Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Peter G. Stromberg is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Tulsa. He is the author of Language and Self-Transformation: A Study of the Christian Conversion Narrative (1993) and Symbols of Community: The Cultural Systems of a Swedish Church (1986).

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Caught in Play

Stanford University Press

Contents

Foreword by Bradd Shore.................................................viiAcknowledgments.........................................................xi1. Caught Up in the Game................................................12. Romantic Realism.....................................................213. Romanticism and the Birth of Consumer Culture........................354. Role Playing.........................................................535. Looking Under the Hood...............................................766. Meta-Action (the Bird's-Eye View)....................................977. Romance and the Romantic.............................................1108. Play and Agency in Legal Drug Use....................................1269. The Oscillation Between Boredom and Stimulation......................14010. Entertainment and Our Understanding of the Self.....................160Conclusion..............................................................174Notes...................................................................179References..............................................................199Index...................................................................211

Chapter One

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, hand-to-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 worlds. 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 over-the-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. 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'."

It is not only children and role players who become caught up in play. 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. 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.

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...