Paul Cardwell, Jr., Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. 18, No. 2, Winter
1994, 157-165
(c) 1994 Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of
the Paranormal
The Attacks on Role-Playing Games
While diminishing in frequency, attacks on role-playing games are still
popular with the mass media.
Television productions, particularly made-for-TV movies, are a
popular source of paranormal claims. These are especially
troublesome when they claim to be documentaries, since the
producers and networks frequently retreat behind a defense of
"entertainment" when challenged. One of the long-time favorite
subjects has been role-playing games - almost exclusively Dungeons
& Dragons, which is trademark of TSR, Inc., but often misused as a
generic term.
These games are not only the favorite topics of TV movies. The
Associated Press and United Press International, between 1979 and
1992, carried 111 stories mentioning role-playing games. Almost all
named only Dungeons & Dragons, even though there are several
hundred such games on the market, and among their manufacturers are
more than a dozen companies beyond the desktop publishing level.
These articles contained 51,182 words in 2,197 paragraphs.
These paragraphs were divided into four categories: those favorable
to gaming, those unfavorable to gaming, those neutral (stating they
excisted, describing them accurately, but without value judgements,
etc.), and those paragraphs not mentioning them at all, even by
interference. Those in the last category were discarded. Based on
the remaining paragraphs, each of the story was tabulated as having
a majority of pro-game paragraphs, anti-game paragraphs, neutral
paragraphs, or with no category having a majority. Of the 111
stories, 80 were anti-game, 19 had no majority, 9 were neutral, and
only 3 were pro-game. Those three pro-game stories were all from
UPI, which is a considerably smaller wire service than AP.
Dungeons & Dragons was first marketed in 1972 as a supplement to
the miniatures wargame system Chainmail. The D&D rules as a
seperate system were published in 1974. The game grew rapidly from
a very small base, doubling sales each year primarily through
word-of-mouth advertising (Gygax 1989). This occured mostly on
college campuses, which became its natural environment. During the
late 1970s, several other role-playing games entered the market
too.
The first attacks on role-playing games (RPGs) came in August 1979,
during the disappearance of Dallas Egbert III from the Michigan
State University campus just before exams. The campus police could
not find him, and since all evidence indicated that he left the
campus voluntarily, their jurisdiction was limited. Egbert's uncle
then hired private detective William Dear, and the nature of RPG
changed forever.
Egbert was a troubled kid. In 1979, according to Dear's book, The
Dungeon Master, he was a sophomore in college at 16, with a 180 IQ,
socially retarded (Dear 1985: 20-21), an epileptic not quite under
medical control (pp. 88-89), a drug addict (p. 163), who claimed to
make his own drugs (pp. 17, 22), and under severe pressure from his
mother to make perfect grades, even though he had no difficulty
making good ones (pp. 20-21, 316). Also, since Egbert was a
homosexual (p. 316), the homophobia on campus in 1979 undoubtedly
was a contributing factor to the stress that caused him to vanish.
I am not comfortable relying on Dear for all this information, but
since the Egbert family will not help, I must assume that either
they are not interested in correcting the record or that Dear is
essentially correct in his statements.
Dear came to campus and from fragmentary tales, second- and
third-hand, or worse, he pieced together the story that has become
a clich‚: Egbert, generally discribed as a "computer genius" - an
exotic title at that time - was also involved in an even more
exotic activity. He was playing the "strange" game of Dungeons &
Dragons in the steam tunnels under the Michigan state campus (pp.
31-32), a statement denied by Dear's publisher in the
acknowledgements and on page 13. In this story, Dear confused three
seperate and unconnected things.
First, almost every college has steam tunnels and steam-tunnel
stories. Yet access to these tunnels virtually always invokes at
the least the crime of breaking and entering. MSU at that time was
something of an exception in that access to the tunnel system could
be gained through buildings under construction - still trespassing,
but a lesser crime (Flinn 1988). The tunnels are cramped, hot,
humid, and dirty. They are hardly an easy way to get from one
building to another, as many students believe. Indeed, even if one
had the proper keys to make the trip, one would look a mess upon
arrival. One can get scalded from valving steam, and getting lost
is a distinct possibility. It is the combination of the forbidden
territory and real danger that makes this a modern urban legend on
campus.
