> In an era of potent concern over internet pornography, cyber-bullying, and drugs, it is hard to imagine a game being controversial.
Really? GTA? Every FPS ever? Video games in general?
This "moral panic" behavior is by no means limited to conservative/traditionally religious causes.
As an example that will likely challenge many here, try comparing environmental panics (historical and present) with religious ones. There is a very similar pattern of catastrophic predictions, frantic hyperbole, disregard of contradictory data (usually combined with demonizing those pointing it out), and the inevitable eventual shift to a new topic for panic.
Growing up through the D&D panic and experienced the first-person shooter makes you a killer or GTA makes you violent nonsense, nothing recent compares to the D&D panic.
There's a severe difference between people thinking a video game will make you anti-social, violent, or a killer and people being concerned over your immortal soul. Keep in mind, D&D was going to make you summon demons, have blood sacrifices to pagan gods, commit suicide, and then after all that evil you were going to burn in Hell forever.
As there is something to what you say in comparing environmental panics but most of the time that was often based on something real that was then overblown, taken out of context, or misunderstood. Acid rain and the ozone hole turned out to be not as bad as some were predicting, but they were real. Summoning demons is not.
That and the more recent nonsense over video games possibly causing anti-social behavior cannot even come close in comparison.
> try comparing environmental panics (historical and present) with religious ones.
Care to name some examples? Because the past ones I can think of (acid rain, ozone hole) do not fit the pattern AT ALL, they were well grounded in reality and abated because things were done that actually eliminated or mitigated the causes of the problem.
I never played Dungeons and Dragons as a kid (born in the early 80s, so a bit too young) but I played a lot of Games Workshop games (Warhammer etc) and I played D&D-based video games (Baldur's Gate etc) heavily.
I remember poring over rulebooks and probability tables for hours, and writing computer simulations (in Visual Basic or Excel) to try and find some edge in the game. I think my parents were pretty worried about me.
I now write stock market simulations and come up with trading strategies for a living, using essentially the same methods that I used in the mid 1990s to win at roleplaying games, so I guess it all worked out okay?
This is basically my story too. It's fun watching my mother wrestle with the notion that the amount of gaming I did as a kid directly led to a doctorate, a publication in Lancet Infectious Diseases and an interview on NPR.
Moral objections don't just come from biblical incompatibility. Back in high-school (not-US), I once had an uncomfortable questioning from our principal because a kid's parent complained after seeing us playing with unfamiliar dice. They equated the probability-driven game mechanics to gambling, or at least believed that it led to a slippery slope.
Then again I later majored in statistics, so maybe they had a point ^_^
In the past pre ww2 board games sometimes used to come with spinners or other means of random number generators due to dice's asociation with gambling.
I was teaching a friend how to create a character sheet in highschool (~10 years ago). Principal saw and asked if we were gambling. The principal (who also introduced me to the Hobbit) let us explain what it was, but still politely asked us to put the dice away. Apparently there was a gambling problem of some sort at the time at the school (I don't know details, just remember hearing rumors)
I remember this - we had to play D&D in secret because of several of our friend's parents.
It's interesting to have seen, first hand, part of our long unbroken chain of freaking out, from rock and roll to instagram; this giant perennial wave of overreaction that's done nothing but persecute innocents and make the world a less beautiful, exploratory, and lively place.
Is there an example of a popular fashion that's been of actual concern? The only example I can think of off-hand is the dancing plague of 1518, and even that was probably worth the casualities.
It's amazing to me that a mode of thinking that has been so consistently incorrect for so long seems to be dominant, whereas the "let kids do whatever it is they're into this week" is considered a fringe hippie thing.
The early rock and roll era was a pretty interesting time.
For the first time, kids had easy access to cars, and thus they could be away from their parents more often. The cultural construct we have today of teenagers being so independent from their parents didn't really exist in the generations prior.
Not only were these teens in their cars, away from parents, they were listening to the radio in the those cars. Outside of adult supervision. And so white kids could hear black music for the first time. So they were crossing racial lines, and eventually the lines became more and more blurred, which is how rock music grew.
And, of course, those kids were having sex in the back seats of those cars. Away from parent, and while listening to rock music. Which, in the pre-pill era, led to a lot of unplanned pregnancies.
So while early rock didn't really cause negative effects, it's not hard to see how worried parents could make the associations. The kids were indeed literally out of control.
D&D was great. I was absolutely obsessed with it as an early teenager in the mid 80's. I carried the rule books around all times and even had a club at the school lunch table. I remember the vice principal...a bearded guy who was probably like 28 coming over and congratulating us saying he played D&D also and he believed only smart people played the game.
