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The 1980s Media Panic Over Dungeons and Dragons
- ca98am79 11y agoThere 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/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084314/ Looks like you can watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awTKqydci_c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awTKqydci_c
- misnome 11y agoThis is indeed mentioned in the article.
- mrspeaker 11y agoI'm no Tom Hanks fan, but he held that mess together and made an amazingly terrible idea only mildly hilarious.
- eggy 11y agoI was in the gaming club in HS in 1979 to 1982, and we basically played military strategy games and D&D. The Tom Hanks movie still resonates, because I remember thinking I didn't know anybody like the characters in our club. My parents only wanted me to balance it with 'real life', getting out and breathing some fresh air (in Brooklyn ;)
- rosser 11y agoYeah, I enjoyed the hell out of Mazes & Monsters — ironically, of course — but there is no conceivable way I can get behind calling it "good".
- exstudent2 11y agoOld 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
- rosser 11y agoThe actual, demonstrable amount of misogyny in gaming stupendously, overwhelmingly dwarfs the even theoretical number of satanists or mass shooters in gaming. Hell, the amount of misogyny in gaming probably dwarfs the number of satanists or mass shooters in the entire world.
- exstudent2 11y agoDo you have links to where this is demonstrated?
- user585803945 11y agoSpoken with absolutely zero shred of credibility or proof behind it, just a bold assertion to virtue signal to others. You're so cool.
- rosser 11y agoThere's some pretty fierce irony in using a throwaway created just to make this comment to question someone's credibility. (Account created one minute before the parent — so far, its only — comment was posted.)
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- copperx 11y agoI've never heard of SPORT before, what kind of game is it?
- chipsy 11y agoI 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.
- shepardrtc 11y agoThis 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.
- rosser 11y agoOne night in the early 90s, I was hanging out with some friends, playing D&D at an all night diner. At some point in the evening, a fellow patron of the establishment, on her way to pay her check, stopped by our table to warn us of the mortal danger to our souls, and handed us a stack of Jack Chick tracts. Needless to say, lulz were had.
- aidenn0 11y agoLike this one? http://www.chick.com/reading/tracts/0046/0046_01.ASP http://www.chick.com/reading/tracts/0046/0046_01.ASP
- daeken 11y agoASP(non-.NET) is the real sin here.
- pmiller2 11y agoI've seen that before, but the thing that really amuses me about it is that Dark Dungeons is the name of a rather fine RPG: http://www.gratisgames.webspace.virginmedia.com/darkdungeons.html http://www.gratisgames.webspace.virginmedia.com/darkdungeons... I'm about 95% sure the game is named after the comic, but I don't know for sure. Maybe I should ask the creator some day. :)
- sehugg 11y agoThe 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 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-satanism-and-a-very-confused-ozzy-osbourne http://io9.gizmodo.com/5829171/when-geraldo-rivera-took-on-s...
- dragonwriter 11y ago> The D&D controversy intersected a much wider (now discredited) moral panic about Satanism. It didn't intersect it so much as it was a component of the broader Satanic panic.
- sopooneo 11y agoWhat baffled me most as an child during the "Satanism Panic" was what the grownups thought the danger was. Regardless of whether there were really people worshipping the devil, and regardless of whether such people believed what they were doing, did the panicked adults believe it? Did they worry that someone was going to perform dark rituals so well that they actually summoned the devil?
- dragonwriter 11y agoThere were two concerns, as I understand it: there were (and are) Christian groups that believe that "dark rituals" can have real and serious consequences for not only the participants but the society that allows them to occur, whether that's literally summoning the devil or, more commonly, just provoking divine disfavor (the kind of people that blame various disasters on divine disfavor due to tolerance for abortion, gay rights, etc.) But there were also concerns that satanic cults, whatever activity they started with, progressed to ritual violence including sex crimes, assaults and murders, and suicides. Overtly, the government and law enforcement involvement in the satanic panic was driven by the latter type of concern, though a lot of the propaganda that fed that concern was spread by people who were also involved with the more.religious concern -- they weren't independent phenomena.
- beat 11y agoA 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.
- anigbrowl 11y agoThat's a rather different situation from thinking that gamers are going to summon demons and stuff like that. cyber attacks have turned out to be a real thing, even though assuming SJG was a front for terrorism was nonsense. On the other hand, I have yet to hear of anyone successfully calling up spirits from the vasty deep.