Second, RPGs are played sitting around a table and improvising
adventure tales (in a wide variety of genre, although classic
fantasy is the most popular) within the constraints of a set of
rules. It is played with pencil, paper, and an assortment of
various-sided dice, which serve as random-number generators. The
math field of probability is a major factor in playing these games.
Everything is described, and nothing is acted out. This is quite
contrary to the common impression generated by Dear and spread by
credulous mass media.
Finally, there is the Society of Creative Anachronism, which was
started in 1966 and recreates a fictional sort of medieval life of
fairy-tale legend. The members get some media attention for their
jousts, but their equally exotic costumes, lute-playing, juggling,
and such, which typify the popular concept of the late medieval and
early Renaissance, are largely ignored.
Dear, putting parts of all these folktales and campus rumors
together, came up with the hypothesis that Egbert was lost in the
steam tunnels, where he had gone to play D&D with his fake
broadsword. Never mind that a steam tunnel is too small a place to
swing a fake broadsword, D&D is played indoors, and that fake
broadswords belong to a wholly different context. This was Dear's
hypothesis and he promoted it at numerous press conferences.
There was another flaw in Dear's hypothesis. Neither Dear's crew
nor the campus police found any game material in Egbert's room,
even though he disappeared with only the clothes he was wearing.
Nor could they find anyone on campus who had ever played a game
with him (Dear 1985: 80). Egbert did subscribe to Dragon, the
official D&D magazine, and had at least once registered at a gaming
convention sponsored by TSR, GenCon (Kask 1979: 2, 11); although
there is no real evidence he actually played, it can be assumed he
played at least some. Certainly he was not deeply involved in the
game.
Egbert eventually "found" himself about a month later - in Morgan
City, Louisiana, claiming to be an oilfield roughneck (Dear 1985:
324). Since at 16 Egbert looked about 12, this does not ring true;
but then very little else about the Egbert case does either.
While the reputation of RPG never quite recovered from this media
circus, things went a bit quiter for about four years. TSR's sales
did not double that year - they quadrupled (Gygax 1989: 13). TSR
seemed to think that this proved that bad publicity was good
publicity, and it rarely defends its game. Other industry watchers
point out that at this time TSR entered into a distribution
agreement with Random House, and this just might have had some
positive effect on sales.
Then came the second event that would permanently imbue RPGs with
the same aura that haunts so many of the subjects examined in this
publication. Another 16-year-old super-genius, this one still with
his own age group, committed suicide. This was Irving (Bink)
Pulling II: He had actually played D&D as a part of the
gifted/talented program at school. However, he was as troubled as
Egbert. A nominal Jew, he was apparently a fan of Adolf Hitler
(Bauerlein 1988). He got up one night and killed 17 rabbits and a
neighborhood cat for no apparant reason. He was socially isolated,
once failing to get even a proforma "campaign manager" to sign on
for him when he wanted to run for school office (Isikoff 1983).
Yet his mother, Patricia Pulling, described him as "a happy,
well-adjusted kid" and blamed D&D when he committed suicide with
her pistol. She also claims receiving ESP knowledge of the event
upon reaching the gates of their house (Pulling 1989: 4).
The suicide mechanism, she claims, was a curse placed on Bink's
game character during a school game. She claims that this curse
compelled him to kill and that he heroically sacrificed himself
rather than carry out the curse. Classmates present at this time of
this supposed curse deny there was any such event (Picton 1985).
The attackers consistently confuse player and character and try to
make them the same thing.
Pat Pulling then embarked on a decade of lectures attacking the
game. She has only recently abandoned this tactic. She sued the
school for Bink's death, only to have her suit quashed (Pulling v.