I also remember the ridiculous religious hysteria and my parents becoming concerned after someone at church giving them a cassette of some guy warning of demonic possession from rock music and D&D. The were reasonable though eventually let it go after investigating the rule books and my father actually playing a game (he frankly thought it was dumb which in retrospect is understandable). It all seems so tame compared to what is around now.
D&D was my great love at that time. Well... that and my TSR 80:)
D&D (and the subsequent Arduin rules) were a HUGE part of my teenage years in the 80s. I had to sell all of my collection to buy tires for my car when I was about 19. Come to think of it, it was more or less my coming of age moment.
I've since purchased almost every book I had as a young kid on eBay, but it's incredibly hard to find anyone who still plays with these rules. Kind of a bummer actually.
I spent a great deal of time in my youth studying the demons and devils sections of the Monster Manual.
Only years later did I learn that the devils were all sourced from actual religions (tiamat, beelzebub, etc). It helped spur my interest in ancient civilizations.
These days, I get calls from friends- all successful, happily married with family and kids- to play D&D.
The people who complained about this back then had NO IDEA how powerful games and myths can be to developing children- in a very positive way.
This was really a crazy time, fresh off of a landslide Reagan victory and no doubt the moral hysteria boosted by it, I remember this situation really well.
My parents (mostly my mother) are very religious and I remember being driven around town with the local Christian radio station on and it being just wall-to-wall fear mongering about Satanism, backmasking in rock songs and D&D. Just endless talk, hour after hour, about how all this will lead your child to drugs, pornography, satanism and suicide -- numerous "concrete" examples were included as the local Christian "research team" swept the country (pre-internet! so most of it was probably just invented whole-cloth) for police reports and court records for Satanic rituals, Rock music and D&D. All reported with deep urgency and absolute truthful authority between gentle praise songs I heard in church every Sunday. Of course they'd never play a couple seconds of Led Zeppelin back and forth so you could hear the hidden messages revealed, lest you want to kill yourself during the next commercial break or continuous praise song power hour.
Terse descriptions of D&D were provided. "A game where players assume the roles of various characters, demons are involved, sometimes, like gambling, dice are used!" without any cultural context about how it's exactly like any other game where people assume different identities, like Cowboys & Indians, or super space spy or whatever.
It was a perfect storm of cultural events simultaneously pumped up by various social moralists who, like most groups like this, take tiny kernels of truth and wrap them in heaping piles of agendas, fabrications and outright lies and blanket every form of sensory input to drive the masses into full foaming at the mouth hysteria.
The publicity eventually leaked out into regular media and I remember seeing some of these "issues" (which had all been masterfully woven together into a single moral crisis by the religious media my mother listened to) break into the regular nightly news my father forced me to sit and watch every evening (to build culture and character).
My mother was absolutely obsessed with all this and was driven to hysteria. One time pulling the car over to the side of a busy highway and making me promise, promise, I'd never roll D&D dice and risk letting Satan into my heart - tears streaming down her face while she shook like a leaf -- because I might commit suicide when the game is over. She'd listen to hour after hour of pronouncements of how the country was going to sin...I'd watch her cleaning the kitchen while this played on the radio, her scrubbing getting more and more vigorous as her emotions became more and more upset.
Even at the tender age of...6 or 7, I knew the entire thing was a ridiculous pile of malarkey. I honestly had no clue what D&D was, had only heard rock music in passing (my music selection was pretty heavily regulated) and certainly wasn't involved in Satanism of any kind. I was more concerned with the severe mental instability this seemed to be drawing out in my mother...who seemed to be the only person I knew who couldn't separate fantasy from reality in this situation.
When the D&D cartoon started airing, curious, I'd sneak a few minutes of it in, titillated that something so dangerous was in cartoon form and on television before bed time. The show was pretty tame so I usually got bored and turned it off and did something else with my time. (He-Man was also banned in my house).
I vaguely remember the acronym BADD from those times and the name Patricia Pulling, and the claim that players would get so wrapped up in the fantasy of their characters, with reality and imagination so tangled up, that when your character died, there was some non-trivial chance you would go out and kill yourself, with probably a recently listened to Led Zeppelin tape in the boom box and with some kind of Satanic connection, or sacrificed chickens or something nearby.
And suddenly, one day, the Christian "news" sources my mother listened to moved on to something else and it was all over. Rock music was still around, Led Zeppelin was still for sale, D&D was still a game, but apparently the moral crusaders had stopped something and had moved on to something else. I think this was when all the major lawsuits had concluded with BADD losing all of them.