- PhasmaFelis 11y agoThis is a good point. The Steve Jackson raids were ridiculous, but given that the perpetrators didn't even know what a role-playing game was, I doubt they drew a connection between Cyberpunk and D&D.
- drhayes9 11y agoBruce Sterling wrote about the raid as part of his book "The Hacker Crackdown". As far as I know, the sting against SJG "Cyberpunk" was part of Operation Sundevil, a larger-scale federal effort to suppress this vaguely public 911 document that a phone phreak got his hands on. Here's a link to the text: http://www.mit.edu/hacker/part2.html http://www.mit.edu/hacker/part2.html The author of the SJG book, Loyd Blankenship, was involved in the transmission and storage of the 911 documents that the Secret Service was all fired up about. He ran the Steve Jackson Illuminati BBS. My favorite part of the Hacker Crackdown book is when Sterling talks about how Steve Jackson couldn't convince the investigators that what he'd written was a game. They kept insisting it was real. EDIT: From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sundevil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sundevil "The raid on Steve Jackson Games, which led to the court case Steve Jackson Games, Inc. v. United States Secret Service, is often attributed to Operation Sundevil, but the Electronic Frontier Foundation states that it is unrelated and cites this attribution as a media error." Whoops! My bad.
- julie1 11y agoWhen 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.
- csydas 11y agoWhile this is a very uplifting interpretation of DnD (and one I really hope people would subscribe to), it's somewhat undermined by the number of players who get bent out of shape when you don't min-max your character into a perfect PvE machine. This of course isn't all players nor to say that this (honestly really) good interpretation isn't valid, it's just that it's not a constant when it comes to the games. Sometimes a game, despite best intentions, is taken in a less than positive way by a small few. Though...it would be nice if more players just lived with the results of the RNG.
- misuba 11y ago...or played with systems that got them more of what they want, instead of insisting they want a RNG despite always being unhappy with what it gives them.
- spc476 11y agoWhen I ran an old-school D&D (1st edition) game a few years ago, I incentivised the players (come in at 2nd level, full hit points and a simple magic item) to "roll straight" (that is, 3d6 for each stat, in order on the character sheet, and play the resulting character) and all but one did so. It made for a very fun game (one of the highlights---the paladin backstabs a (obviously evil) NPC and with the cleric's help, sets fire to a carnival; both are arrested while the thief and magic user help bail them out).
- 13thLetter 11y agoAll 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.
- clavalle 11y agoFurries? Bronies? What are you referring to?
- 13thLetter 11y agoDoes it matter? We as a society have no ability to recognize and arrest a moral panic while it's in progress. At best, the people who point out that it's a moral panic get lumped in with the targets of the moral panic and marginalized. In fifteen years when we've moved on to panicking about, I dunno, artificial intelligences or space colonization or whatever ("Sixteen Reasons Why Moving To The Moon Is Racist") we'll all look back on 2016 and smugly shake our heads at those ignorant, benighted simpletons and how they freaked out over the most minor things.
- StevePerkins 11y agoI'm not sure about your age or background... but having lived through "D&D or Heavy Metal Music == Satanism" moral panic myself, I'm not sure that such a phenomenon is even possible in an Internet-enabled world. If you were into any kind of nerd subculture, or really just any subculture to begin with, then it's really hard to describe the sense of social isolation that you would have felt prior to online communities (especially if you didn't live in a major city). The Internet has ushered in an era of social fragmentation, but before then there an immense pressure toward social cohesion and conformity. Today, no matter what you're into, there's a subreddit and 1,000 other websites dedicated to that. There is community, social connection. Conventions and other gatherings emerge from that. Back in the 80's, there was just... nothing. You were a freak, and completely socially isolated, just for being into non-pop musical genres... or having hobbies and interests other than those deemed mainstream (e.g. sports, hunting and fishing, etc). Yes, there are still moral crusaders today. There are still assholes in Kentucky that don't want to give marriage licenses to gay people, and so on. I don't mean to make light of that. But it's just... not... the... same... as it was a generation ago, when any deviation from the norm placed you in complete social isolation without even an online escape.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- TheGirondin 11y agoAre there any sociologists studying the current moral panic around gaming?
- nsxwolf 11y agoIs there one?
