> In an era of potent concern over internet pornography, cyber-bullying, and drugs, it is hard to imagine a game being controversial.
Really? GTA? Every FPS ever? Video games in general?
This "moral panic" behavior is by no means limited to conservative/traditionally religious causes.
As an example that will likely challenge many here, try comparing environmental panics (historical and present) with religious ones. There is a very similar pattern of catastrophic predictions, frantic hyperbole, disregard of contradictory data (usually combined with demonizing those pointing it out), and the inevitable eventual shift to a new topic for panic.
Growing up through the D&D panic and experienced the first-person shooter makes you a killer or GTA makes you violent nonsense, nothing recent compares to the D&D panic.
There's a severe difference between people thinking a video game will make you anti-social, violent, or a killer and people being concerned over your immortal soul. Keep in mind, D&D was going to make you summon demons, have blood sacrifices to pagan gods, commit suicide, and then after all that evil you were going to burn in Hell forever.
As there is something to what you say in comparing environmental panics but most of the time that was often based on something real that was then overblown, taken out of context, or misunderstood. Acid rain and the ozone hole turned out to be not as bad as some were predicting, but they were real. Summoning demons is not.
That and the more recent nonsense over video games possibly causing anti-social behavior cannot even come close in comparison.
> try comparing environmental panics (historical and present) with religious ones.
Care to name some examples? Because the past ones I can think of (acid rain, ozone hole) do not fit the pattern AT ALL, they were well grounded in reality and abated because things were done that actually eliminated or mitigated the causes of the problem.
The easiest, most clearly falsified example is probably Paul Ehrlich's alarmist population bomb. Already too late to avoid hundreds of millions of people dying from starvation in the 70s. Didn't happen. Food production increased. Later editions said 70s and 80s. Didn't happen, food production increased. Instead of backing off the catastrophic rhetoric, he increased it, and was ignored by the community. Oh, wait, no, he got a MacArthur genius grant...
Peak oil (oh, we just mean "conventional oil"). Many resource exhaustion forecasts (it will happen, just wait). Mass species extinctions (it's happening! Dozens per day! Which species?)
Each of these is based on an element of truth, extrapolated without allowing any mitigating factors, and published with forecasts of imminent doom.
I never played Dungeons and Dragons as a kid (born in the early 80s, so a bit too young) but I played a lot of Games Workshop games (Warhammer etc) and I played D&D-based video games (Baldur's Gate etc) heavily.
I remember poring over rulebooks and probability tables for hours, and writing computer simulations (in Visual Basic or Excel) to try and find some edge in the game. I think my parents were pretty worried about me.
I now write stock market simulations and come up with trading strategies for a living, using essentially the same methods that I used in the mid 1990s to win at roleplaying games, so I guess it all worked out okay?
This is basically my story too. It's fun watching my mother wrestle with the notion that the amount of gaming I did as a kid directly led to a doctorate, a publication in Lancet Infectious Diseases and an interview on NPR.
Moral objections don't just come from biblical incompatibility. Back in high-school (not-US), I once had an uncomfortable questioning from our principal because a kid's parent complained after seeing us playing with unfamiliar dice. They equated the probability-driven game mechanics to gambling, or at least believed that it led to a slippery slope.
Then again I later majored in statistics, so maybe they had a point ^_^
Which is basically a standard deck of cards but with four colors for four suits, and numbered from 1-14. Just getting rid of the standard symbols is enough for people to pretend that they can't gamble with them. Popular with Mormons.
I don't know about 'popular with Mormons'. That or my friends and I are exceptions. I remember fondly having D&D/MTG/card games/board games nights. I personally love card games and usually have a deck with me. Especial during youth/single group game nights with the whole congregation. I can see this for those that are hyper conservative, but this can work for any religion.
In the past pre ww2 board games sometimes used to come with spinners or other means of random number generators due to dice's asociation with gambling.
Nope, I once got in trouble for playing a game of Spades in school during a non-class period. Today I don't gamble with card playing so I cancel you out and invalidate his point.
Wait, unless his point was that you like card games, gambling or otherwise. If so, you're on your own.
I was teaching a friend how to create a character sheet in highschool (~10 years ago). Principal saw and asked if we were gambling. The principal (who also introduced me to the Hobbit) let us explain what it was, but still politely asked us to put the dice away. Apparently there was a gambling problem of some sort at the time at the school (I don't know details, just remember hearing rumors)
I remember this - we had to play D&D in secret because of several of our friend's parents.
It's interesting to have seen, first hand, part of our long unbroken chain of freaking out, from rock and roll to instagram; this giant perennial wave of overreaction that's done nothing but persecute innocents and make the world a less beautiful, exploratory, and lively place.
Is there an example of a popular fashion that's been of actual concern? The only example I can think of off-hand is the dancing plague of 1518, and even that was probably worth the casualities.
It's amazing to me that a mode of thinking that has been so consistently incorrect for so long seems to be dominant, whereas the "let kids do whatever it is they're into this week" is considered a fringe hippie thing.
The early rock and roll era was a pretty interesting time.
For the first time, kids had easy access to cars, and thus they could be away from their parents more often. The cultural construct we have today of teenagers being so independent from their parents didn't really exist in the generations prior.
Not only were these teens in their cars, away from parents, they were listening to the radio in the those cars. Outside of adult supervision. And so white kids could hear black music for the first time. So they were crossing racial lines, and eventually the lines became more and more blurred, which is how rock music grew.
And, of course, those kids were having sex in the back seats of those cars. Away from parent, and while listening to rock music. Which, in the pre-pill era, led to a lot of unplanned pregnancies.
