The 1980s Media Panic Over Dungeons and Dragons

A friend of mine has an as-yet-unfinished documentary about the early history of RPGs, based on interview footage he shot in early 2000s (including interviews with Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson). My favorite moment in the rough cut starts with Frank Chadwick of GDW talking about how the anti-RPG frenzy didn't affect them (at the time, GDW mostly made a science fiction RPG called Traveller). Cut to Steve Jackson of Steve Jackson Games - an incredibly animated person - having an absolute freakout while explaining how the Secret Service raided his business and seized all his inventory, computers, everything. Someone found out about their upcoming game "Cyberpunk", declared it a "manual for computer terrorism", and the Secret Service flipped out. They nearly put SJG out of business. No charges were ever filed, as SJG didn't do anything even remotely illegal or dangerous. This event was one of the things that led to the founding of EFF.

So yeah, the SJG "Cyberpunk" raid was probably the peak of the anti-D&D frenzy. That's not just moms and journalists freaking out. That was the full authority of the US government.

The D&D controversy intersected a much wider (now discredited) moral panic about Satanism. Wikipedia has a good summary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satanic_ritual_abuse

"Journalists" like Geraldo Rivera exploited this panic quite thoroughly in the 1980s: http://io9.gizmodo.com/5829171/when-geraldo-rivera-took-on-s...

This lasted well into the 90's as well. I remember in middle school going to an after-school youth center with my friends and attempting to play D&D there. They actually had some person come in and sit down with us trying to convince us of how evil the game was. I think they contacted our parents, too. The only thing they accomplished was motivating us to stop going to a nice enough after-school place. We were in 8th grade, I think, and we were sitting there looking at the guy like, are you out of your mind? To us it was just a dumb game.

Honestly, it was a great way to keep kids off the streets. You were motivated to sit around for hours, doing something harmless while being very social. For many introverted kids, it was a godsend.

I played AD&D in high school in the late 1970s, in the Deep South (aka Bible Belt country), and I'm grateful to my parents for not freaking out and taking it away from me.

Years later, what I realized was that all those people who were in a tizzy were reflecting their own fears onto the game. The highly Christian saw demonic influences. The tightly-wound saw loss of control (letting random chance determine reactions). The extroverts worried that their children weren't getting out often enough to meet other children.

A friend of mine had his D&D books burned by his parents. I was pretty young at the time and I remember thinking: "Burned? Like book burning? What? That DMG never hurt anyone!"

I was young and it was my first brush with a moral panic. Changed my perspective. Made me realize that it's not Evil per se that you need to watch out for, but simply regular people who are afraid of something.

All those moral panics in the past were so embarrassing and obviously silly in retrospect, and I feel for all the innocent people who were attacked and ostracized.

It's a good thing that the moral panics we have right now are clearly righteous and accurate, and the people being attacked and ostracized unquestionably deserve it.

When kids play thieves vs cops or cow boys vs indians parents are not scared. Acceptable social games perpetuating legitimate fights between arbitrary good and evils.

However you see maybe D&D is racist : elves have boni in beauty, dwarves are ugly and strong ... but any characters can choose their morale demeanor.

In fact you needed assassins as much as paladin. No true D&D party could survive without diversity of classes, races and moral demeanor.

Yes D&D is a dangerous fantasy.

It is a fantasy that states that for making a strong team you have to embrace diversity and that teach you how to deal with discrimination positively.

It teaches you that mainly your talent were random (initial dices) but it was up to you to make them a strength and it did not even mattered you were weak you could level up through doing.

Yes D&D dangerous fantasies should stop because they are turning kids in better adults better understanding that everything is a weird cocktail of luck and determinism and that we can have nice adventures out of it and improve ourselves.

Dangerous game indeed. Giving hopes to kids should be forbidden. We better need an adaptation of 1984 in AAA format.

I played D&D a lot from about 1982-1989 with the neighborhood kids. None of us fit the stereotype for D&D kids. The parents didn't think anything of it at first until all this media stuff. Some parents stopped allowing their kids to come and play because of it. I recall my mother taking me aside to talk to me about the game. I distinctly remember her saying that "some people say that game is evil." I don't recall what I said in response but she seemed satisfied and that was the last time she ever asked me about D&D. I even got the Fiend Folio for Christmas that year.

I have to say the darker and scarier the modules, the more into them we were. We must have played and replayed Ravenloft dozens of times. We made up our own versions to it.

We had an official club called "Strategic Games Club" in my high school. We'd meet after school once a week and play D&D. One day 1995, our sponsoring teacher oddly started trying to steer us into playing chess. We kept refusing. Eventually she came clean and told us someone complained and there were new rules... our games could no longer contain any references to monsters, demons, killing, or magic. There could also be no games of Magic the Gathering (which was new at the time, and no one in the club was playing yet).

The club instantly folded. We never heard another word about what precipitated it. Seemed pretty late in the game for D&D moral panic, and this was a pretty liberal Chicago suburban school district.

"Dark Dungeons" is also the name of a rather good "retroclone" of the Basic D&D Rules Cyclopedia, which a lot of people consider to be the best rule set. Dark Dungeons also does a really good job of organizing the rules and fixing conflicts.

"Darker Dungeons" is a similar concept but with some mechanical modifications the author thought were sensible.

http://www.gratisgames.webspace.virginmedia.com/darkdungeons...

My first D&D group was broken up when two members (who were brothers) Mother heard it was satanic and forbade both of them from gaming. They were the thief and cleric, so we were basically SoL without them.

Made more frustrating by the fact that they went to the same church as my family... sigh.