It was still on my banned list, but the hysteria was over. Like most kids I just ignored it and played a little D&D over at my friends' houses till I got bored of it and listened to rock music just the same. Years later, remembering the hysteria, a friend and I figured out how to reverse a cassette tape and we experimented listening for hidden messages in Rock Music cassettes to little success.
The early 1980s were a really weird moment in American history.
On the flip side, I grew up in a religious family. Conservative church three times a week, mom was a preacher's daughter and my dad later became a missionary.
Me and my brother played D&D frequently, had the books (the ones with devils on the covers), and it never bothered anyone. I don't think my parents were too worried a game was much danger to me.
Fortunately for me my parents were basically atheist/agnostic and so I never had to feel what you felt personally with your mother. Nevertheless, I was vaguely aware of this moral hysteria going on in the background, and had the same innate sense of ridiculousness of it all at age 6 or 7. Later when I was in high school I was introduced to Frank Zappa and read his 1985 statement to congress (http://downlode.org/Etext/zappa.html) and it gave me a deep sense of pride that there were still grownups standing up for true freedom in the way that it had always been preached to us in Civics and American History, and not the fear-based politicization of every non-issue that seemed to pass for national politics in those days. I suppose politics are no less ridiculous today, but I think with the crumbling of the Soviet Union there was a real vacuum for common fears and the political machine was a bit out of practice to raise a credibly amorphous spectre such as "terrorism".
> The early 1980s were a really weird moment in American history.
I don't see anything about what you've described (other than the specific subjects of D&D and rock music) that identifies the 80s. The reaction you describe is typical of all time periods; the same thing is happening all over all the time. For some period in the 90s-00s it was violent video games.
Until this moment, it never occurred to me that others were also scarred from this period (yay internet!). In our house my father was the one who bought into the hysteria, He Man was also banned, and the D&D cartoon was as well.
We've talked about it since, and he has no memory of telling us (me and my siblings) that listening to secular music would lead us to the devil. He wasn't religious before this episode, and hasn't been since. I've always held resentment toward him from this time, but to find he didn't even remember was a shock.
My question for you guys is: how did it effect you? How did you recover? For me the result was, at the time, going to school and spewing this nonsense to my friends and ostracizing myselft. I had socialization problems anyway an that just increased my perceived isolation. Took years to work thru all that.
It is a little crazy in hindsight. I mean - who did I play D&D with? The other nerds who also never got in trouble. We were by and large the teachers pets.
I remember meeting a cop at GenCon when this hype was happening, and he said, "The stats suggest that D&D players commit crimes at a miniscule level compared to the general population."
> My parents (mostly my mother) are very religious and I remember being driven around town with the local Christian radio station on and it being just wall-to-wall fear mongering about Satanism, backmasking in rock songs and D&D.
will be on these kinds of "generated worries"? Will the fear mongers simply fade away, or will they find some different way to incite fear in others for their own gain?
If the scientific community were ever as pervasively and objectively wrong on an issue as the Christian community was on the whole Satanic Panic thing, there would be a fundamental loss of credibility. And yet...
So how are your parents today? Have they come back down to earth? Do they recognise this hysteria and admit that it was all rather silly or are they still stuck in the cult-like droning of radio stations and the like?
Because that stuff can turn outright dangerous. What if she caught you watching that cartoon and decided you needed to be ritually cleansed by (for example) submerging into holy water until the demon's convulsing stopped? Just a thing I randomly thought up, but TBH I'm sure it happened.
I grew up in the same town as Bob Jones University. So they were really frothing at the mouth over the game (I picked it up just after AD&D came out). They were into picketing at the time, and protested outside a couple of bookstores that sold the game (they also protested Monty Python's Life of Brian, which I am proud of having crossed their picket line into 94 minutes of sin & depravity).
It was pretty counter-culture for the time. Some of my friends would have been called "goth" in later years, but this was before all that.
In college I drove down to Jacksonville for GenCon South, and got eliminated from the tournament pretty quickly (our party wandered the desert, got lost and died - we never even found the temple. Bah.) But it was amazing how many other people were into the game, way more than just the 4-5 people who played that I knew.
In France too there was lots of bad mouthing about role playing games in the mid to late 80s, when it was really popular (while it was nowhere as popular as in the US), and fearmongering in newspapers and media. A couple of years later, (early 90s, basically), video games were targeted, and they made it sound like people who were playing video games were retarded.
There was a documentary about Eric Chahi as he was finishing his work on Another World on Amiga (one of the milestones in Gaming!) in 1991-1992, and the reporters described him almost as being autistic. The media suddenly changed their stance on video games after Sony's success with the PS1 turned most young people into gamers and gained mass approval.