Bracey, 1984). She teamed up with the National Coalition on
Television Violence (NCTV), essentially a one-person organization
headed by Illinois psychiatrist Thomas Radecki, and ultimately
became a director at NCTV. Pulling also created her own
organization, Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons (B.A.D.D.).
In January 1985, B.A.D.D. and NCTV jointly filed a petition with
the Federal Trade Commission demanding that warning labels be
required on the games. stating that they were hazardous and could
cause suicide. The FTC forwarded the petition to the Consumer
Products Safety Commission because the petition alleged an unsafe
product rather than fraudulent advertising. The CPSC finally
decided that there was not a close enough connection between the
product and the alleged danger to warrant such labeling.
The list of "victims" submitted with this petition became the basis
of ongoing compilation. The petition had nine cases, one of which
gave no name, date, place, or documenting citation. Another was an
accident, not a suicide as stated. Three were children of members
of Pulling's B.A.D.D. group for whom Pulling's simplistic
explanation may have been a means of their avoiding facing the
deaths of their children. This is not a universal reaction. Three
other cases were disputed by the parents of the victims, who
claimed that the games had nothing to do with the deaths (AP 1985;
Grice 1985).
NCTV and B.A.D.D. claim 120 such cases implicate role-playing
games; this figure remained unchanged from 1987 until Radecki upped
it to 128 in March 1993 (Gil Gross Show 1993). During that time of
stasis, they still added "cases" to the list. They provide names,
dates and/or places (rarely all three) in fewer than 25 of these.
Of those few, one has never been found in any documentary account,
and another was from an item in a newspaper from a town more than
250 miles from the alleged event, but no newspaper coverage could
be found in the city in which it supposedly happened. In the few
cases of citations, they are almost always relatively obscure,
small-town newspapers that, when they are finally located, turn out
to be based on statements from anti-game individuals. The alleged
dangers of playing these games have been treated by newspapers and
TV talk shows as fact, as so often happens with claims of flying
saucers, the Bermuda Triangle, livestock mutilations, satanic
sacrifices, and all kinds of other horror stories.
The collection of anti-game anecdotes has sometimes been called a
"modern urban legend", a term coined by the folklorist Jan Harold
Brunvand. Actually, it is a collective delusion. The modern urban
legend is a traveling tale, in which the same story is set in
various parts of the country and has "actually happened" to a
friend of a friend, with only the names of the people and places
changing. A collective delusion, on the other hand, is seen to be a
situation that is "everywhere" but "they" are keeping it a secret.
Thus the attacks on role-playing games are part of a phenomenon
that Brunvand calls "satanic panic".
The attacks have gone through several stages. In the early 1980s,
much was made of gamers', particularly younger ones, "casting
hexes" on teachers and parents. Aside from assuming the magic in
the games was not only real but translatable into real life, there
was another assumption: that the game was teaching this real magic.
Fortunately, I was actually able to observe one of these cases in
1984. A junior high school let those students arriving early go to
the lunchroom to escape the bad weather while waiting for school to
start. Four students played D&D while waiting and as a result were
verbally attacked and ultimately denounced before the school as
"Satanists" by one of the teachers.
Two of the students were active members of mainline Protestant
denominations, one was a rather nominal Roman Catholic, and the
fourth was a extremely devout member of a fundamentalist sect. He
moved shortly after the episode and attended a fundamentalist
parochial high school that had no difficulty accepting role-playing
games.
An additional problem for the school was that the parents of one of
the students were both law-enforcement professionals. They
conducted an investigation of the episode that totally verified the
students' story. The teacher made an insincere apology, and the
school principal promised it wouldn't happen again. However, the
game is still banned from the before-school free time, and the
teacher was given a merit raise at the end of that year.
The kids found it more amusing than traumatic. Mocking the
credulity of the teacher, they would make weird gestures when they
met him in the halls. This ridicule, I contend, is what was really
going on in the "hexing" stories.
With the FTC petition, the emphasis changed from magic to suicide.
After all, magic is rather hard to prove, while suicides are a
matter of public record.
