When Dungeons and Dragons Set Off a Moral Panic | Hacker News Reader

When Dungeons and Dragons Set Off a Moral Panic

nytimes.com

130 pointsingve82 comments

My friend's mom was very concerned about our D&D gaming. This was 1982. She even went so far as to provide us with tapes of ministers decrying D&D as satanic (which we found hilarious).

However I have to hand it to her. A child of the 60s herself, she knew that there was no point in forbidding it. So, she opened her house to it, so "at least it will be happening where I can see it."

Once she was exposed firsthand to the amount of totally harmless riotous fun we were having - totally sober and clothed, mind you - she changed her mind entirely.

Let this be a lesson about listening to ministers about anything.

I was almost kicked out of my catholic high school in 2006 because I was running a DnD group after school and the administration found out. I had to have several parent teacher conferences which mostly consisted of my mom and I trying to stifle laughter as the principal drew a path of my moral degeneracy (in terms of severity) from playing DnD, to cutting myself, to Wicca and finally, yes, to Islam. I think they saw one of the characters in my campaign was D'jinn or something.

Where was this?

South Shore of Massachusetts

I'm very surprised by this being your experience in 2006.

Really? As OP article points out, similar sorts of things have been said about Harry Potter, by definition in the same period.

Besides which, those were the Bush years, conservative Christians were at the highest levels of the government, never mind at some religious school somewhere or other. What I remember from US news in the mid-oughts was serious moves in the direction of teaching intelligent design in schools, and just generally that this sort of thing was not viewed as a ridiculous archaism, but a defined political perspective with a lot of support in red states.

I'm British (and we obviously also have moral panics, but less often overtly religious nowadays), but thanks to the internet I spent a lot of time talking/arguing with Americans, including a few intelligent young religious conservatives, who would share articles around arguing that it was definitely not OK to let your kids go out trick or treating on Halloween (from my memory, the argument was basically that it's all just good fun and games and candy until you're burning in the lake of fire).

When the gay marriage stuff started steamrolling across the states in the last few years, my first thought was how quickly things have changed - that was unimaginable ten years ago.

I used to play a lot of DnD in the early 90's and I loved the Harry Potter books. Of course to me it sounds ridiculous that someone would assume that I actually believe in the magic described in the books, but then I had the realization that if people's "faith" allowed them to believe in the magical things described in the Bible then believing in other magic (presumably evil magic) is not too far off.

I was raised Catholic but decided that it was all bullshit way back in middle-school and have been atheist ever since.

I guess I just think of the DnD panic to be from the 80s so for someone to take it so seriously in 2006 I find unusual.

I assure you it felt very strange and unusual to me as well. I was being told all this by someone who had gone to Yale for her PhD (in theology, but still) and who beforehand I was on good terms with, as far as student-administrator relationships go. That's probably when I realized most credentials were bullshit.

I once attended a Church presentation on D&D with my D&D group - all atheists - to figure out what was going on. This was back in, what, 1995?

Anyway the gist of it was that they were opposed to D&D (and any entertainment) that presented the occult and paganism (from their perspective) as anything other than unadulterated evil. D&D was only a small part of it. Their main objection was to television shows; the example they cited was in all seriousness an episode of Duck Tales that featured "pyramid energy" in a positive light.

Strangely, this made some sense to me - if you start from their premises that the Bible is literal truth and is an instruction manual for a moral life.

We wrote it off as another example of religion - or indeed any irrational philosophy - corrupting the minds of otherwise good and intelligent adults ;)

Measured concern about something unfamiliar, or with elements contrary to one's beliefs is certainly reasonable, as long as it's proportionate. My parents are devout Christians and were a little concerned about D&D and were aware of the controversy, but we had a few short conversations on the subject and that was that. Fair enough.

I did have a really good laugh at some of the Jack Chick comics. That was the extreme end of the ant-D&D looney fringe, but it was so infantile in it's extreme depictions and outrageous in it's claims that I saw it as a valuable tool. I'm sure he did do a lot of damage and caused some harm, but for me being able to point to something so clearly absurd seemed helpful. I was confident that anyone in my circle of family or acquaintances would be able to see the absurd side of the claims by Chick and his kind. That meant anyone agitating against D&D or roleplaying games in general could be put on the defensive because they would need to show that their objections weren't absurd in the same way.

> as long as it's proportionate

Serious question: what's proportionate, if you believe that your children are engaged in a 'game' that will literally cost them their souls?

It would mean if you do have such serious concerns, actualy investigating and determining if those concerns were founded on anything, rather than assuming the worst and making a fool of yourself by accusing the game of containing and encoraging things it plainly doesn't.

