(Author's Note: I
normally shy away from controversial topics, but I am also trying to flex my
writing muscles. This article does touch on topics of religious and
philosophical nature. It is my purpose merely to inform and write about
something that interests me. I respect everyone's right to free speech and
admire those with personal religious convictions. It is not my intension to
offend anyone by the statements and opinions presented here.)
What is
Dungeons and Dragons?
In 1974, Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax published a new type of game.
Historical wargaming had been around for a long time. In these games, small
miniature soldiers acted out the strategies of battle on a tabletop. Arneson
and Gygax were enamored with these types of games, as were many hobbiests at
the time. But these two men were also enjoying the massive success of fantasy
literature that had followed the success of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings series.
They began toying with the idea of taking the epic fantasy battles of the
novels and acting them out on the table.
Gygax and Arneson created a system of rules that allowed them to fight
out fantasy battles using small miniatures. This would become the basic rule
system at the heart of their famous game. As they played out these battles,
they found themselves thinking about the broader stories they could tell. Who
were these individual soldiers, what was their story? The game was quickly
evolving from a simple combat centered game of annhilation of the enemies
tokens, to a more complex game of stories and adventure.
When Dungeons and Dragons was released in the 70s, it was a huge success.
It has since spawned numerous incarnations and an entire genre of games.
Roleplaying games, are games in which players take on the role of a character
and make the decisions of how that character progresses through an adventure.
This was a revolutionary idea. Games are generally about strict adherence to
rules and specific mechanics. Choices are often limited. But in roleplaying
games, the rules are merely there to facilitate the endless number of choices
available to players. Suddenly gamers had the freedom to do what they wanted in
a game. At its core, roleplaying games are about one thing. Story. Roleplaying
games are often described as cooperative storytelling. Like a group of friends
sitting around working together to tell an entertaining story.
Now you may be wondering why I am telling you all of this. Well it is
important to understand what Dungeons and Dragons is, and what it isn't. Much
of what I will be talking about comes from those who have no idea what this
game is. So at this point I can stress a few quick points. Dungeons and Dragons
is a roleplaying game. Roleplaying games (RPGs) are games of imagination and
storytelling. And these games can be literally anything you want.
If you are familiar with D&D and its ilk, please feel free to skip to
the next section.
A roleplaying game, D&D especially, is played with the use of a few
things. One person, known as the game master, runs the game. Their job is to
tell the story, narrate the action, and referee the rules of the game. While
players take on the role of individual characters, the game master plays the
role of the world in which the story takes place. The easiest way to explain it
is to relate it to something we all did as kids. Remember back to when you were
small and used to play pretend. Roleplaying games are like kids playing cops
and robbers. The players say what they are doing, they take part in the
evolving story as it unfolds. The exception is that roleplaying games have a
set of rules to govern the fairness of play. If one of the robbers is shot and
the cop yells, "I got you!" only to have the robber whine, "No
you didn't, you missed!", in an RPG, players have rules to determine what
actually happened.
So literally the game of Dungeons and Dragons can be anything you want. The
game master and his adventurers, choose what sort of setting they want their
game to take place in. Will it be the high fantasy of Tolkien, filled with
magic and dark lords? Or will it be the historical fantasy of King Arthur,
filled with sword clashing knights and political intrigue. It is the openness
to make RPGs whatever you want that is crucial to all of this. It is what makes
the games worth playing, but understanding this, also makes all that follows
appear as ridiculous as it actually is.
Satanic Panic
The late 70s and most of the 80s saw not only the rise of D&D's
success, but also the social phenomena of "Satanic Panic". Satanic
Panic was a form of moral panic that spread through North America during this
time and left many people fearing for both their moral and physical safety.
Moral Panics are a form of hysteria that spread among groups of people
within a specific society. Sociologists define it as "an intense feeling
expressed in a population about an issue that appears to threaten the social
order". These are essentially
controversies that involve social tension, and are often hard to refute or
disagree with from inside the community affected, because the matter may be
taboo and therefore cause more problems trying to argue against, than just
letting it stand.
Most famous of these social phenomena would be the witch hunts during the
sixteenth century or McCarthyism during the height of the Cold War. These
famous incidents can also help illustrate the main factor in the spread of
moral panic. The realistic fear of war, lead to a heightened state of unease in
the US during the 1950s. It is not enjoyable to live in a constant state of
fear. Especially when the thing we are so afraid of, is intangible or not
easily understood. We look for things to blame, something more present and
visible to rally against. In this example, it was the opposing ideology of
communism that became the focus. Soon conspiracy turned to scapegoating, and a
culture of fear was born. As word spread, and the media reported on the
subject, soon everyone was worrying about the person next door and their
political leanings. By simply reporting the facts, the media fanned the flames,
generating more anxiety and panic. This constant build up, of one thing adding
to the next, is what sociologists call a positive feedback loop. Made worse is
that often, moral panics are fed by groups who stand to gain from such unrest.
Whether it be gained attention to their issue, or merely monetary or political
gains, these can be like gasoline on the slower building fire of social panic.
