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Comment by UnpossibleJim | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only one who feels like this is another echo of moral panic of the great Dungeons & Dragons scare of the mid eighties, which then morphed into the WoW scare of the early 2000's, which has now morphed into the Fortnite scare of 2019? It seems like every 20ish years there is a new and terrible game for parents, media and establishment to find and reach perfect harmony about that coalesces into a cry of "What about the children?!" all the way t Capital Hill and beyond. Ugh.

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Compared to the D&D scare, this is less of a moral panic of fear of the unknown and more of a panic of lost productivity. D&D's panic, or at least how I understand it, was more like the panic around Harry Potter. Fortnite is more similar to getting mad at your kids for watching too much television or WoW.

The D&D scare seems to at least have benefited from a lot of common misunderstandings and that most people were unwilling to give it a shot. Harry Potter exploded in popularity for the blowback to ever be taken too seriously. Its pretty easy to open up a book and read it vs gathering some people together to try out a somewhat complex and open-ended game.

That's fair. Additionally with D&D, it is what you make of it. The themes and context can very with the group playing, whereas Harry Potter is exactly what it is.

>Am I the only one who feels like this is another echo of moral panic of the great Dungeons & Dragons scare of the mid eighties, which then morphed into the WoW scare of the early 2000's

Don't forget the late 90s Doom scare, the sole cause of Columbine.

Folks are being really blase about online gaming addiction.

It's real. It's happening.

Aww, but mommmm!

Not only are you not the only one to notice this, it's addressed in TFA.

"I get that these concerns are sometimes misguided and overblown, but I also think that it's bad practice to assume that present fears are wholly illegitimate simply because you can think of analogous concerns in the past that in retrospect appear 'ridiculous' to you."

It's not every 20 years, it's pretty much a constant. Some games or trends just happen to get more mainstream attention than others.

I don't think we're ever going to truly get rid of this sense of "this thing is bad for my kid, we need to get rid of it!" Since ultimately some bad thing happens to a kid/parent and they feel more validated amongst others who feel the same way about that thing. That's an incredibly powerful emotion.

We probably just need to be better at getting people to be generally more open minded and to see the world in less black and white terms.

|We probably just need to be better at getting people to be generally more open minded and to see the world in less black and white terms.|

Statement for the ages right there.+1

If you play fortnite backwards there are satanic images.

Mass necromancy, too!

Every GTA release is aimed to chock more than the previous one. I watched store clerks with a long line of kids wanting to buy GTA V, they asked for phone number to parents to ask for permission to sell and informed what type of game it was. Great hype for the game :)

I'm not sure it's constantly going up. I mean, GTA 2 had flamethrower fire truck and picking up people in the bus to drop them off for grinding into hamburgers. The latest releases are pretty chill in comparison.

hot dogs, not hamburgers, to be correct :)

It's all the fault of that devil music those kids are listening to these days.

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