It would mean asking people who play the game what their actual experiences of it were and honestly and directly discussing with them any aspects of that you found troubling.

It would mean actualy addressing the problem in a way that has a realistic chance of working, rather than being completely counterproductive.

D&D isn't the only roleplaying game. You could encourage them to play science fiction, modern or historical games with little or no religious content, or a game like Pendragon so they can play Christian knights in the age of Chivalry. There are lots of options

That reminds me of one of the most unintentionally hilarious things I've ever heard on a news program.

One year when Halloween rolled around on a Sunday, a local woman was interviewed who said she'd send her daughter out on Saturday instead because Sunday was the Lord's day and Halloween was a day for the devil.

A: Why are you allowing your daughter to participate at all, if that's how you feel?

B: Saturday is the Sabbath!

A significant part of the genre of satan-fearing or whatever you call it, is the devil is quite lazy, but its still worth banning.

For the standard HN car analogy, driving while drunk is perhaps only 10 times more dangerous than driving sober. So ten times practically nothing is still close to zero. So when the ball game lets out and 40K fans drive home and at least half are legally drunk, there are no bodies stacked like cordwood, because its just not that dangerous. However, virtually everyone agrees the cost/benefit ratio, especially in the long term, is such that drunk driving should be illegal. A standard HN golf analogy would be holding up your golf club during a lightning storm, where the odds of getting lit up are extremely low because a spark that jumped 10 kft isn't going to care about a primate waving a stick, yet only an idiot would intentionally do it.

You are saying that DUI is not a meaningful danger?

Yeah, obviously. The rate isn't that much higher than sober drivers, and the odds of being caught are extremely low. Its problem is the cost/benefit ratio is extremely low. There's nothing to gain by permitting it (maybe more booze sales, not really worth it) and plenty to gain by making it illegal (because every death due to it is pointless).

Paradoxically most of our legal system is based on risk/reward ratios, not level of risk. For example speeding is illegal although the odds of an accident are extremely low. On the other hand climbing Mt Everest isn't illegal at all, even though the death rate is about 50% or whatever it is now. Smoking is not illegal although the odds of smoking killing a smoker are pretty good, yet psychedelics are illegal despite the actual death rates and counts being pretty close to zero.

Almost one third of all traffic related deaths in the US are caused by drunk drivers. That's a very big slice of a pie that's way too big already.

See, you're agreeing with me. I pulled the actual numbers from Google and 40K total traffic deaths out of 2.6M total deaths for the USA last year is about one percent. So drinking related is a third of one percent. Its about a hundred times more likely than getting hit by lightning, its hardly zero, but its basically a rounding error in list of risks to worry about.

Lets say 100 times per year the local pro baseball stadium fills all 40K seats and a mere 1/4 (probably more) drive home after some beers. So right there, the odds of someone being killed in any individual baseball game related drunk driving incident are under 1%, likely far, far lower, given that's hardly the only pro sport, there are more baseball stadiums in the country than the one nearby me, more than half the people sitting the stands have had a beer, and almost all drinking happens outside baseball stadiums anyway.

However, I agree with you completely, its only banned because its a completely senseless and avoidable risk to take, not because its highly risky. Its measurably an extremely low risk, but the key is its a dumb risk to take, which is the only reason why its illegal. Tobacco smoking on the other hand is extremely high risk, but its not illegal, because most people don't see it as senseless or dumb.

Very similar to what my parents (actually just my mom) did initially. Mom's complaints later faded as she encouraged me to befriend some neighbor kids who were being ostracized because of general nerdiness & neediness. In fact at that point she was asking me if I wanted to go play games at their house, not to convert them but rather to ease their social pain a bit. To this day I am glad she raised me. And I play RPGs with my kids and find alternate non-satan-involving scenarios just by default :D

My experience was similar. This was the early 90s and I was 11 or 12. I told my mom that I wanted to play D&D with my friends, and she looked a little nervous for a moment (for which I blame daytime tv, all the talkshows went on about D&D and satanism back then), then said, Alright, as long as you can still tell the difference between fantasy and reality, you can play.

Then not too long after that we wound up playing at my house a few times and she saw it was really just us being silly and playing a very fancy form of pretend and she came all the way around to approving, since it kept me social and imaginative, and it was pretty hard to get in actual trouble when me and my friend group spent all our time sitting around the dining room table at one or another's house.

D&D does actually deal with remarkably clear lines between Good and Evil. Demons, devils and undead are all clearly in the evil category, as are most of the monsters you need to kill.