There are more than 5,300 suicides a year in the United States in
the 15-to-24-year-old age group (National Safety Council 1988),
which in the mid-1980s provided most of the gamers. The average age
is climbing, and the average age of the serious players may well be
even higher. Therefore, to have no connection whatsoever, there
would have had to have been at least 1,060 gamer suicides per year.
Yet, in the whole time since 1979, there have been only 128 claimed
game-related suicides, murders, robberies, rapes, etc., combined,
and Radecki claims only one-quarter are suicides (Gil Gross Show
1993). The statistics are actually arguing that gaming prevents
suicides rather than causing them.
Of course it does neither. Role-playing gaming requires imaginative
solutions to complex problems. Therefore it attracts those who have
some degree of skill in doing just that. These people can generally
do the same in real life and thus avoid using "a permanent solution
to a temporary problem", which suicide usually is. Again, the
game-bashers have their cause and effect reversed.
In the late eighties, there was another change in emphasis. The
games now were said to cause murder. Again some post hoc ergo
propter hoc "case histories" were brought out, and again they were
disproved on examination.
The final change occurred around 1990. Building on the regular
appearance on tabloid TV shows of multiple-personality syndrome
cases in which persons claimed to have been the victims of ritual
satanic cult abuse, the anti-game campaign came almost full circle.
Critics now claimed that RPG was the same as Satan worship.
However, this time the anti-gamers went just a little too far into
the spooky area for many followers outside the groups that provide
the foundation for the anti-game movement itself. It is true that
they have had some success in "cult-awareness seminars", which are
closed to any dissenting viewpoints and are used to indoctrinate
teachers, social workers, and police. But this initial anti-gamer
success is slowly being countered by gamer backlash and the
beginning of skepticism in the general public. Even the mass media
have been neglecting such charges of late.
This skepticism is due to several factors. First is common logic.
With so much evil in the world, obvious just by turning on the TV
news programs, these games pale into insignificance. Some 7.5
million play these games at least once a month (Buettell 1990),
mostly in the U.S. and in Canada, with sizable numbers in Britain
and Australia, and smaller but quickly growing activity in
Scandinavia (including the Baltic republics), France, New Zealand,
and Brazil. While this is a small number in percentages, it means
that most of the people these attacks are aimed at convincing - the
upper-lower to upper-middle-class white, religious suburbanites -
personally know quite a few persons who play these games, and they
notice the charges are definitely not true for these friends and
acquaintances. Therefore, they tend to question the validity of the
same charges against people they don't know.
Second, in 1988, a couple of gamers who had been corresponding
after meeting at a game convention decided it was time to organize
a defense of gamers. This was the start of the Committee for the
Advancement of Role-Playing Games (CAR-PGa). What William Flatt and
Pierre Savoie started has slowly grown since, although more in
quality than in numbers. After several years of comparative
silence, the Game Manufacturers Association is again taking a stand
on the issue.
When CAR-PGa was first organized, it was assumed that at least some
of the stories must be true, and that the group would find what the
variable was, change that, and make the games completely safe.
After several years of searching the literature, it became obvious
that we were dealing with a colossally successful "big lie",
supported by the mass media's ignoring and opposing views. How the
anti-game groups gained such influence over the generally
anti-censorship mass media is yet to be discovered and any such
evidence would be greatly appreciated. To be sure, horror stories
sell papers and attract audiences, but controversy does so even
more. Nevertheless, all controversy was kept out of the media; only
the anti-game side was presented.
There was a final factor that undermined the anti-game forces.
During the first years of NCTV, Thomas Radecki claimed to be on the
faculty of the University of Illinois (Champaign-Urbana) medical
school. When I checked the school, I found that he had never been
on the faculty. Although at one time he had been given the honorary
"clinical faculty" status - given to doctors who are accredited to
practice at a teaching hospital and not involving any faculty
duties, except for the answering of occasional questions asked by
medical students - this was pulled in 1985 (O'Morchoe 1988), long
before he stopped claiming faculty status in promoting NCTV.
In March 1992, Radecki quit NCTV and turned it over to Beverly
Hills colleague, Carole Lieberman.
