Throughout the history of Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), there have been many cycles–both game wise and society wise alike. These cycles made the game what it is today, and one of those cycles made D&D Christianity’s enemy just for simply existing.
Now if you know anything about D&D, you know that you fight, not worship, demons. According to Joseph Laycock, author of the book “Dangerous Games”, which tracks the moral panic around D&D, “People would argue the game was responsible for suicides, murder, cannibalism, and torture.” (CBC) Now why was this what everyone assumed? Let’s first look at what someone who grew up at the time had to say.
Laycock said, “They would actually create documents that they would mail to police departments for use in interrogating teenagers who played this game because the assumption was they were participating in crimes.” (CBC)
In fact, looking more toward the start of how D&D formed with its founders, it couldn’t be further from the truth. Laycock said, “One thing a lot of people don’t know is that Dungeons & Dragons was created by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson [who were] both very devout Christians. At least for some of his life, Gary Gygax was a Jehovah’s Witness.” (CBC) These founders wanted to make a game about good vs. evil, not the other way around, but people simply were told that it had demons and were looking for stuff to blame.
There were also tragedies that were pulled into the panic to stir fear-mongering into the church. BBC states, “In 1982, high school student Irving Lee Pulling died after shooting himself in the chest. Despite an article in the Washington Post at the time commenting how [Pulling] had trouble ‘fitting in,’ and mother Patricia Pulling believed her son’s suicide was caused by him playing D&D.” Now the question is: why? Why did all of this happen?
Well, it’s actually pretty simple. The Christian church in the ’80s was filled with a lot of people scared for the future; the world was changing fast. If you told someone–just 100 years prior–that we would have light bulbs in every house around the world, you would get called a lunatic. And the church couldn’t keep up with the rapid change. With things like cult leaders, serial killers, and child abuse being televised across the nation, people realized there were more threats in the world than they originally thought, and felt like it could happen to their kids and acted how they felt was best. To put it simply, people just thought the world was scary and wanted a scapegoat and something to blame for the struggles of the world.
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