person to engage in an entertaining activity with little or no larger context framing the activity—no show, or game, or fantasy—we acknowledge that this is an unusual situation. When we think of entertainment, we think in the first instance of a person acting in concert with something stimulating the action or imagination so that the person is engaged, responding to something that has independent form.

This larger context of entertainment, the entertaining framework, can take many forms. The most efficient way to specify the institutional level of entertainment is to say it is always some form of play. Defining my concerns in this way is not as restrictive as it might initially seem, for I adopt a broad definition of play.⁸ I follow French sociologist Roger Caillois (1961) in adopting a four-part classification of play and games. Caillois divided play and games into agon (contests such as chess and basketball), alea (games of pure chance), mimicry (pretending), and ilinx (activities that induce vertigo). The advantages of this classification arise primarily from its breadth and flexibility. It allows one to see the element of play in a broad range of activities that