I grew up in middle class, suburban Kansas. But, did not experience any of this hysteria. I guess I'm lucky. I've been playing RPGs for 30 years.
Lots of people play today. I strongly encourage anyone even slightly interested to visit local game shops, look for meetup.com rpg meetup and try it out. If you happen to be in austin http://www.meetup.com/dnd-823/
I'm happy to answer any questions about that meetup (which I organize), finding / starting a game, or RPGs in general. Here or email [email protected]
I continue to play today as well, it's a REALLY great hobby for a software engineer in particular, since it involves heavy and somewhat complex rulesets, some minor math, and a great way to socialize with staring at a computer screen. It really makes it easier to connect and talk to others as there is a built and fun subject to talk about. Playing RPG's has improved my life quite a bit since I picked it up again.
The funny thing is that in the 90s, after the scare was mostly over, when adults would see me and my friends with rule books and pieces of paper full of numbers they'd always congratulate us for being 'studying hard'. ;)
Ah, we lost our cleric and fighter (they were brothers) to that, since their mom heard that it was "satanic." Most ironic thing is that they were the only 2 in the group that attended the same church as me.
Is it so bad that my cleric is lawful evil and gets his powers from Asmodeus? Does that make me a devil worshipper? Come on Mom, it's Asmodeus, not Satan.
Edit: Actually, I don't know if a cleric could get powers from a devil rather than a god. Dungeon Master's Guide check please? Ah, well. It's an RPG. We could do whatever we wanted as long as the DM approved.
From my memories, a devil would be interpreted as a demon so they might be able to give you limited abilities if they happened to be particularly powerful. But not the full abilities a god could provide.
I was more into Dragonlance so things might be a tad different for you.
Plus, as you say, whatever the DM decides if there's no specific rule defining the outcome.
Gary Gygax was a Christian. In February 1969, he wrote an article in IFW Monthly explicitly stating he was a Christian and making an argument why Christians shouldn't celebrate Christmas; he justified his argument with Biblical sources. See http://boingboing.net/2012/12/24/gary-gygax-explains-why-chr...
Original D&D included Christian symbolism: Clerics used holy water and a cross. Gygax's 1975's D&D Supplement I: GREYHAWK (page 34) states:
"All Vampires are affected by the cross, despite any former religious background, as it is sovereign against them."
Furthermore, the demons and devils in early D&D were presented as adversaries, not as role models.
I started playing D&D in the early 80s. I went to Catholic grammar school. We were taught by priests and nuns. We played D&D in the schoolyard. Nobody discouraged us from playing.
I was also bullied quite a bit in grammar school and high school, and I think I would have gone nuts if I didn't have D&D as an outlet. D&D also got me interested in reading books and studying probability. D&D helped improve my grades from Cs and Ds to straight As. I eventually got a B.S. in math with a 4.0 GPA.
As a grown up, I played in a group DM'd by a fundamentalist Christian, who didn't see any conflict between his religious beliefs and fantasy role playing games.
One of the various crimes that the media tried to tie to D&D was the murder of Lieth Von Stein. It became the subject of a few books and made-for-TV movies. Basically the guy's stepson and friends murdered him for insurance money/inheritance, and although they were really into D&D, the real vector (other than greed and malice) was LSD and coke.
One of the books about the case is called Cruel Doubt[1] and in 1997, I listened to the audio book in a road trip with my parents (I was like 14). It's a really well-done book (skip the made-for-TV movie starring Blythe Danner and a 16-year old Gwyneth Paltrow), but it focused a lot on the D&D controversy, because that was so much a part of the D&D narrative.
Anyway, I share all this because a) the book is really good (I got the Kindle version a few years ago and re-read it for the first time in 15 years) and b), my own mother still harbors negative feelings about D&D because of how the book explained the controversy and the supposed associations between the game and the murder.
She'd missed the whole brouhaha in the 1980s, because she had two daughters and the only one who could ever be interested in D&D (me) was born in the early 80s, and thus a toddler during most of the media maelstrom.
Yet the narrative of that book (which again, really isn't against D&D and doesn't make it out to be a catalyst for the murder, beyond sharing the real fact that yes, the murderers did lots of LSD and played D&D all day instead of going to work or school), was enough for my mom to give me a lecture at 17 when I happened to go hang out with my then-boyfriend and his college friends who happened to be playing a tabletop game.
Anyway. This comment adds nothing to the discussion, I just wanted to plug Cruel Doubt because it's a really good true crime book. And I associate it with helping corrupt my otherwise intelligent mother into believing a game was the product of the devil and evil. Don't worry, I set her straight.
