Nintendo And Brave New World Can Teach Us A Lot About Human Nature
Dopamine, comfort, and convenience can be the ultimate dictator
There’s an innate anxiety hidden deep in free democratic societies. We fear the dictator. We’re taught this at early ages in history classes through names like Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot.
Brute force, constant surveillance, and the removal of our natural agency terrify us because it’s so alien to what we know. The dictators doing it also might as well have interchangeable faces too.
Their stories often resemble each other so much that these characters take on highly recognizable masks, all while wearing telltale dictator uniforms.
It’s why George Orwell’s book, Nineteen Eighty-Four, about a dystopian future ruled by totalitarian states, became an instant classic. Despite being fiction, the story isn’t far from reality. Terms from the book even entered our cultural vocabulary permanently.
Memory hole
Double-think
Big Brother
Thoughtcrime
In 1949, Orwell sent a copy of his book to the author of Brave New World, Aldous Huxley. After a few months, a letter found its way back to Orwell. In it, a cordial Huxley says Nineteen Eighty-Four’s premise that “the policy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indefinitely seems doubtful.”
A smart ruling minority would find “less arduous” ways to stay in power. According to Huxley:
“Within the next generation I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience.”
In Huxley’s vision, pleasure, distraction, and contentment would be a much better way to control people. It also bypasses the traditional warning bells of a dictator. So, you’d never see it coming.
Brave New World’s, characters are dulled into submission by the euphoric drug “soma,” and casually joke “a gramme is better than a damn.”
Society is also distracted by “feelies.” These are movies where the viewer could experience everything the protagonist did — actual virtual worlds.
I think this is where we’re at right now. While traditional dictators in uniforms still exist, another threat flies under our radar because it’s coated in sugar. Call it dopamine, comfort, and convenience. We’re also well familiar with virtual worlds, distractions, and drugs of all sorts.
As a former gamer, I see it all too clearly. In my brave new world, Nintendo is the dictator that flogged me into submission. They did it masterfully, too.
Rebuilding The Gaming World, Conquering Our Homes, And More
As a kid, I remember always having video games. It started with Atari. Compared to today’s systems, the Atari was awful, and apparently the market thought so too.
In 1983, Atari was one of the fastest-growing American companies in history, with revenues of $3.2 billion. Within two years, this dropped to $100 million. Atari crashed, taking the home video game market with it, and poisoning retailers from wanting to carry home video games.
This is the difficult environment arcade game maker Nintendo entered. In Jeremy Snead’s documentary, Playing with Power: The Nintendo Story, he explains Nintendo had to convince skeptical retailers to carry their game system. Nintendo did this in two ways.
They didn’t sell video games. They dressed their machine up as the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). This wasn’t just a video game system; it came with a gun and a robot that interacted with the screen.
Nintendo offered to purchase back anything retailers didn’t sell.
The gamble worked, and in 1986 the NES was a smashing success. Where Atari’s games had blobby blocks, terrible content, and no discernible story, Nintendo brought arcade quality to the living room. But they also did more.
Nintendo didn’t give its users games; they gave them detailed quests to be conquered at home, a culture, and help on their missions. These quests came with the following:
Music so catchy symphony orchestras play versions of the tunes today.
Graphics that looked like the arcade. In the documentary, a Nintendo executive says the art on Atari’s cartridges never resembled the game. But Nintendo proudly put scenes from the games on theirs.
Innovative controllers that made game play easier.
Deep stories and characters, where your brain didn’t have to make any leaps to climb into the virtual world.
A phone helpline where “game counselors” walked players through tough spots on their journey. A former company exec brags in the documentary that they received about 20,000 calls a day.
A magazine, called Nintendo Power. This came with detailed maps (little polaroid photos of all the boards, pressed into the pages.) The magazine also showed pictures of gamers with their high scores for the Nintendo world to see.
Finally, a genius at Nintendo, Gunpei Yokoi, created the portable Gameboy. Now gamers could go on these quests anywhere; they didn’t have to wait till they got home. I couldn’t stop playing, and neither could my friends, for very good reasons.
Dopamine Loops, Distractions, And Virtual Worlds
What Nintendo had inadvertently done was to create dopamine or compulsion loops. These are repetitive cycles employed to keep a gamer playing a game. Think of it this way: defeat opponents, get rewards, and upgrade your character. You do this so…you can defeat more opponents and start the loop again.
Another way to do this is to make games progressively harder as time passes, which requires gamers to become more skilled as smashing buttons. This is Super Mario Brothers in a nutshell. Not only had Nintendo perfected the dopamine loop in its games, but they brought it home and to your pocket.
In Snead’s documentary, the founder of Atari, Nolan Bushnell, claims we wouldn’t have the games and media on our phones today if it wasn’t for the Game Boy. Modern companies built off this base, and improved the dopamine loop by using “gamification.”
In 2009, Facebook created the “like” button, which turned social media from a sharing vehicle into an addictive reward engine with that never-ending loop built in.
Internal documents from TikTok show their executives know it’s addictive. In fact, they even know how many videos you must watch to become hooked on their distraction — two hundred sixty, or thirty-five minutes’ worth. Similar documents have been released from Snapchat too.
Technology and virtual reality have also enabled players to immerse themselves in the games they play. Huxley’s “feelies” have become our reality. We’ve also become conditioned to look at our phones whenever a bell rings, like trained lab animals.
A couple of evolutionary psychologists even claim certain segments of the male population live in these virtual worlds permanently. William Costello and David M. Buss at the University of Texas at Austin call it the Male Sedation Hypothesis.
They theorize porn, video games, and drugs become a world in themselves, and certain men are just checking out of life. It’s Huxley’s vision in our time. Although it isn’t destined to be a horror story with a brutal ending.
Adjusting Our Eyes To See The Hidden Dictators
In 2019, the Communist Party in China created a law, which put a limit on how much time minors could play video games. By 2021, they lowered the time limit again to only one hour on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights. The all-powerful state was threatened by video games.
Communist party members called these games “spiritual opium,” warning of their addictive nature. In other words, one dictator easily recognized another controlling force. Chinese parents supported the measure too.
Personally, I gave up my video games over ten years ago, although a cellphone is never far from my side. Like you, I respond to every ding obediently. But I do recognize the virtual world’s power, and this is important for all of us.
While the world may still fear the traditional dictator, the closer enemy to freedom and agency is convenience, distraction, and the dopamine pushers who offer that natural drug instantly.
Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is a true threat, but it shades our eyes from another more likely tyrant. That dictator is what Nintendo showed us in 1986. You can be made to love your servitude with the right dopamine hits and compulsion loops.
Nintendo and Brave New World can teach us a lot about human nature. It’s a lesson we need to take to heart.
-Originally posted on Medium 4/21/25