Oh, man, I lived through the '80s hysteria about D&D, to the point where one of my (parochial school) friend's mother wouldn't let him associate with the rest of us classmates if D&D was even suspected. Years later in college, I read "Mazes & Monsters", and while I thought it was an interesting story, I could clearly see the mental illness involved, which was entirely outside any concept of RPGs. If anything, one could lay blame at (spoiler warning!) J.R.R. Tolkien, for the "twin towers" references in his works and where the title character ended up.

Watching the video clips had me howling/cringing. The later frenzy directed at other RPGs, like the SJG stuff already mentioned, just pretty much seals the deal that "the previous generation" (let me live in the past, please) just didn't understand fiction/fantasy. That was a whole 'nother set of data points in my education/maturation process as an independently thinking adult...

Are there any sociologists studying the current moral panic around gaming?

> These days your life isn’t complete if you aren’t part of a role-playing gaming group

I may be a bit old to know, but is this really true now? I wasn't aware RPGs were having that much of a cultural renaissance.

Perhaps my 16 year old, nerdy, Rolemaster-addicted self is vindicated!

Or perhaps it is hyperbole.

I read Dear's The Dungeon Master back in high school and want to reread it at some point. It's a complex, real story, and told with some empathy.

Just wanted to point out the humblebundle for Pathfinder role playing game. Super cheap,get all the materials

Somewhat tangentially related, BBC's Archive on 4 broadcast this last week:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b071h083

It's about those old "interactive fiction" books you got in the 80's where you could play a whole adventure by making choices and jumping to different pages and paragraphs. Quite a blast from the past as was being reminded by this article of playing MERP[0] for hours and hours back in the mid to late 80's when I attended college.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle-earth_Role_Playing

I started playing Pathfinder (a DnD varient, don't ask me about all the variations) with some friends on a weekly basis starting about two months ago, and it's fantastic fun. Lot's of people aren't really familiar with it, but from my perspective if you would ever play any sort of videogame with an emphasis on thinking (not a reflex-shooter, that is) you should really give it a shot. It's extremely social, and enables fantastic creativity that even the latest games have barely started to compete with. Combined with dice rolling forces some insanely implausible events that would be nearly impossible to program into a video game.

The Dark Dungeons movie mentioned is actually a movie made by people who DO understand D&D et al, but are trying to create an accurate film portrayal of Chick's cartoon tracts:

http://www.wired.com/2014/05/dark-dungeons-movie/

As a gamer myself, it's just kinda weird to watch my favorite hobby get distorted like that. I'd say it'd be more fun to remove all the gaming references and replace them with actual Lovecraftian Cthulhu cultists, but that's just my opinion.

There is a good made-for-TV movie starring a young Tom Hanks, called "Mazes and Monsters" (1982) that was probably made because of the hype:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084314/

Looks like you can watch it here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awTKqydci_c

I remember the age of moral panic well. It went far beyond DND. Really, they were deeply suspicious of anything kids liked enough to form a subculture around. Punk, goth, fantasy, arcade games, Star Trek, you name it.

They expected bored compliant teens they understood. Liking stuff was a subversive act.

I played in a group for years in middle and high school. The town I grew up in was sort of backward and religious. Let's just say there was considerable pressure to abandon the game.

We didn't have book burning though. (saw that down thread, and I can only imagine what younger me would have thought of that!)

I think these games are just great! Many of us took turns being the DM, and that's where a lot of learning happens! Theater of the mind becomes something tangible. You need to make it real enough for the others to get their own creative juices running, and when you do it right, the whole thing is immersive. We soon learned to replace things like, "you enter a dark room and encounter two trolls looking to fight!" with, "you enter a musky, dark room..." Players then ask what do they see, or cast light, or listen, and the whole exchange takes a bit longer. However, the interaction quality goes way up. So does the fun.

A good friend, who died early (sadly), had the seriously great idea to take a movie, "Escape From New York", and turn it into a campaign playable by 4 people. Several of us worked on it, maps, translating rules and setting up the damage tables, etc... so that it would work reasonably with "modern" type weapons, no magic, and so forth.

That campaign ran a few times and we really enjoyed it. Sometimes I feel that's a potential branch of fantasy gaming that got missed, or just seriously under exploited. The D&D idea, rules, dynamics, works for a lot of things. We found that out more or less accidentally. The realizations falling out of that were something our group thought about for a long time afterword.

Sometimes, it was necessary to play the game in secret. A gathering would be arranged under some other pretense. Fear of evil, the devil, and other inane things was enough to make it very highly controversial. Nobody I know was impacted in any way, other than positive ways.

This also made it difficult for both genders to play at times. Our group had one girl in it early on. She really wanted to play the game, and just kept at us, until she was in. Once she was, that was it! We all bonded and it was just something we enjoyed doing. Years later, she talked about that experience at a reunion, and it mattered far more to her than it did us. Being accepted and being able to play on par with the others in the group was liberating and empowering to her. Interesting how these things play out.

I purged my set of stuff during that last year of High School. Sometimes wish I hadn't, as some of it is totally collectible now. And it would be fun to read through and remember... I took a mechanical drafting class once, just for access to the tools to make big, great maps!

Someone should make an audio / text type adventure / campaign. Let the computer be the DM, it can present information in various ways, offer up maps on the screen, and provide audio clues. Maybe it's a stretch, but it could also query the players and take voice commands. The idea here would be to use a display to present and manage all the tedium, but use audio and voice input to actually communicate the players actions and game state in a way that would closely simulate the experience.

Yet today, nobody is bothered by GTA, where you can run over people and shoot whores. (But not have sex with them; that still generates bad publicity.)[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_Coffee_mod

Old media has been perpetually scare mongering in this space...

1980s: Gamers worship satan

1990s: Gamers are violent and shoot up schools

2010s: Gamers are misogynists