Of course you can play it with a lot more moral ambiguity than that, but out of the box, D&D is very suitable for a black & white world view.

I once worked for some people with a similar belief system to that above. A big part of it was that there were only two powers in the world - Christ & God vs. Satan. ANY power that was not explicitly that of Christ was implicitly the devil, regardless of how good it sounded. Harry Potter for example, was clearly an agent of Satan.

The moral ambiguity was the best part!

Put the party into a situation where they could ally with a profoundly evil power to achieve a great good. Or maybe give them a powerful magical item that they discover is slowly corrupting them as they start wielding it for the right reasons...

I wish more of our current crop of politicians had played RPGs that way...

Its something to unite against, and its the business model. At least in part. I had a roommate who's parents were NOT into D&D resulting in some conversations on this topic.

We'll all unite against it, regardless if it exists or is even a problem. Its been the bane of minorities for centuries, although it works pretty well. So you get 100 teens in church holding up their hand or praying or whatever they did to promise, well, it doesn't matter, the point is they got them unified. From memory his mom worked the unity angle, what matters is every teen in the congregation made the same pledge. To some folks unity and conformity is more important than the rights of minorities. "well, maybe its not fair and maybe they're good people at heart, but what really matters is they're them and we're us".

Again from memory, his Dad was freaked out by the business model. So wait... you're saying that its possible for a very small number of people to sit around and write a completely fictional work of vast size that is creative and interesting mythology and publish numerous books about it and it becomes crazy popular and culturally influential? You're not, uh, implying anything about the development process of a certain book we consider holy from 2000+ years ago, are you? So this annoys the parents twofold, first of all its highly unfavorable direct analogy with their favorite business model aka religion, and secondly no one likes weasel words and if you're trying to say holy books are works of fiction then just spit it out don't talk around it. To those parents it sounds a lot like "I'm not coveting my neighbor's wife, I just want a one night stand with her, so technically I'm off the hook WRT sin and commandments, right, I mean the words don't literally match up so its OK, right?"

Ah, yes, good times.

It's a cycle, happens about every ten years or so. The usual "this example of popular culture I don't like will destroy our youths!" type of thinking.

My favorite was that time Papa Smurf was converting the children because he used magic. Oh, and the Smurfs were communists.

Take a look around, I'm sure you can find a current example of "video games is responsible for this thing I don't like" syndrome.

Yeah, cycles of moral panic that were fuelled by the media when they had nothing better to do. Nowadays though, it's fuelled by outrage culture on social media, so the result is more schizophrenic.

Reading this reminded me of a friend of mine.

We went to the same church when we were young, where his parents sometimes had very specific problems with some video-games.

It was long time ago, but I remember them having problem with Age Of Empires, because "That is not how conversion works!" [1] :)

Playing Duke-Nukem was fine a.f.a.i.k.

[1] https://youtu.be/Bwd10I4oJjo?t=311

Hehe, I had a friend whos parents were jehovas witnesses. Their parents didn't want him to use special sounds on his digital keyboard, because they sounded like ghosts and this was considered evil.

I used to play D&D at a JW friend's house, but his parents were relatively progressive. We could play all day long and eat all the Cheetos we wanted, but we weren't allowed to summon demons. Everything else in the Player's Handbook was fair game, as long as we steered clear of demons.

I also encountered people who took their kid's Christmas present away for the same reason you mention. To be fair, you really could make some scary-ass demon noises with the Casio SK-1.

How do ghosts sound? And how did they know?

Buddy, if you have to ask then I can't explain it to you. I know a ghost sound when I hear it.

They sound like they do on "Scooby Doo", duh! :)

The initial thought of a bunch of adults freaking out about a harmless game is pretty funny, but as someone who played a lot of D&D in their teenage years I have to say I'm glad I "missed out" on this. I had pretty insular, highly religious parents who would have definitely made sure I was nowhere near a game of D&D and probably would have forbid me from hanging out with anyone who played. I would have missed out on what I consider a really important part of my childhood as a result. Not only that, but I truly believe playing D&D helped me develop methods for abstract thought (through visualizing the game world in my head, developing backstories and personalities for characters, etc.) that likely contributed to my ability to understand abstract maths and computer science. I honestly doubt I'd be the person I am today without this game. Weird to think about.

Also, it's funny that the headline describes Dungeons and Dragons as setting off a moral panic; I thought it was Christianity.

I don't understand why this is getting down voted. It's a perfectly sensible comment. If a moral panic is being propagated and promoted by an organised group with an agenda against something innocuous, who is responsible for the panic?