When I got into Dungeons and Dragons, I remember my mother getting worried about something she heard on the news about kids going and playing D&D-inspired make believe in sewers, and lecturing me at length about how I should never ever that.
We lived really far out in the country at the time. Nothing but wells and septic systems for 20 miles in any direction.
While the idea of teenagers literally worshiping Satan was a moral panic, I suspect many Christians would find D&D incompatible with Christianity, given its emphasis on violence, personal power, and the occult.
Violence, personal power and the occult? You're going to find a lot more "violence" and "personal power" by switching on the TV or going to the library. Anyway, combat is often (depending on who you play with, but it has been my experience when I played tabletop) a very small part of a scenario.
As for "the occult" in D&D, come on. Throwing a die to check the damage of a fireball never turned anyone into Aleister Crowley.
And yet, those are frequently described in the bible; lots of violence in the old testament, some in the new, and again lots in the post-biblical eras; personal power, I'm pretty sure God is the pinnacle of that; the kings in the old testament another (they (re?) conquer Israel of all things), Jesus yet another (cult/religious leader). Occult, I don't know what falls under that, but plenty of talking to the dead / satan / higher beings there.
I consider myself a devout Christian, and I find nothing inherently un-Christian in D&D. If one wants to indulge fantasies of evil, well, sure, there's the Book of Vile Darkness. But the nice thing about D&D is that it's like Lisp---so free-form that it can be whatever you want it to be. It is much more archetypal to play a band of shiny heroes---which is a good thing to aspire to.
If any particular Christian finds something that would lead them to sin in D&D, then they should avoid it. But all things God has made are good in their proper place, and that includes imagination.
Nah, not really. I think the main drive against things like D&D comes from a fear against anything which makes people think outside of the ordained box. The more people think - be it about fantasy and monsters or DNA and atoms - the less control you have over where their thinking might lead them. Free thinkers are the bane of organised religion, so anything which encourages free thinking is discouraged by it.
For the amount of people that profess to Christianity, its amazing how many ignore the core tenets. I'm sure Bush was praising the Lord as he set the war machine in motion, or Bernanke saying a humble prayer as he pillaged the wealth of the middle class. Ah, the land of Christian principles. Thank God I'm not there.
[+] [-] kbutler|12 years ago|reply
Really? GTA? Every FPS ever? Video games in general?
This "moral panic" behavior is by no means limited to conservative/traditionally religious causes.
As an example that will likely challenge many here, try comparing environmental panics (historical and present) with religious ones. There is a very similar pattern of catastrophic predictions, frantic hyperbole, disregard of contradictory data (usually combined with demonizing those pointing it out), and the inevitable eventual shift to a new topic for panic.
[+] [-] talmand|12 years ago|reply
There's a severe difference between people thinking a video game will make you anti-social, violent, or a killer and people being concerned over your immortal soul. Keep in mind, D&D was going to make you summon demons, have blood sacrifices to pagan gods, commit suicide, and then after all that evil you were going to burn in Hell forever.
As there is something to what you say in comparing environmental panics but most of the time that was often based on something real that was then overblown, taken out of context, or misunderstood. Acid rain and the ozone hole turned out to be not as bad as some were predicting, but they were real. Summoning demons is not.
That and the more recent nonsense over video games possibly causing anti-social behavior cannot even come close in comparison.
[+] [-] brazzy|12 years ago|reply
Care to name some examples? Because the past ones I can think of (acid rain, ozone hole) do not fit the pattern AT ALL, they were well grounded in reality and abated because things were done that actually eliminated or mitigated the causes of the problem.
[+] [-] throwaway13qf85|12 years ago|reply
I remember poring over rulebooks and probability tables for hours, and writing computer simulations (in Visual Basic or Excel) to try and find some edge in the game. I think my parents were pretty worried about me.
I now write stock market simulations and come up with trading strategies for a living, using essentially the same methods that I used in the mid 1990s to win at roleplaying games, so I guess it all worked out okay?
[+] [-] willvarfar|12 years ago|reply
OMG, parents should have intervened!
[+] [-] Fomite|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gregd|12 years ago|reply
So playing all those chaotic evil characters really had an affect on you eh? :)
[+] [-] maldeh|12 years ago|reply
Then again I later majored in statistics, so maybe they had a point ^_^
[+] [-] aidenn0|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 6d0debc071|12 years ago|reply
The next step in that argument being "Well, no more maths for me then!" She half jests.
I've often wondered whether extremely basic statistical ability could be enhanced by having kids play those sorts of games. Dice and cards and so on.
[+] [-] walshemj|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tempestn|12 years ago|reply
Of course, I'm playing hold'em on my other monitor right now, so maybe he had a point too...
