I have been a Dungeon Master for many years, hanging out in people’s homes (sometimes their basements) until the wee hours of the morning, building tension and assisting small groups in working together to attain a rewarding ending.  Despite what you may be thinking, my dungeon mastering never involved whips and chains (which were a waste of a Weapons Proficiency slot), although studded leather was a popular clothing choice among my group.  I’m not talking about BDSM, of course; I’m talking about D&D.

The attacks on the video game industry seem very similar to allegations that were leveled against role-playing games in the ‘80s.  In fact, I would argue that blasting video games is a continuation of the efforts against role-playing.  If I were to defend gaming to my readers, I would be preaching to the choir.  Instead, I have decided to outline a brief history of the early attacks on gaming.

The hysteria started in 1979, when a detective investigating the disappearance of James Dallas Egbert III (a boy genius with a penchant for computers—how could he not be with a name like that?), theorized that Egbert might have gotten lost or hurt pretending to be a 20th-level paladin in the tunnels under the University of Michigan.  Instead, he found out that Egbert had been a very troubled kid, and he was having a hard time dealing with being a 16-year-old super-genius college student (and Neal Patrick Harris made it look so easy in Doogie Houser, MD).   Egbert tried to kill himself several times, and in 1980 he succeeded.  Needless to say, the media figured that the mysterious, magical role-playing game made a good patsy.  In 1984, the detective wrote a book called The Dungeon Master, wherein he revealed that a lot of Egbert’s demons were psychological, not 2d4 Tanar’ri from the 663rd layer of the Abyss.  The media, seeing the logical and non-headlining sense this made, completely ignored it.

In 1982, Irving Pulling II, another 16-year-old genius and occasional role-player, shot himself in the chest with his mother’s gun.  There were warning signs of a growing mental instability.  Prior to the incident, he made a habit of killing rabbits in his back yard and once disemboweled the neighbor’s cat (apparently trying to squeeze in a few extra experience points).  His mother made the natural conclusion that the Dungeon Master of his gaming group used occult powers to curse poor Irving with homicidal mania and that Irving killed himself heroically in order to save the family.  Apparently Irving’s genius came from his father’s side of the family.  She then went on to form BADD (Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons) and spent her remaining years trying to prove that D&D was a gateway to the occult, homosexuality, and other demons of Christian mythology.

It is ironic that Dungeons & Dragons is a game of the imagination, because the religious fundamentalists started imagining their asses off after these events.  Soon D&D was being tied to pretty much any teen murder or suicide where the kid read Tolkien.  The use of fantasy magic in the game (not to be confused with the use of fantasy magic in The Chronicles of Narnia) was obviously an instruction manual for calling upon El Diablo.  Luckily we have the Harry Potter books for that today.  Sometimes Dungeons & Dragons got tied to the occult in very unique ways.  A childhood friend of mine was not allowed to play the game because his parents believed that the 10-sided dice were used in divination by cultists.  Amazing.

Of course other role-playing games were drawn into the line of fire as their popularity grew.  Vampire: the Masquerade made its debut on the “occult mind-control devices for children” list when it was mentioned as an inspiration in a gruesome murder in the ‘90s.  It is probably only a small consolation that the fundies never found out about the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game, or else they would have shit themselves in Lovercraftian horror (SAN loss 1d10/1d100).

As gamers, what can we learn from this?  Attacks against popular entertainment are nothing new—nor are the arguments themselves (in the 1600s there were those who thought the theater was a gateway to homosexuality and demonic possession).  Logic and common sense are not going to win the day, but time will.  As gaming becomes more mainstream (and the masses somehow restrain themselves from going on murderous rampages), the buffoonery of its critics will be brought to light.  Eventually, they will move on to another, newer medium and the arguments will replay themselves again.  Come to think of it, I heard that if you play the Blu-Ray version of The Craft backwards, it summons the devil* in the form of Fairuza Balk to do your bidding. 

Now that’s some magic I could really get behind.

*EDITOR’S NOTE: This totally works.