I don't really mind the title, nobody's demanding that it be revised and it's clear what is meant, but I think it's reasonable to point out where the responsibility lies.

> who is responsible for the panic?

Definitely the overreacting organised group, but also a large amount of blame falls on the media helping them promote their overreactions to the masses

You really need the media to have a moral panic, because without them you can't get the feedback loop going. I deliberately draw analogy to the audio phenomenon here. No matter how much I scream and yell, even in front of a crowd of people, I can't create a feedback loop without a microphone.

The reason why the moral panics in the last couple of years have not been from the religious right isn't so much because they've particularly changed, but because the media isn't willing to push those anymore, and the media on the right just isn't large enough right now to sustain their own. (Give it another three or four years at current pace, though.)

HN doesn't really seem to appreciate humor or sarcasm very much.

My reply was intended to be perfectly serious. It really was not Dungeons and Dragons triggering anything, and the headline is just wrong.

I think your point is valid and the way you phrased it amusing. I would never downvote it.

That said, the position is not wholly different from "laws are the leading cause of crime" or "the ebola outbreak did not cause people to panic - it was their desire to live and be healthy".

> "laws are the leading cause of crime"

But that's an interesting analogy. Why are people who take certain drugs "criminals"? Because we passed laws against it.

Some laws have a legitimate moral basis, others don't -- and I guess the same is true about moral panics.

How about "Sexy clothes incite rape"?

Interesting. I don't think it's quite the same thing.

The first three statements all roughly take the form "if only you would stop regarding X as Y, then you would stop observing Y when X happens".

"Just stop regarding the content of D&D as morally corrupting, and then you will not need to panic when you find your children playing it."

"Just stop considering robbery to be illegal, and then crime rates will plummet."

"Just stop wanting to be healthy and then you won't mind the ebola outbreaks when they occur."

By contrast, "Stop dressing so sexy and then noone will rape you anymore" is not a suggestion that you can make a problem go away simply by ceasing to regard it as a problem. It may be an absurd attempt to transfer blame by stripping the rapists of their moral agency, but it proposes to solve a problem in the world by taking a physical action in the world.

Which I appreciate mostly, it can be distracting and is often puerile, but if you're also making a valid point I think humour is fine.

Not really; it's more that it was a subculture of nerdy teenagers. (Combining three instincts: suspicion of subcultures, suspicion of nerds and suspicion of teenagers). You can come up with any number of examples of similar or more severe moral panics occurring in the Islamic world, East Asia or India.

D&D set off a moral panic in the Christian community... better wordage or just hand waving?

Nah - throw a burning match into a pile of dry newspapers. The fact that paper was piled up was the reason there was a big fire. The lack of rain and damp provided conditions that enabled/exacerbated it. But the match was still what set it off.

The resulting headline would be a little ambiguous, however.

I think you mean fringe heterodox groups some of which are not technically Christian.

Heh - thinking back to my youth, when my mom, bless her heart, didn't want me playing MTG, so I had to play SWCCG instead.

Got the same satisfaction out of it I suppose, and my social circle was all pretty into the SW game as well so I don't know if it really mattered that much. Not to mention I had a black border Darth Vader, which at the time made me the "coolest" kid in my friend group for a short period of time.

My mother never forbade me to play any games and generally made not much rules.

It always felt strange to me, visiting a friend who can only play special games or only play for one hour a day etc.

Back in the day if you were playing D&D you were worshipping the devil - now if you play video games you hate various societal groups.

So interesting how puritanism evolves

> So interesting how puritanism evolves

More like the main stream media which love to run these "white male gamers/developers pushing women/minorities out of gaming/tech" stories. Their business is outrage, that's the result of the click bait culture. They don't do that because they believe in that crap, they do that because it drives ad-revenue. Unfortunately they don't understand that by publish content that sides with extreme ideas,they are alienating their own audience on the long run.

I've up voted you because IIRC some game producers have been caught running fake protest groups.

http://kotaku.com/5289471/eas-fake-protest-riles-some-religi...

As they say, there's no such thing as bad publicity.

Those really are not the same thing at all.

Nobody that has any sort of voice says that if you are playing video games you are anti-women/minority/whatever like they were with DnD and Satanism. There are people that say there is disparity in representation of genders in video games, and that's hard to dispute, but not that the act of playing them is an act against any of those groups.

