
The 1980s Media Panic Over Dungeons and Dragons - samclemens
http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-1980s-media-panic-over-dungeons-dragons
======
beat
A 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
That'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
This 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.

------
sehugg
The 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-s...](http://io9.gizmodo.com/5829171/when-geraldo-rivera-took-on-satanism-
and-a-very-confused-ozzy-osbourne)

~~~
oaktowner
I remember my parents showing us a video about "satanic" music. Black Sabbath,
Ozzy Osbourne, Rush, Styx, the Eagles...you name a late 70's band, they were
in there. Some of the bands actively courted that image, of course, but the
whole thing was pretty patently ridiculous.

Their lyrics, their iconography, their album illustrations were all trotted
out as 'proof' that the bands had sold their souls to the devil and were
trying to recruit us to the dark side.

~~~
oneeyedpigeon
Abba?

~~~
chipsy
As i start to read this, "Dancing Queen" comes on. Clearly they control the
airwaves.

------
shepardrtc
This 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
One 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
Like this one?
[http://www.chick.com/reading/tracts/0046/0046_01.ASP](http://www.chick.com/reading/tracts/0046/0046_01.ASP)

~~~
pmiller2
I'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...](http://www.gratisgames.webspace.virginmedia.com/darkdungeons.html)
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. :)

~~~
YeGoblynQueenne
Thanks for pointing this out. I had a look and the rulebook starts with an
adventure featuring... Black Leaf, the thief. I think that's a definite clue,
innit :)

~~~
pmiller2
Lol. I've never read that part. I skipped over it because I've played D&D and
already knew more or less what I was in for.

------
chiph
I 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.

~~~
geon
> to meet other children

Single player dnd?

~~~
protomyth
There was a set of modules just for solo play from TSR. Sometimes people are
not available and computers were not universal.

~~~
chiph
Computers weren't only not universal - they were downright _rare_. The Apple
][+ was the one to have at the time.

~~~
protomyth
The ][+ was a luxury computer. We had an Atari 400 with friends having
Commodore, TI, Radio Shack, and Sinclair.

------
johngalt
A 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
Jack 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.

~~~
addled
Better to destroy than run the risk someone digs them out of the landfill and
reads them. Kind of like hard drives.

~~~
bitwize
Actually 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.

------
13thLetter
All 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.

~~~
StevePerkins
I'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.

~~~
Zikes
That isolation was also a blanket of security. If you exhibit any attributes
that today's moral panic is against, you could find yourself facing down a
horde of harassers. They'll find all your friends and family on Facebook and
try to get them to turn against you. They'll look up your employer online and
tell them you're sexist or that you're sharing child pornography online. If
you're in university, they'll convince the school to expel or otherwise
ostracize you.

There are a lot of similarities between this generation of moral panic and the
past, but the differences are not at all an improvement.

~~~
StevePerkins
Ehh... I won't argue that the Internet hasn't opened up the door for new modes
of harassment. However, the "cyberbully", "stalker", or "brigade" phenomenons
are a totally different animal from a moral panic. Maybe they're even worse,
but they're not the same.

~~~
brighteyes
Brigades and harassment can be expressions of a moral panic.

In the 80's, moral panics led people to write leaflets, call their senator,
and push their local TV station to cover it. Today, technology lets the people
caught up in a moral panic directly interact with the people they see as the
cause of their panic. It's not surprising that we see brigades and harassment
on those new front lines.

Of course, that doesn't tell us that every antagonistic movement is a moral
panic. But certainly the moral panics, if large enough, will have unpleasant
aspects. That's just the cost of allowing easy direct interaction between
anyone at any time.

------
julie1
When 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
While 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.

~~~
spc476
When 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).

------
mmmBacon
I 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.

------
nsxwolf
We 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
Even 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
Called them up to suggest they talk to the FOX station's manager, I mean.

------
jff
"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...](http://www.gratisgames.webspace.virginmedia.com/darkdungeons.html)

------
aidenn0
My 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_.

------
emag
Oh, 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...

------
TheGirondin
Are there any sociologists studying the current moral panic around gaming?

~~~
cuckcuckspruce
The sociologists are the ones leading the current moral panic around gaming.

~~~
CaptSpify
Source?

------
sago
> 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.

~~~
rasz_pl
check out [http://geekandsundry.com/shows/critical-
role/](http://geekandsundry.com/shows/critical-role/)

larping and d&d is the cool again

~~~
sago
Critical 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!

------
chipsy
I 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.

------
SubiculumCode
Just wanted to point out the humblebundle for Pathfinder role playing game.
Super cheap,get all the materials

~~~
noarchy
Great 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.

------
teh_klev
Somewhat 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)

------
TTPrograms
I 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.

------
tomkat0789
The 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.

------
ca98am79
There 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)

~~~
rosser
Yeah, I enjoyed the hell out of _Mazes & Monsters_ — ironically, of course —
but there is no conceivable way I can get behind calling it "good".

~~~
ja27
The religious thing didn't make a dent in my parents but when this crappy
movie came on TV it was nearly the end of D&D for us.

------
noonespecial
I 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.

------
ddingus
I 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.

~~~
mratzloff
There are plenty of classic text adventure games that blur the line with RPG.
Beyond Zork, for instance.

~~~
ddingus
Yes. A genre I really love. Once in a while, I will take a chunk of time and
play one. Always fun.

I still think we can do more with text adventures. With all the spiffy audio
we've got now? Maybe play it in surround! Could be really great!

------
Animats
Yet 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
Lots 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.

------
exstudent2
Old 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
The 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_.

~~~
rustynails
It's funny you should say that.

When I was young, I played dungeons and dragons (the board game). I remember
how this campaign ostracised people who wanted to play. In particular, girls
were very vicious with the insults about being a freak (to all of us that
played).

I would compare the stigma to those that liked computers.

I can't think of a single girl who liked either d&d or computers in the 70s or
80s (my wife tells me she started in computing in the 80s though and I don't
doubt her). Strangely, supposedly, revisionist reality is the opposite - girls
were driven away by mean men (it's revisionist history, but misogyny is the
buzzword of the new century and truth be damned).

I'm glad misogyny was mentioned because my life experience was the exact
opposite. However, I enjoyed these pursuits and no amount of bullying stopped
me. The attitudes have changed so much today and not for the better.

~~~
tptacek
Men in technology who self-identify as nerds and write about their experiences
being tormented by girls in their childhoods don't do much do allay concerns
that their industry is pervasively biased in favor of men and against women.

I was as nerdy a kid growing up as I am in adulthood, and I while I had
virtually no problems with girls, I had a whole fuckload of problems with
cliquish and bullying boys. That, I'm afraid, didn't do much to make me more
tolerant of men bullying and excluding women today.

Take from your bad childhood experiences the lesson that _deliberate and
calculated exclusion is bad_ , not the idea that anyone has somehow earned a
right to justify excluding others.

~~~
Grishnakh
>I was as nerdy a kid growing up as I am in adulthood, and I while I had
virtually no problems with girls, I had a whole fuckload of problems with
cliquish and bullying boys.

I'm going to jump in here and second this. I also had a fuckload of problems
with cliquish and bullying boys, and none with girls. It would have been nice
if girls had been more interested in me, but I finally figured out much later
that much of that was because I never took any initiative and approached them
or socialized with them; once I figured that out, and how to be more outgoing
with them, things changed rapidly. Boys were always the source of real misery
in middle/high school.

I've heard (in more recent years) of girls being vicious little back-stabbing
bitches to each other, and there's movies that reinforce that stereotype, but
as a boy that got picked on, I never saw that myself or had any problems with
girls that weren't my own fault.

