When Dungeons & Dragons Set Off a Moral Panic
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As someone who spent a considerable portion of the early 1980s surrounded by Dungeons & Dragons and role-playing games in general, I keenly remember the ridiculous media coverage that blamed D&D for all things nefarious during this time period, and demonized it for promoting devil worship, witchcraft, and other anti-Christian activities. If you're not quite as familiar with these years or want to recall just how nonsensical this whole thing was, there's an informative editorial on The New York Times that also features a 13-minute video that covers some of the news stories that sparked such controversy:
The 1980s were prime years for accusations that the game fostered demon worship and a belief in witchcraft and magic. Some religious figures cast it as corrupting enough to steer impressionable young players toward suicide and murder. As Retro Report recalls, fears began to be stirred in 1979 with the disappearance of James Dallas Egbert III, a gifted 16-year-old student at Michigan State University and a devoted D&D player. The game warped his thinking and drove him to behave erratically or so some insisted. In reality, the boy was already troubled. After a month's absence, he was found. But in 1980 he ended up taking his own life.
A nationwide focus on his plight propelled interest in D&D. Sales soared, with the numbers of players leaping from the thousands into the millions. Condemnation rose as well, usually after bad things happened to D&D gamers. When Irving Lee Pulling II, a high school student in Virginia, killed himself in 1982, his mother, Patricia A. Pulling, blamed the game and formed a group called Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons. D&D was also attacked after a few murders, like the 1984 strangulation of a Missouri teenager, Mary C. Towey, by two young men, Ronald G. Adcox and Darren Lee Molitor.
A (moral panic,) as cultural critics labeled it, set in. It was not unlike 1950s fears over gory comic books and 1980s worries over sex-laced rock music. But researchers, including those with the Centers for Disease Control, established no causal link between the game and violence. Much of the finger-pointing seemed rooted in a classic fallacy in logic: Mr. Adcox and Mr. Molitor played D&D. Mr. Adcox and Mr. Molitor became killers. People who play D&D become killers.
Agitation over the game has subsided. So has general interest. D&D is classically low-tech, played with pens, paper, dice and figurines. Its influence, however, abides, notably among creative types who acknowledge that they qualified as full-blown nerds in their teens.
You might recall that I had the opportunity to chat with Gary Gygax before his death, and had even asked him a quick question about some of this negative publicity:
GB: Dungeons & Dragons has received some bad publicity in the past, including some reports linking the game to violence and even suicide. Looking back, how did such events make you feel and what do you have to say to those who might still think a game like Dungeons & Dragons is "evil" in some way?
Gary: All absolutely unfounded. So to answer (What do I want to say to those who think the game is evil), I would say that they are quite unable to distinguish the difference between fantasy and reality. It is a game, it is make-believe, nothing in it is real. There are no swords, there is no death, there are no demons. No gold, no treasure, no magic. It is all imagination and make-believe. It is very much like the Walt Disney picture Fantasia, the scenes from the sequences of (Night on Bald Mountain) or (The Sorcerer's Apprentice) illustrating the game.
Such charges are just of pack of lies, there is not a shred of evidence for any one of those claims. So those people who are saying these things are wrong for whatever reason it's all just lies.
Interestingly, the video in the NYT article showcases just how much more successful the game was after all this publicity, negative or not. I guess the people who sought its downfall only ended up popularizing it even more, and we should probably thank them for exposing it to so many of the creative minds that have shaped the video game industry we're enamored with today.
