Stories and Play - Some Random Musings, by Dani Bunten Berry, 1996
I've been thinking about story products myself lately. I recently told someone that what makes a psychopath possible (I think I was referring to someone in my now estranged family) is a tolerance for a loosely strung story. I would contend that for most of us the way we judge the value of alternative life choices is how it would sound as a retold story. "He pissed me off and I hit him" would not be sufficient motivation or explanation for most of us! We would need more involved justification that might include appealing to moral and ethical mores. "He wouldn't respond to any other type of attempt to maintain an appropriate personal boundary so I was forced to excercise physical force," would be far more persuasive to us. I got really tickled when I came up with this. I even went further and postulated that brains were nothing but engines for creating, storing and retelling stories. Cool huh?
Well, as is the case with all my grand insights it faded and over the last couple of months I've been working on recapturing my theory of why people play that was based on some reading I did back in the late '80s. I had stumbled across this theory regarding an optimal arousal mechanism? That theory holds that mamalian brains have a need for stimuli that forces them to move to the edges of their known space to find new things to excite them. Once they master something it can no longer satisfy them. Since this drive doesn't directly result in any immediately useful stuff (as does "work") it can be thought of as a drive to "play". In most species this "play" happens mostly during juvenile phases but with neotonous species like ours if can continue through out life. I remember thinking when I first discovered this theory what a wonderfully "elegant" mechanism it was. Somewhere I remember the quote that "Play is the mechanism whereby a mouse teaches the cat to catch mice". This notion of play could be generalized to be the creative impulse - creative folks "play with ideas", and require a playful environment. It could also explain hallucinations in a sensory deprived environment - if the brain can't coax new stimuli from the organism it will invent them itself. The "drive for play" even applies to one of my pet psychology/philosophy concepts - the solipsism syndrome. As a philosophy solipsism is the belief that nothing outside your own mind really exists. The syndrome occurs in situations where humans are faced with mindlessly repeating patterns and have to do something to break the pattern in order to prove the existence of an external reality seperate from their brains. In other words if the brain is to stay engaged the world has to occasionally play with it. (I came up with a good example of solipsism recently: You know how when you're driving at night on a curvy road and you seem "compelled" to stay on the road despite switch-backs - you almost can't tell if it's you or the road that is making things happen. That's solipsism syndrome and fortunately a little head shake is all it takes us to realize who's in charge rather than being forced to test the world's reality more dramatically by driving off the road.)
Stories are a whole different thing. They reasure us and make sense of a chaotic and frightening jumble of the stimuli the world offers us. So, what if the unified theory I'm looking for is that "play" brings challenge and diversity to the brain and "stories" bring reliability and the safety of a predictable world? Somewhere recently I heard someone say that the true strength of Hollywood is that no matter in what devious ways they twist the plot and characters they can always get the story to the ending the audience expects. Why would we spend good money on movies where the only question is how they will contrive things to deliver the ending we knew was there even before the film began? Because it's one of things our brains need. These two elements "play" and "story" are really dipoles of some thing that our brains feed on. What do you think? [Click to reply]