In the 80s Satanic Panic was at its height. Worried citizens had federal
agents looking for supposed "thousands" of underground cults
operating secretly in the US. Sensational stories of ritual abuse and animal
sacrifices were becoming part of the common media discourse. There was no
evidence for any of these things. In fact, there is still nothing to back up
the outrageous claims of this time. No cults were ever found, no evidence of
occult crime or ritual sacrifices every emerged. But that didn't slow the
flames of panic.
Soon, those paranoid citizens, no longer looking for hidden communists,
were on a witch hunt to root out the evilness they believed was rampant in
their society. Coalitions and organizations were formed to find the devil in
games, movies and even music. Dungeons and Dragons would then become the poster
child for evil. A Satanic recruitment tool used to lure children into the
darkness.
A lot could be said about the social implications of moral panic, and the
reasons they emerge in the first place, but that really isn't my purpose here.
There are many amazing texts on the topics out there. Including this excerpt
from the great book on junk science, Why People Believe Weird Things, by Michael
Shermer. You can read the segment on Satanic Panic, here.
Egbert, Jaffe & Pulling
So by the 80s we have a culture of fear, concerned with the spread of
evil. Adults are suddenly "remembering" events of their childhood in
which they were abused by Satanists. Public speakers and religions leaders are
coming out, on their supposed encounters with dark cults. And most importantly,
the media is reporting on all of this, adding to the state of fear in the
nation.
A number of writers saw value in this opportunity. Books warning about
the horrors of the occult were flying off of bookshelves. And whether authors
were enticed by the money, or the chance to get their story heard, the stories
were propagating like mice. It is actually a few of these books that connects
D&D to the Satanic Panic. If not for these odd circumstances, the game
would probably have been left alone.
In 1979 a man named James Dallas Egbert III, went missing. The story was
that he had escaped his college campus, fled down to a series of steam tunnels
and committed suicide. As the story goes, he was an avid gamer, and it was his
involvement in D&D that lead to his tragic end. Well none of that is really
true. Egbert did play D&D, but it had little to do with the incident in
question. He entered college at the young age of 16, and cracked under pressure
of post secondary education. A perfect storm of mental illness, a disconnect
with his peers, many twice his age, and the common drug use of the time, lead
to a downward spiral. Egbert was also homosexual, and his fear of being outed
in a time and place that did not see much acceptance, caused him to become
depressed. He did head down into the steam tunnels with the intention to kill himself.
But he did not. Instead he skipped town and disappeared. William Dear, a
private investigator hired by Egbert's parents, managed to track him down to
where he was living in Louisiana, sometime later.
Dear wanted to write about the case. But Egbert's parents did not want
either his drug use or sexuality in the news, and so Dear was forced to search
for other angles in the story. With the current atmosphere, he took the
opportunity to ride on coat tails and ensure his book would sell. He played up
a ridiculous theory that Dungeons and Dragons was at fault for Egbert's
problems. A work of supposed true crime, created entirely out of thin air, the
media of course ate it up.
Hot on Dear's trail was romance author Rona Jaffe. Despite knowing nothing
about the game, she decided to pen a fictionalized account of the Egbert case,
sensationalizing the horror inherent in Dungeons and Dragons. In 1981, she
published Mazes and Monsters, about a boy who plays too much of a certain
roleplaying game in college and ends up losing his ability to distinguish the
fact from the fiction (much like its author).
Again, the book hit at just the right time, in the right climate of
fear, that it sold well, despite depicting roleplaying games as one of the most
boring and ridiculous things a person could spend their time doing. Inevitably,
the novel went on to become a TV movie, starring a very young Tom Hanks, who
somehow convinces himself that he is the character he plays in the game and
therefore things he can fly off the top of a skyscraper.
Dark Dungeons
The reason I started writing this article in the first place is that I
play roleplaying games (though not D&D specifically). Growing up in a
religious home, my first knowledge of this game's existence came through
similar claims that it was evil and lead to spiritual turmoil. I was taught to
fear it. That is until I actually had a chance to see what it was that I was
supposed to be fearing.
It is not an erroneous correlation that the rise of Satanic Panic in the
80s came about at the time of the rise of the religious right and the ultra
conservative movements in evangelical churches. Many groups have grown up out
of the warnings of fire and brimstone from the world's evils. The religious
climate of the US changed drastically in the 80s, so it no wonder than many of
these conservative movements were behind the fast spread of moral panic.
In the mid 70s, a Christian fundamentalist named Jack Chick began
publishing small comic strip booklets he called tracts. These series of comics
were in a sense Chick's attempt to spread the word of God among the secular
masses. But they did so by demonizing nearly ever topic that Chick, in his
fundamentalist view, found evil. They covered every topic from rock music to
the secret evils of Catholicism.
In 1984, Chick published his most famous tract, entitled Dark Dungeons.
Chick saw the game of D&D as a Satanist conspiracy. Feeding off of the
groundwork laid by Dear and Jaffe, as well as the tense climate built up by
Pulling, Chick connected roleplaying directly to the occult. This, for many
Christians, was all that was needed to prove that these games should be avoided
by all with any sort of moral compass, and that not only could they lead to tense
spiritual issues, but might insight someone to kill themselves.