- brighteyes 11y agoProbably not, there wasn't much study of the D&D moral panic in the 80's at the time either. Academic interest comes much later, not in time to help. For example, Elizabeth Loftus [1] was pivotal in discrediting the "satanic abuse" panic of the 80's (which as other comments say was related to the D&D panic). But she did so a decade later. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Loftus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Loftus
- cuckcuckspruce 11y agoThe sociologists are the ones leading the current moral panic around gaming.
- CaptSpify 11y agoSource?
- chiph 11y agoI 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.
- autokad 11y agoi dont think so. its the same thing that has always gone on, someone in power wants to push an agenda so they segregate people by fear. it was more focused back then because there were less sources people could be told what to fear.
- geon 11y ago> to meet other children Single player dnd?
- protomyth 11y agoThere was a set of modules just for solo play from TSR. Sometimes people are not available and computers were not universal.
- nsxwolf 11y agoWe 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.
- syntheticnature 11y agoEven much later, there was residue from the panic. It's not like newspapers published articles going "Hey, this stuff is harmless." Crazy Egor's, for those of you that remember it, used to advertise on the local independent/proto-FOX station for where I grew up, because their store was local. I once called them up to talk to the station manager about running news stories about the evil of Magic cards... in the late 90s.
- syntheticnature 11y agoCalled them up to suggest they talk to the FOX station's manager, I mean.
- Animats 11y agoYet 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_Coffee_mod
- oldmanjay 11y agoLots of people are bothered over GTA. Jack Thompson, for instance, led a long campaign to have games censored, and GTA was a centerpiece. So, if you are insinuating that video game violence is a real-world problem, we've gone through that moral panic already. If you're insinuating something else, it isn't obvious and clarity would be nice.
- johngalt 11y agoA 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.
- bitwize 11y agoJack Chick instructs his followers in proper D&D material disposal: "Don't throw them away. Burn them!" I guess fire is the only way to get the demons out. Makes you wonder how they thrive in hell.
- eli_gottlieb 11y agoSomeone ought to find Jack Chick and get him to play as an Inquisitor in a game of Dark Heresy.
- addled 11y agoBetter to destroy than run the risk someone digs them out of the landfill and reads them. Kind of like hard drives.
- bitwize 11y agoActually I don't think there was any logic behind the directive. It's just a matter of, that's what the sorcerers in Acts 19 did to their magic scrolls when they heard word of the Lord Jesus Christ, so that's what you should do to your D&D materials.
- YeGoblynQueenne 11y agoThe demons are also supposed to suffer torment, in hell. They're not there for their amusement with the souls of the damned, but rather because they rebelled against big G. This bit of Christian mythology does make sense, I find. Actually, a fair few do, it's just that, well, angels and demons, right? Oh and now that I mentioned it, there's an RPG where you play devils or angels duking it out in the land of the living: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Nomine_%28role-playing_game%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Nomine_%28role-playing_game... ... and I even have a hard copy, that I picked up from Oxfam. Hmmm...
- mmmBacon 11y agoI 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.
- aidenn0 11y agoMy 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.
- SubiculumCode 11y agoJust wanted to point out the humblebundle for Pathfinder role playing game. Super cheap,get all the materials
- noarchy 11y agoGreat deal, indeed, but good luck downloading the PDFs right now. Paizo watermarks them with your info before you can download them, and their servers are overwhelmed.
- jff 11y ago"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.html http://www.gratisgames.webspace.virginmedia.com/darkdungeons...
- ddingus 11y agoI 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.
- TTPrograms 11y agoI 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.
- sago 11y ago> 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.
- YeGoblynQueenne 11y agoI'm sorry- I think it's hyperbole :/
- rasz_pl 11y agocheck out http://geekandsundry.com/shows/critical-role/ http://geekandsundry.com/shows/critical-role/ larping and d&d is the cool again
- sago 11y agoCritical Role is a fun show, I agree. My only niggle: "larping and d&d is the cool again" - again? Oh, it very much was not cool the first time around!
- emag 11y agoOh, 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...
- teh_klev 11y agoSomewhat tangentially related, BBC's Archive on 4 broadcast this last week: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b071h083 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle-earth_Role_Playing
- tomkat0789 11y agoThe 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/ 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.
- noonespecial 11y agoI 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.