Actors condemn 'fantasy...' The 80s were weird. What was going on?

First off, Mr. Crowley, if you're gonna claim that no one was seduced into satanism by D And D, may I suggest you do something about your screen name? Kinda sends the opposite message.

Heh. Just kidding. Yeah, the 80s. Ya'd think that parents would actually be happy about a game that promoted interest in folklore and mythology, 'cuz you know, that can lead to reading more and stuff, but I guess a lot of them didn't see it that way. My mom sorta bought into the hysteria, but I was never much into gaming, so it didn't have much effect on my life.

And the odd thing was, it never really carried over into other forms of entertainment, like books etc. I think a few Christians got worked up about CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien(the latter a major influence on DND), but other than that, you didn't have a lot of media interest in the supposed negative effects of fantasy novels.

I think maybe it seemed spooky to some parents that DND was something kids would do in groups, away from their parents, and which parents didn't have much understanding of. Whereas books etc are a little more respectable.

Anyway, with pretty much every other computer game having some fantasy motif these days, I'd say the floodgates are now ireversibly flung open, and unlikely to be closed any time soon.

The neurotic seek to ban what they can't control - anything that contradicts their narrow world-view - LPs, RPGs, video tapes, video games, the Internet and Facebook. It wasn't just a thing of the 80s, it goes on daily everywhere to one degree or another. A nation that burns books ends up burning people...

"Remember, you have to make it home to get paid" (The Dogs of War)

There were a couple of different moral panics in the late 70s and 1980s. I've seen explanations for the day care ritual abuse hysteria which are rooted in increased workforce participation by women and anxiety about letting strangers look after kids, but I don't think I've seen a good explanation for the D&D panics. The one guess I would have is that the 1970s and 1980s saw a resurgence of conservative Christian religiosity and an expansion of the reach of this with televangelists and increasing numbers of megachurches which turned some of these pastors into stars (televangelists really began back in the 1920s with radio and megachurches began back in the 1950s but they really began to hit it big in the 1980s). I think that some of these people saw the pseudo-occult trappings of things like D&D or heavy metal music as problematic. Role playing games are also kind of unusual in that they sort of blur the line between performance and gameplay. Players are encouraged to adopt a false persona, one which they will often refer to in the first person and speak with the voice of. That's not how most games which people were familiar with were played. So I think some people may have become concerned that there was the potential for reality and fantasy to become confused. This was helped along by a couple of media stories at the time where people who had played the game committed some kind of horrible act. In particular, the novel Mazes and Monsters was based on the case of James Dallas Egbert, a teenage student who went missing from the University of Michigan. Egbert was suicidal and had originally gone into the university's steam tunnels to commit suicide but then changed his mind. A private investigator hired by his family speculated that Dungeons and Dragons, which Egbert played, might have played a role in his disappearance and the media ran with it. There were a couple of other stories where people who had played the game committed, or attempted to commit, crimes such as murder and suicide. Instead of blaming these things on people's underlying mental illness or depravity, the media sometimes blamed the game for inspiring them.



Unless Alpert's covered in bacon grease, I don't think Hugo can track anything.

An interesting story posted by the BBC about D&D gaming hysteria. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-26328105

Well, the late 70s to mid 80s was an odd time. They had umpteen movies and books about aliens, crashes, and abductions; the Loch Ness monster was a superstar and Sasquatch was a recurring character on the Six Million Dollar Man.

There were a couple of programs that had very few limits on content- That's Incredible and Ripley's: Believe it or Not (granted, Jack Palance was really good in this one). The Bermuda Triangle and psychics were presented uncritically and people believed it. That sort of non-skeptical acceptance of what was told through this medium is where D&D ran into trouble.

When 60 Minutes talked about how the game was evil and violent and drove some kids to suicide, the backlash was tremendous. Later, it was HM music with 'Priest and others testifying about their lyrics. I recall a teenager killed himself "because of the gloomy lyrics in Fade to Black". Obviously, there are larger issues at work in cases like that.

Other venues were affected, too. When wrestling hits its peak, there were news stories of kids relating to the larger-than-life figures in the WWF a little too much. One anecdote involved a woman whose son would shake while ranting that he was Rowdy Roddy Piper and didn't have to listen to anyone. Look at the havoc wreaked by the 'recovered memory syndrome' folks. Communities of "satanists" were exposed complete with child sacrifice. D&D wasn't the only place that appealed to the imagination.

Ultimately, Mazes and Monsters is a study not of how a roleplaying game affects its players, but of the tendency of outsiders to simply accept the BS that's fed to them and pass it along.

It was one of those moral panics that overtakes society from time to time.

Seriously, Rona Jaffe played D&D and understood it and its culture. Unfortunately her real message was lost in all the hubbub and in the movie adaptation...it's not that these games are sick or evil, or that the players are sick and evil, it's that we have a society that's sick and sometimes evil, and kids need fantasy to escape and sometimes (like in the female character's case) find empowerment. These games are a reaction to societal problems, and not a problem themselves.


"Value your education. It's something nobody can ever take away from you." My mom.

Religious people have a hard time telling what's real and what's not. They couldn't understand D&D was fiction. They have the same problem with the Bible.

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