Sadly it is the trail of paranoia and out-right lies, that lead to this
point. It allowed so many to whole heartedly believe something that wasn't
necessarily true.
(On a more humorous note, the ironic popularity of this comic strip among gamers, has lead to it being made into a new parody film: check out the oddball trailer here.)
Conclusion
So what does all this matter? Am I just hear to point out human errors
and spread the word about a game? No not really. Mostly my point was to shed
some light on a topic I find interesting. It is one I have seen in my own
personal life, but with some basic investigation and research, managed to
better understand.
I wrote out the long section at the beginning, explaining what a
roleplaying game was because I think knowing that is at the heart of this
controversy. Dungeons and Dragons, or any other roleplaying game, is a game of
imagination. It is the most customizable game in existence. If you do not like
one element of the game, don't use it. If you don't feel comfortable playing a
game set in a world of magic, take your characters to another world of your own
creation.
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| Foxtrot is the copyright of Universal Press Syndicate and Bill Amend |
I am not getting into the deeper philosophical or religious debates here,
the concepts of evil, etc. But I do feel the need to point out the inherent
flaw in demonizing something that you do not understand. To do that, I feel I
need to address some specific issues pointed at the game.
Is D&D evil? No. Some may take issue with its use of magic (it is a
fantasy setting after all). Or some may say that the game promotes knowledge of
evil. D&D does contain information about fictional monsters, including demons.
These are presented in the same light as any other creature from myth and
folklore. But again, the game is what you choose to make it. If you don't want
those monsters in your story, don't use them.
Does D&D teach you magic? No. No more than Monopoly teaches you high
finance. If players choose to use magic in their game, they are not losing
themselves in a character, forgetting where reality and fiction seperate. Nor
are they learning mystical incantations and dark lore from forgotten books
bound in human skin. In a game, when a character uses magic. He says what magic
spell he is using, as listed in the book, and follows the rules of what dice to
roll to see if his decision was a successful one.
Does D&D lead to suicide? This is the oddest idea to me. I have never
met anyone who is so attached to their character in a roleplaying game that
they would choose to die in real life if something happened to their character.
This would be like an author being distraught over a character he wrote about.
Most game masters are pretty lenient, they want the players to succeed and tell
a good story. Sometimes death factors into it, but often it does. Characters
can die though. It is their potential demise that leads to the excitement of
the game. But it is also a work of fiction. If a character dies a magical
artifact could bring her back. Or a new character can easily be made for the
next game. I think the fact that there has never been a documented case of this
actually happening is proof enough of this ridiculous claim. But if we look at
it more closely, perhaps the bigger issue is our lack of understanding of mental illness. This is a subject dear to
my heart. It pains me to see the state of our mental healthcare system. Before
we start blaming games or other things, maybe we need to take a deeper look at
the problem itself. Perhaps the bigger problem is a lack of care for the people
who need it, and a lack of building a culture of compassion rather than one of
blame.
Moral panic will never disappear. Many sociologists say that we have
built up a climate perfect for it right now. We live in a society of hatred and
finger pointing. Economic decline, political strife, and many other issues
leaves us vulnerable to becoming a culture of fear. The change in the media to
polarized sensationalism, as well as the ease in which information (true or
not) spreads via social media, makes us a prime target for this sort of thing.
We give in too easily to easy answers, not stopping to think about what this
information means, or where it came from. Truth has become so relative, that
junk science is rampant not only on our Facebook pages, but on Capital Hill.
Perhaps we need to do something about these issues. And one thing we can
do is calm down! We get so worked up over the world's controversies. Maybe that
is precisely what I am doing right now. Not getting worked up over things,
doesn't mean we stop caring. We just take a more rational approach to dealing with
the things that make us uncomfortable. We take a step back, look at things from
someone else's perspective, and move forward making calm rational decisions.
Maybe we just need to play more games. Garner friendships and build up a
sense of community. Games like Dungeons and Dragons open up an infinite number
of possibilities. It can build courage and character. It can teach the skills
of writing. Some say it can even give you greater opportunities to succeed inlife. And like life, it is entirely what you make it.
I don't expect to have changed anyone's mind on this topic, but I
certainly hope to have added to your knowledge. I am a firm believer in the
idea that eliminating ignorance, eliminates strife. After all, as GI Joe said,
"Knowing is half the battle".
If you want to know more about any of the topics
in this article, check out the links within the piece itself, as well as some
other great articles and resources listed below.The History of Dungeons and Dragons
More About D&D
Pulling's Anti-RPG Propoganda Booklet
Satanic Ritual Abuse and the Spread of Satanic Panic
The Exploitation of the Egbert Case
and a fantastic article on the entire topic including lots of links and a more in depth analysis of each element: A Short History of the Satanic Panic
2 comments:
Thank you. :)
I see that this was written "a few years ago", but I am still thankful for the information presented in a respectful way.
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