[+] [-] tekalon|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] badsock|12 years ago|reply
It's interesting to have seen, first hand, part of our long unbroken chain of freaking out, from rock and roll to instagram; this giant perennial wave of overreaction that's done nothing but persecute innocents and make the world a less beautiful, exploratory, and lively place.
Is there an example of a popular fashion that's been of actual concern? The only example I can think of off-hand is the dancing plague of 1518, and even that was probably worth the casualities.
It's amazing to me that a mode of thinking that has been so consistently incorrect for so long seems to be dominant, whereas the "let kids do whatever it is they're into this week" is considered a fringe hippie thing.
[+] [-] waterlesscloud|12 years ago|reply
For the first time, kids had easy access to cars, and thus they could be away from their parents more often. The cultural construct we have today of teenagers being so independent from their parents didn't really exist in the generations prior.
Not only were these teens in their cars, away from parents, they were listening to the radio in the those cars. Outside of adult supervision. And so white kids could hear black music for the first time. So they were crossing racial lines, and eventually the lines became more and more blurred, which is how rock music grew.
And, of course, those kids were having sex in the back seats of those cars. Away from parent, and while listening to rock music. Which, in the pre-pill era, led to a lot of unplanned pregnancies.
So while early rock didn't really cause negative effects, it's not hard to see how worried parents could make the associations. The kids were indeed literally out of control.
[+] [-] jqm|12 years ago|reply
D&D was great. I was absolutely obsessed with it as an early teenager in the mid 80's. I carried the rule books around all times and even had a club at the school lunch table. I remember the vice principal...a bearded guy who was probably like 28 coming over and congratulating us saying he played D&D also and he believed only smart people played the game.
I also remember the ridiculous religious hysteria and my parents becoming concerned after someone at church giving them a cassette of some guy warning of demonic possession from rock music and D&D. The were reasonable though eventually let it go after investigating the rule books and my father actually playing a game (he frankly thought it was dumb which in retrospect is understandable). It all seems so tame compared to what is around now.
D&D was my great love at that time. Well... that and my TSR 80:)
[+] [-] gregd|12 years ago|reply
D&D (and the subsequent Arduin rules) were a HUGE part of my teenage years in the 80s. I had to sell all of my collection to buy tires for my car when I was about 19. Come to think of it, it was more or less my coming of age moment.
I've since purchased almost every book I had as a young kid on eBay, but it's incredibly hard to find anyone who still plays with these rules. Kind of a bummer actually.
[+] [-] dekhn|12 years ago|reply
I spent a great deal of time in my youth studying the demons and devils sections of the Monster Manual.
Only years later did I learn that the devils were all sourced from actual religions (tiamat, beelzebub, etc). It helped spur my interest in ancient civilizations.
These days, I get calls from friends- all successful, happily married with family and kids- to play D&D.
The people who complained about this back then had NO IDEA how powerful games and myths can be to developing children- in a very positive way.
[+] [-] bane|12 years ago|reply
My parents (mostly my mother) are very religious and I remember being driven around town with the local Christian radio station on and it being just wall-to-wall fear mongering about Satanism, backmasking in rock songs and D&D. Just endless talk, hour after hour, about how all this will lead your child to drugs, pornography, satanism and suicide -- numerous "concrete" examples were included as the local Christian "research team" swept the country (pre-internet! so most of it was probably just invented whole-cloth) for police reports and court records for Satanic rituals, Rock music and D&D. All reported with deep urgency and absolute truthful authority between gentle praise songs I heard in church every Sunday. Of course they'd never play a couple seconds of Led Zeppelin back and forth so you could hear the hidden messages revealed, lest you want to kill yourself during the next commercial break or continuous praise song power hour.
Terse descriptions of D&D were provided. "A game where players assume the roles of various characters, demons are involved, sometimes, like gambling, dice are used!" without any cultural context about how it's exactly like any other game where people assume different identities, like Cowboys & Indians, or super space spy or whatever.
It was a perfect storm of cultural events simultaneously pumped up by various social moralists who, like most groups like this, take tiny kernels of truth and wrap them in heaping piles of agendas, fabrications and outright lies and blanket every form of sensory input to drive the masses into full foaming at the mouth hysteria.
The publicity eventually leaked out into regular media and I remember seeing some of these "issues" (which had all been masterfully woven together into a single moral crisis by the religious media my mother listened to) break into the regular nightly news my father forced me to sit and watch every evening (to build culture and character).