Due to an unfortunate series of events I ended up at a private military-themed school in south Texas for several years of high school (80s). I was told that D&D was not allowed because it would make you communist. And when the school chaplain (!!) found out I was an atheist he interrogated me and flatly stated that if I didn't believe in got that I must therefore worship Saran. I think it's a (religious?) tendency to condemn any activity that they can't completely control.

It seems much more commercialized these days. Even a cursory background check into any of the big names will reveal a Patreon/Kickstarter/etc fundraising campaign. Being outraged is outrageously profitable.

Well, AD&D certainly put me on my path to worshipping Satan. I thank TSR for that. I've never looked back.

Lawful evil or bust! I also took driving lessons from Carmaggedon ...

Anticristus, il Filio de Sathanas, infestissumam!

I always was curious who these people were. Raised in the average Catholic family D&D and many early fantasy games on our PC were considered harmless fun. Perhaps it came from the fact that we always had books around and were encouraged to read. About the only time I ever remember issues with D&D and Arduin Grimoire type games were the "jocks" some of whom would pick on our group. When the PC and such rolled around (Apple 2 as well) many of them were just as fascinated.

>Raised in the average Catholic family D&D and many early fantasy games on our PC were considered harmless fun. ... When the PC and such rolled around (Apple 2 as well)...

I went to Catholic school when the Apple ][ was current. The teachers strongly warned us not to play D&D.

I think it goes back to the fact that a few loud and vocal people(groups) can distort the perception of average or commonplace. Despite it being an inaccurate representation of the whole.

As a person from a country with <20% of religious people, about half of them (lukewarm) Catholics, reading some of these comments, the only thing that comes to my mind is...W.T.F.?

We specifically say we have "freedom of religion" in the U.S., and unfortunately a lot of people take that to mean "the freedom to impose my religion on others".

It varies greatly from state to state; everywhere I grew up and went to school, there were a lot less religious conservatives so it wasn't an issue for me. But sometimes visiting other states, it can be a bit of a shock to see the amount of religious bumper stickers, house decorations, clothing, etc.

I had no idea that religious clothing and bumper stickers constituted imposing one's religion on others.

By imposing I was more talking about the article itself- I don't mind the t-shirts or bumper stickers, they're just visible evidence that some parts of the country are different than others.

Blame your ancestors. They ran all the firebreathing Fundamentalists off to the New World, where they discovered the healing power of Not For Profit Incorporation.

Recently and related discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11225579

Interesting the article references the disappearance of James Dallas Egbert III but makes no mention of the tv show that aired on CBS in 1982 that was based on this incident.

I thought it was one of Tom Hanks better performances. [/sarcasm]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mazes_and_Monsters

The video above the article does mention the show.

My parents were more enlightened. I had very lax curfew standards - if I was out until 2am, it was because I was playing Dungeons and Dragons with the other nerds. If my brother was out past 11pm, it was because he was up to no good. :-)

To a person the group I played D&D with ultimately ended up in professional jobs. With a sample size of 20+ over the years, we all finished college. At least half got graduate degrees. A couple have made major impacts on science and technology.

There was one friend whose parents went a little overboard with the moral panic. Despite that, he came out ok too. :-)

One year at GenCon (even better than "at Band Camp") a cop at my table mentioned that criminal behavior for games was almost unmeasurable compared to the general population.

> One year at GenCon (even better than "at Band Camp") a cop at my table mentioned that criminal behavior for games was almost unmeasurable compared to the general population.

Unclear probably because I'm tired - Do you mean the criminal behavior of gamers when they are not playing games? As opposed to their (imaginary) criminal acts in the game?

My typo doesn't help. Basically gamers get into real life trouble much less than non-gamers.

If it wasn't for D&D, I never would have known asmodeus was the most powerful devil!

Anti-Dungeons & Dragons Propaganda Booklet: http://www.theescapist.com/BADDbook.htm

According to a review on Amazon for Pat Pulling's book, an anti-D&D author who's mentioned in the article, Pat admited to "butchering pets" with her son; unable to find a source backing that up though; Pat's book on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0910311633/

Did the NYT help propagate that moral panic?

No, it only mentions that D&D was being reported as motivation for a 16 year old that went missing in 1977. It concluded that series of articles with a simple statement that D&D was not in any way associated with the boys disappearance or his eventual return. ("Accio bratty teenager!")

I actually made a movie based upon the Jack Chick "Dark Dungeons" comic and tried my hardest to make a faithful to the spirit adaption. I think the results speak for themsevles; www.darkdungeonsthemovie.com

as a kid in the late 80s, the news convinced my grandma that DnD was training me to be a satanist w/ suicidal pacts around the characters and all

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