Compulsions manifest in different ways. As with nail biting, many of them appear as small momentary urges. There are others, however, which work on a much longer timescale. These compulsions control us by dosing our brains with pleasurable or painful emotions in response to various stimuli.

Emotions can be just as painful as a punch in the gut, or as pleasurable as the best meal on Earth. Emotional pleasure and pain are so powerful that we structure our entire lives around finding ways to fulfill our emotional cravings. The performer likes being onstage because he likes the feeling of having people pay attention and react to him. The rock climber likes climbing because of the rush of danger and triumph she gets from conquering a difficult cliff. The S&M submissive likes being whipped because it makes him feel secure under the control of a stronger personality. In all cases, these people's entire lives are built around satisfying their characteristic emotional needs.

We are all addicted to the happy-chemicals our glands brain release when stimulated, and we will do anything to get a fix. Just as with a heroin addict, this includes taking insane, life-threatening risks, directly self-harming ourselves, or inflicting vicious cruelty on others.

_{Endorphins are naturally produced feel-good chemicals in the blood. The word comes from 'Endogenous Morphine', which means 'Morphine produced naturally in the body'. It's the same stuff.}

Compulsion Machines

Now imagine we could invent a machine which would artificially trigger those incredibly powerful compulsions? If it was really well-designed, we could get people to sit in front of it for hours every day. A crazy idea!

Not really. They're called video games. Gaming is an industry which makes money by building machines to meticulously triggering human instincts in ways that they were never intended to be triggered.

We are not unique in this. Most forms of entertainment can be interpreted as "emotions in a box". You buy the product, and when you use it, you get the desired emotional state. The unique thing about game design is that we work behind a double layer of indirection. We do not influence people through direct interaction as with a salesman, or indirectly through a predefined set of stimuli as with a novelist. Instead, we create systems, which in turn create stimuli, which then make players want to play the game. Our advantage is that if we do a good job, the game system can put out far more stimuli than we put into it.

Types of Compulsions

If we're going to use a machine to trigger a person's compulsions and emotions, we need to know what those compulsions are, and what triggers those emotions.

Differences in genetics, age, sex, and conditioning mean we each have a unique set of compulsions and emotional needs and rewards. The most consistent compulsions are the genetically programmed ones. These are also the easiest to analyze so I'm going to focus on them here.

Since our genes are direct results of the process of evolution, we can categorize our compulsions and emotional triggers by how they would have helped our ancestors reproduce. This is not a perfect system of categorization. Human behavior being as complex as is, these drives can never be clearly or unambiguously delineated, and their interactions can be wickedly complex.

I will only discuss a small subset of inherent compulsions, which are themselves a small subset of all human compulsions. This is just the tip of the iceberg.