My mother was absolutely obsessed with all this and was driven to hysteria. One time pulling the car over to the side of a busy highway and making me promise, promise, I'd never roll D&D dice and risk letting Satan into my heart - tears streaming down her face while she shook like a leaf -- because I might commit suicide when the game is over. She'd listen to hour after hour of pronouncements of how the country was going to sin...I'd watch her cleaning the kitchen while this played on the radio, her scrubbing getting more and more vigorous as her emotions became more and more upset.
Even at the tender age of...6 or 7, I knew the entire thing was a ridiculous pile of malarkey. I honestly had no clue what D&D was, had only heard rock music in passing (my music selection was pretty heavily regulated) and certainly wasn't involved in Satanism of any kind. I was more concerned with the severe mental instability this seemed to be drawing out in my mother...who seemed to be the only person I knew who couldn't separate fantasy from reality in this situation.
When the D&D cartoon started airing, curious, I'd sneak a few minutes of it in, titillated that something so dangerous was in cartoon form and on television before bed time. The show was pretty tame so I usually got bored and turned it off and did something else with my time. (He-Man was also banned in my house).
I vaguely remember the acronym BADD from those times and the name Patricia Pulling, and the claim that players would get so wrapped up in the fantasy of their characters, with reality and imagination so tangled up, that when your character died, there was some non-trivial chance you would go out and kill yourself, with probably a recently listened to Led Zeppelin tape in the boom box and with some kind of Satanic connection, or sacrificed chickens or something nearby.
And suddenly, one day, the Christian "news" sources my mother listened to moved on to something else and it was all over. Rock music was still around, Led Zeppelin was still for sale, D&D was still a game, but apparently the moral crusaders had stopped something and had moved on to something else. I think this was when all the major lawsuits had concluded with BADD losing all of them.
It was still on my banned list, but the hysteria was over. Like most kids I just ignored it and played a little D&D over at my friends' houses till I got bored of it and listened to rock music just the same. Years later, remembering the hysteria, a friend and I figured out how to reverse a cassette tape and we experimented listening for hidden messages in Rock Music cassettes to little success.
The early 1980s were a really weird moment in American history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bothered_About_Dungeons_and_Dr...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backmasking
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8Rop4Zt-S0
[+] [-] waterlesscloud|12 years ago|reply
Me and my brother played D&D frequently, had the books (the ones with devils on the covers), and it never bothered anyone. I don't think my parents were too worried a game was much danger to me.
Common sense for the win, I guess.
[+] [-] dasil003|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thaumasiotes|12 years ago|reply
I don't see anything about what you've described (other than the specific subjects of D&D and rock music) that identifies the 80s. The reaction you describe is typical of all time periods; the same thing is happening all over all the time. For some period in the 90s-00s it was violent video games.
http://basicinstructions.net/basic-instructions/2014/2/4/how...
[+] [-] marktangotango|12 years ago|reply
We've talked about it since, and he has no memory of telling us (me and my siblings) that listening to secular music would lead us to the devil. He wasn't religious before this episode, and hasn't been since. I've always held resentment toward him from this time, but to find he didn't even remember was a shock.
My question for you guys is: how did it effect you? How did you recover? For me the result was, at the time, going to school and spewing this nonsense to my friends and ostracizing myselft. I had socialization problems anyway an that just increased my perceived isolation. Took years to work thru all that.
[+] [-] mathattack|12 years ago|reply
I remember meeting a cop at GenCon when this hype was happening, and he said, "The stats suggest that D&D players commit crimes at a miniscule level compared to the general population."
[+] [-] pwg|12 years ago|reply
I wonder what the end effect of this trend:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7535218 [Internet use is associated with non-religion]
will be on these kinds of "generated worries"? Will the fear mongers simply fade away, or will they find some different way to incite fear in others for their own gain?
[+] [-] MartinCron|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Cthulhu_|12 years ago|reply
Because that stuff can turn outright dangerous. What if she caught you watching that cartoon and decided you needed to be ritually cleansed by (for example) submerging into holy water until the demon's convulsing stopped? Just a thing I randomly thought up, but TBH I'm sure it happened.
[+] [-] agscala|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chiph|12 years ago|reply
It was pretty counter-culture for the time. Some of my friends would have been called "goth" in later years, but this was before all that.
In college I drove down to Jacksonville for GenCon South, and got eliminated from the tournament pretty quickly (our party wandered the desert, got lost and died - we never even found the temple. Bah.) But it was amazing how many other people were into the game, way more than just the 4-5 people who played that I knew.
[+] [-] ekianjo|12 years ago|reply
There was a documentary about Eric Chahi as he was finishing his work on Another World on Amiga (one of the milestones in Gaming!) in 1991-1992, and the reporters described him almost as being autistic. The media suddenly changed their stance on video games after Sony's success with the PS1 turned most young people into gamers and gained mass approval.
