The God On Television
Whether it be Cthulhu, Vecna, or the movie star of your choice, some people seem to pick some very odd figures to venerate. Have you ever sat down to wonder what sort of person chooses to worship at the altar of vapidity and corruption?
Dr. Eric Lis is a physician, gamer, and author of the Skirmisher Publishing LLC sourcebook, Insults & Injuries.
Whether it be Cthulhu, Vecna, or the movie star of your choice, some people seem to pick some very odd figures to venerate. Have you ever sat down to wonder what sort of person chooses to worship at the altar of vapidity and corruption?
A small but vocal area of research in the mental health field has long concerned itself with the phenomenon of "celebrity worship." Simply from reading that term, you probably already have a perfectly clear idea of what it refers to, although as often the case with such things, there's some real disagreement in the literature as to what the "best" definition is. Broadly speaking, celebrity worship is conceptualized as a pathological "parasocial" relationship where an individual becomes absorbed and, in some sense, seemingly addicted to the idea of some famous figure. It's something we see every day in the Western world, to varying degrees: our co-workers who can't tear themselves away from the latest celebrity gossip, our relatives who become deeply invested in a marriage between famous people they've ever actually met, our friends to whom a particular sports star becomes more important than their team or their game. While the vast majority of people who become interested or even obsessed with a celebrity remain perfectly functional, a certain percentage of people, by fortune or natural predisposition, get caught up in their obsession to the point that it eclipses other parts of their lives. As with many of the phenomena that we see in our daily lives, it's something that gets carried over into our games: soldiers allow charismatic warlords to drive them to horrific extremes, seemingly stable people flock to the banner of demagogues, and at a rather extreme end of the spectrum, every city seems to have a dozen people just looking for an opportunity to start praying to Nyarlathotep, just because he's famous.
While this isn't a huge area, there's been some very rich research looking at celebrity worship. There are, for example, a few different standardized questionnaires designed to measure when an individual's preoccupation with a celebrity become problematic. Questions on the scale range from the relatively simple, such as asking how much time in one's day gets taken up by the preoccupation, to questions focusing more on addiction, such as asking ways that the preoccupation interferes in daily activity, to assessing the outright pathological, such as asking whether someone would do something illegal or immoral simply because their favourite celebrity told them to. The questionnaires alone aren't sufficient to diagnose someone's preoccupation as pathological, but high scores can guide someone to investigate the issue further. The next time you feel like creating a whole bunch of cultists for a game, think about downloading a copy of the Celebrity Attitudes Scale or Celebrity Worship Scale and pick behaviours off of it until the character seems symptomatic enough.
What sorts of people seem to be at risk of getting caught up in this sort of way? It's been shown that "average people" tend to perceive celebrity worshippers as gullible, irresponsible, submissive, and dishonest, but just because these are the stereotypes doesn't mean they're true. Celebrity worship in one's teens seems to be associated with having more body image issue, but this is an effect that disappears by adulthood and probably says more about teenagers in general than celebrity worshippers as a population. Along related lines, people who score higher in celebrity worship seem to be more open to and more likely to eventually undergo elective cosmetic surgery (though in the undergrads studied, nobody had their hands replaced with tentacles). Some work has suggested that people prone to celebrity worship tend to be more sensation-seeking, tend to have a poorer sense of their own identities as people, tend to be less able to set healthy boundaries between themselves and others, and as a group tend to score higher on measures of narcissistic personality styles. There's some data suggesting that celebrity worshippers may be more prone to addiction in general, criminality, materialism, and compulsive buying, all of which might be conceptualized as being tied together by greater impulsivity and poorer impulse control. A couple of papers by one team have suggested that people prone to celebrity worship seem to have globally poorer mental health, with higher rates of depression and anxiety, but there were some important confounding variables that mean we should be cautious about making strong statements based on this.
The finding that I find most fascinating is from this paper, which suggests that people who are less religious are more likely to engage in celebrity worship, which makes me wonder if a certain percentage of people have an intrinsic need to worship *something* and celebrities are simply a handy thing to latch on to if you live in a non-religious milieu. We might imagine that people who have a need to believe in something greater than themselves sometimes find unhealthy icons to feed that hunger. Whether the need gets met by a saviour, an actress or a demon lord may depend, more than anything else, on what culture and historical period you're born in.