The faltering campaign against RPG was given a boost during the
1992 "May sweeps" for TV audience ratings. On the first day of
sweeps and again on May 17 and 19, two heavily hyped TV movies were
shown based on the murder of Leith von Stein, in Washington, North
Carolina, in 1988. While the first was a turkey, the second, Cruel
Doubt, was better acted, if just as hokey, and returned to network
broadcast in August 1993, right after extensive play of the
admittedly fictional Mazes and Monsters movie.
In the von Stein case, a boy arranged for two friends to kill his
parents. The stepfather was killed and the mother survived. A
$2-million inheritance was barely mentioned, as though it couldn't
possibly have been a motive. Both movies, and the books they were
based on, had a "smoking gun", a game scenario describing the
murder. The problem is that no such scenario was found after
exhaustive searches by CAR-PGa and the university-based computer
bulletin board, Usenet.
Yet, since these books were published, there have been two more
cases copying the von Stein modus operandi explicitly. In the
first, the British-Columbia Huenemann/ Leatherbarrow case, a boy
arranged for friends to kill his mother and grandmother, both
successfully, for a $3-million inheritance (Mullins 1992). In the
second, the Koslow case in Texas, the daughter arranged it for a
$12-million inheritance. The stepmother was killed, and the father
survived his injuries, but games were never mentioned (Crawford
1993). However, in neither of these cases, were the two "true
crime" books investigated as a blueprint - but in the von Stein
case a nonexistent game scenario was blamed.
It is still too early to tell what effect these programs will have
on public opinion. The original broadcast of Cruel Doubt was
opposite a show hyping flying-saucer abduction stories. One can
assume that these incredible beliefs will never die out, but will
live on in the minds of a credulous minority, be tolerated by an
apathetic majority, and to the rest of us sometimes be a source of
persecution and always be a source of irritation.
___________________________________________________________________
References
Associated Press. (1985). Son's deaths not tied to Dungeons &
Dragons: mother. September 18.
Bauerlein, Chuck. (1988). "Bink": A victim of the occult? Newport
News Daily Press, April 10, G1.
Buettell, Jack. (1990). Adventure games are on a roll. Toy Book,
September, pp. 1-12.
Crawford, Selwyn. (1993). 20-year-old found guilty in Koslow
beating death. Dallas Morning News, 1A, 24A.
Dear, William. (1985). The Dungeon Master. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin; New York: Ballantine.
Department of Professional Regulation. State of Illinois v. Thomas
E. Radecki, No. 91-6666-LEG, consent order.
Flinn, R. T. (1988). Personal communication, September 14. Flinn
was in charge of physical faculties at Michigan State University.
Gil Gross Show. (1993). CBS Radio, March 18.
Grice, Royce. (1985). Personal communication to TSR, September 20.
Gygax, Gary. (1989). A funny thing happened on the way to the
boardroom. Familiar, Fall, p. 13 (see also an interview on this
website).
Isikoff, Michael. (1983). Parents sue school principal: Game cited
in youth's suicide. Washington Post, August 13, 8A.
Kask, Timothy. (1979). Dragon, October, pp. 2, 41.
Mullins, Anne. (1992). Murderers remain a mystery: Shocked
community stymied by Dungeons and Dragons style murders. Vancouver
Sun, June 5, B1.
National Safety Council. (1988). Accident Facts. (part of a press
release by NCTV on that subject is reproduced here.)
O'Morchoe, Charles C. C. (1988). Personal correspondence, August 5.
Picton, John. (1985). Fantasy game linked to murder, suicide.
Toronto Star, March 3, A8.
Pulling, Pat. (1989). Devil's Web. Lafayette, La.: Hunting House.
Pulling v. Bracey. (1984). Hannover District Court, Va., September
17.
___________________________________________________________________
Paul Cardwell, Jr., is Chair of the Committee for the Advancement
of Role-Playing Games (CAR-PGa), an international network
researching all aspects of role-playing games. Its address is:
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