[+] [-] njharman|12 years ago|reply
Lots of people play today. I strongly encourage anyone even slightly interested to visit local game shops, look for meetup.com rpg meetup and try it out. If you happen to be in austin http://www.meetup.com/dnd-823/
I'm happy to answer any questions about that meetup (which I organize), finding / starting a game, or RPGs in general. Here or email [email protected]
[+] [-] jaegerpicker|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mercurial|12 years ago|reply
1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Thompson_(activist)
[+] [-] partomniscient|12 years ago|reply
1: http://www.chick.com/READING/TRACTS/0046/0046_01.ASP
[+] [-] tellarin|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aidenn0|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gexla|12 years ago|reply
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Throne_of_the_Gods
Is it so bad that my cleric is lawful evil and gets his powers from Asmodeus? Does that make me a devil worshipper? Come on Mom, it's Asmodeus, not Satan.
Edit: Actually, I don't know if a cleric could get powers from a devil rather than a god. Dungeon Master's Guide check please? Ah, well. It's an RPG. We could do whatever we wanted as long as the DM approved.
[+] [-] talmand|12 years ago|reply
I was more into Dragonlance so things might be a tad different for you.
Plus, as you say, whatever the DM decides if there's no specific rule defining the outcome.
[+] [-] ergoproxy|12 years ago|reply
Original D&D included Christian symbolism: Clerics used holy water and a cross. Gygax's 1975's D&D Supplement I: GREYHAWK (page 34) states:
"All Vampires are affected by the cross, despite any former religious background, as it is sovereign against them."
Furthermore, the demons and devils in early D&D were presented as adversaries, not as role models.
I started playing D&D in the early 80s. I went to Catholic grammar school. We were taught by priests and nuns. We played D&D in the schoolyard. Nobody discouraged us from playing.
I was also bullied quite a bit in grammar school and high school, and I think I would have gone nuts if I didn't have D&D as an outlet. D&D also got me interested in reading books and studying probability. D&D helped improve my grades from Cs and Ds to straight As. I eventually got a B.S. in math with a 4.0 GPA.
As a grown up, I played in a group DM'd by a fundamentalist Christian, who didn't see any conflict between his religious beliefs and fantasy role playing games.
[+] [-] filmgirlcw|12 years ago|reply
One of the books about the case is called Cruel Doubt[1] and in 1997, I listened to the audio book in a road trip with my parents (I was like 14). It's a really well-done book (skip the made-for-TV movie starring Blythe Danner and a 16-year old Gwyneth Paltrow), but it focused a lot on the D&D controversy, because that was so much a part of the D&D narrative.
Anyway, I share all this because a) the book is really good (I got the Kindle version a few years ago and re-read it for the first time in 15 years) and b), my own mother still harbors negative feelings about D&D because of how the book explained the controversy and the supposed associations between the game and the murder.
She'd missed the whole brouhaha in the 1980s, because she had two daughters and the only one who could ever be interested in D&D (me) was born in the early 80s, and thus a toddler during most of the media maelstrom.
Yet the narrative of that book (which again, really isn't against D&D and doesn't make it out to be a catalyst for the murder, beyond sharing the real fact that yes, the murderers did lots of LSD and played D&D all day instead of going to work or school), was enough for my mom to give me a lecture at 17 when I happened to go hang out with my then-boyfriend and his college friends who happened to be playing a tabletop game.
Anyway. This comment adds nothing to the discussion, I just wanted to plug Cruel Doubt because it's a really good true crime book. And I associate it with helping corrupt my otherwise intelligent mother into believing a game was the product of the devil and evil. Don't worry, I set her straight.
[1]:http://www.amazon.com/Cruel-Doubt-Joe-McGinniss-ebook/dp/B00...
[+] [-] bunderbunder|12 years ago|reply
We lived really far out in the country at the time. Nothing but wells and septic systems for 20 miles in any direction.
[+] [-] QuantumChaos|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mercurial|12 years ago|reply
As for "the occult" in D&D, come on. Throwing a die to check the damage of a fireball never turned anyone into Aleister Crowley.
[+] [-] Cthulhu_|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dropit_sphere|12 years ago|reply
If any particular Christian finds something that would lead them to sin in D&D, then they should avoid it. But all things God has made are good in their proper place, and that includes imagination.
[+] [-] Yetanfou|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] walshemj|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] talmir|12 years ago|reply
Nothing is as hard to control as an independent mind.
[+] [-] noonespecial|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway234254|12 years ago|reply