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Evolutionary explanation for entertainment 8 November 2003 by Mike Rozak
For awhile I've been thinking about the question: "What makes games fun to play?", or more broadly, "What is entertaining?". Needless to say, you can come up with a list of thousands of entries, none of which really answer the question. Frustrated by the huge number of answers, I took a different approach by defining entertainment: Entertainment is an activity that keeps people interested in itself despite the fact that there are no obvious economic rewards (aka: work). So what is entertaining? This list was just as bad as the "fun" list. I then tried to tackle a simpler problem. Having spent a lot of time around animals (I have volunteered at a few zoos), I decided to answer a slightly different question, "What keeps an animal's interest?", or more specifically, "What keeps a primate's interest?" This one is a bit easier to answer:
Animals also have some internal "drives" (or instincts) that encourage their actions:
If you look at the above activities you'll notice that they do a pretty good job of keeping your interest too. Interestingly, all of the above are fairly common entertainment devices. Some forms of entertainment exploit them better than others; books rarely use the "food" drive because words just don't compare to the real thing, but danger and socialisation are common themes in novels. Humans are different than other primates though, so I'll include a few other items that interest humans alone:
So what does this prove? Not much, yet. I have listed a number of external stimuli and internal drives that will keep you and/or an animal interested... at least for a while. If an animal (or you) get too much of any particular stimulation it will get bored (so to speak) and go onto something else. Boredom acts as a safety switch to ensure that an animal doesn't become obsessed with the activity, since obsession often leads to death and/or failure to breed. In humans the failure for boredom to kick in is considered a mental disorder. (Alcoholism, food addiction, computer nerd, etc.) While an animal can have too much of a stimulus, it can also have too little. Instincts dictate that an animal which doesn't get enough food will seek out food. The same obviously applies to narcotics, sex, socialisation, ferreting, hunting and gathering, and migration. I suspect (although cannot prove) that if an animal doesn't have enough danger or "new"-ness it will also seek these out. Humans obviously do (danger = adrenaline activities, new-ness = take up a new hobby, etc.)
To summarise my theory:
Fine. But how does this relate to entertainment? Modern society is a recent invention. Throughout most of homo sapien's (that's us) evolution, we were sitting in a savanna in Africa hunting for our food and being chased by lions. Our genetics are not attuned to modern life; they are attuned to life 1 million years ago. This may be too much to swallow for you, especially if you you're a descendent of Adam and Eve. Let me give you an example on a less controversial animal, a house cat, which is designed to hunt in the wild. If you lock it up in a house, the cat will display some odd behaviours, namely chasing pieces of string around. That's because it doesn't have any prey to chase, so its hunting drive needs some outlet. I suspect that if the cat were able to satiate its hunting drive in the wild, it wouldn't be nearly as interested in a tasteless and easy-to-catch piece of string. The same goes for a human. Modern society provides us with plenty of food and usually (but not always) socialisation. There aren't many lions chasing us around though. And we don't get much of a chance for hunting and gathering (although a shopping mall trip comes fairly close to gathering). My theory predicts that people will seek out whatever need is un-met. (Specifics will vary from person to person since not only will their daily experiences differ, but so will their genetics.) Entertainment is how we do this. Following this logic, people that like to jump out of airplanes are obviously exposed to less danger in real life than their genes would recommend. Those interested in soap operas aren't getting enough socialisation (gossip) in their life. People that go on holiday are fulfilling the migration and/or exploration urge. (They're also trying to escape from the stress of their every-day lives.) Etc. But how does this relate to fun? When you ask someone why they participate in an entertainment, they usually say, "Because it's fun." From this I make the cognitive leap that our sense of fun is a codeword for "Because it's entertaining," or "Because it keeps my interest - and I'm not even getting paid for it." (Some people will play a game even when it's no longer fun, but that's become they've become obsessed with winning at it.) Putting my marketing hat on... Even if "fun" is not the same as "keeping one's interest" it doesn't matter. As long as it keeps the user's interest more than any other activity it will sell, so it's just as good as fun. I suspect most people reading this are thinking, "Interesting, but way too simplistic. It doesn't explain why I like to do X." True, it's simplistic, and true it can't be used to explain everything, but (from my perspective at least) it provides a basis for explaining why an activity is fun. This is infinitely more useful than no basis at all. If this theory is true, what are the consequences?
There's one thing I forgot to mention: Why do I think that stories in themselves are interesting to humans? My thinking falls along the following lines: Humans have been able to speak for several hundred thousand years, maybe more. They have been sitting around campfires and telling stories for just as long. At first the elders were just passing on common wisdom to younger tribe members without the story, such as "Don't eat red berries because you'll die." As anyone knows, being told something is not the same actually seeing it or experience it yourself. Being told that red berries are poisonous is not as "sticky" as actually eating a red berry and getting very sick (or even dying) or seeing a friend eat the berry and get sick or die. So, elders would spruce up their words of wisdom by attaching them to reality. "Your Uncle Ug ate red berries and died." This helped because it also included the socialisation instinct/drive into the equation, making the message just a bit more sticky. A generation later though, socialisation didn't come into the equation because no one alive knew Uncle Ug any more. Connecting him to the message made no difference so it was back to square one. The solution was to give Uncle Ug relevance by first describing him as a person and as part of the clan. Only then do you kill him off by making him eat the berries. A story started to form. The story was further extended with more words of wisdom. After all, an elder isn't going to spend 10 minutes describing Uncle Ug (so he becomes part of the clan), and then only include only one sentence of wisdom about him... "Uncle Ug was a great any mighty warrior... blah blah blah... he was my father's great uncle. blah blah blah... One day he ate a red berry and died. The end." The elder sticks some other bits of wisdom in, such as "White berries are good to eat" and "To hunt a tiger you do X, Y, and Z." All of these pearls are strung together with some more narrative about Uncle Ug first hunting the tiger and doing X, Y, and Z, and then eating the white berries. He was still hungry so eat ate a red berry and keeled over. Using this trick, the elder kills thee birds with one stone. However, for some people this still wasn't sticky enough because they didn't buy the long explanation of why Uncle Ug was important. (History teachers still have the same problem today.) Genetics solved this problem though. Those people that didn't believe the story about Uncle Ug didn't pay too much attention to not eating the red berries, and well, they eventually ate one and died. Those that paid attention lived. The brain managed this by creating a semi-hypnotic state where the story's words were treated as reality (more or less) by the brain, instead of first being passed through other functions of the brain (such as critical facilities). Just ask any high school student about the Titanic; they're much more likely to relate the scenes from the movie than the drab facts they learned in history class. Stories are sticky. Facts are not. As for why I think story telling is semi-hypnotic: Have you ever watched people watching TV? Most have that zoned-out look to their face that indicates they're engrossed by the story. They are oblivious to the rest of the world until the TV's plug is pulled. (I'd call this hypnotised.) Another interesting point about TV is that people usually watch the flickering story-teller at night, very similar to sitting in front of a flickering fire listening to the tribe's story teller. This theory also explains why stories usually have morals and knowledge embedded within them.
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