So while early rock didn't really cause negative effects, it's not hard to see how worried parents could make the associations. The kids were indeed literally out of control.
> For the first time, kids had easy access to cars, and thus they could be away from their parents more often. The cultural construct we have today of teenagers being so independent from their parents didn't really exist in the generations prior.
You have a very distorted and limited view of history (but then, mine is surely as distorted, just differently!)
My parents were just sharing stories of how, at age 10, a friend would take the sheep, a horse, and a dog, and literally be alone for the full day, before returning at night.
I'd characterize the difference more as "large numbers of youth with no responsibilities", rather than "away from their parents more often". Industrialized societies with child labor laws tend to keep children more separate from adult responsibilities, and prevent them from having meaningful responsibilities.
D&D was great. I was absolutely obsessed with it as an early teenager in the mid 80's. I carried the rule books around all times and even had a club at the school lunch table. I remember the vice principal...a bearded guy who was probably like 28 coming over and congratulating us saying he played D&D also and he believed only smart people played the game.
I also remember the ridiculous religious hysteria and my parents becoming concerned after someone at church giving them a cassette of some guy warning of demonic possession from rock music and D&D. The were reasonable though eventually let it go after investigating the rule books and my father actually playing a game (he frankly thought it was dumb which in retrospect is understandable). It all seems so tame compared to what is around now.
D&D was my great love at that time. Well... that and my TSR 80:)
D&D (and the subsequent Arduin rules) were a HUGE part of my teenage years in the 80s. I had to sell all of my collection to buy tires for my car when I was about 19. Come to think of it, it was more or less my coming of age moment.
I've since purchased almost every book I had as a young kid on eBay, but it's incredibly hard to find anyone who still plays with these rules. Kind of a bummer actually.
I spent a great deal of time in my youth studying the demons and devils sections of the Monster Manual.
Only years later did I learn that the devils were all sourced from actual religions (tiamat, beelzebub, etc). It helped spur my interest in ancient civilizations.
These days, I get calls from friends- all successful, happily married with family and kids- to play D&D.
The people who complained about this back then had NO IDEA how powerful games and myths can be to developing children- in a very positive way.
This was really a crazy time, fresh off of a landslide Reagan victory and no doubt the moral hysteria boosted by it, I remember this situation really well.
My parents (mostly my mother) are very religious and I remember being driven around town with the local Christian radio station on and it being just wall-to-wall fear mongering about Satanism, backmasking in rock songs and D&D. Just endless talk, hour after hour, about how all this will lead your child to drugs, pornography, satanism and suicide -- numerous "concrete" examples were included as the local Christian "research team" swept the country (pre-internet! so most of it was probably just invented whole-cloth) for police reports and court records for Satanic rituals, Rock music and D&D. All reported with deep urgency and absolute truthful authority between gentle praise songs I heard in church every Sunday. Of course they'd never play a couple seconds of Led Zeppelin back and forth so you could hear the hidden messages revealed, lest you want to kill yourself during the next commercial break or continuous praise song power hour.
Terse descriptions of D&D were provided. "A game where players assume the roles of various characters, demons are involved, sometimes, like gambling, dice are used!" without any cultural context about how it's exactly like any other game where people assume different identities, like Cowboys & Indians, or super space spy or whatever.
It was a perfect storm of cultural events simultaneously pumped up by various social moralists who, like most groups like this, take tiny kernels of truth and wrap them in heaping piles of agendas, fabrications and outright lies and blanket every form of sensory input to drive the masses into full foaming at the mouth hysteria.
The publicity eventually leaked out into regular media and I remember seeing some of these "issues" (which had all been masterfully woven together into a single moral crisis by the religious media my mother listened to) break into the regular nightly news my father forced me to sit and watch every evening (to build culture and character).
My mother was absolutely obsessed with all this and was driven to hysteria. One time pulling the car over to the side of a busy highway and making me promise, promise, I'd never roll D&D dice and risk letting Satan into my heart - tears streaming down her face while she shook like a leaf -- because I might commit suicide when the game is over. She'd listen to hour after hour of pronouncements of how the country was going to sin...I'd watch her cleaning the kitchen while this played on the radio, her scrubbing getting more and more vigorous as her emotions became more and more upset.
Even at the tender age of...6 or 7, I knew the entire thing was a ridiculous pile of malarkey. I honestly had no clue what D&D was, had only heard rock music in passing (my music selection was pretty heavily regulated) and certainly wasn't involved in Satanism of any kind. I was more concerned with the severe mental instability this seemed to be drawing out in my mother...who seemed to be the only person I knew who couldn't separate fantasy from reality in this situation.
When the D&D cartoon started airing, curious, I'd sneak a few minutes of it in, titillated that something so dangerous was in cartoon form and on television before bed time. The show was pretty tame so I usually got bored and turned it off and did something else with my time. (He-Man was also banned in my house).
I vaguely remember the acronym BADD from those times and the name Patricia Pulling, and the claim that players would get so wrapped up in the fantasy of their characters, with reality and imagination so tangled up, that when your character died, there was some non-trivial chance you would go out and kill yourself, with probably a recently listened to Led Zeppelin tape in the boom box and with some kind of Satanic connection, or sacrificed chickens or something nearby.
And suddenly, one day, the Christian "news" sources my mother listened to moved on to something else and it was all over. Rock music was still around, Led Zeppelin was still for sale, D&D was still a game, but apparently the moral crusaders had stopped something and had moved on to something else. I think this was when all the major lawsuits had concluded with BADD losing all of them.
It was still on my banned list, but the hysteria was over. Like most kids I just ignored it and played a little D&D over at my friends' houses till I got bored of it and listened to rock music just the same. Years later, remembering the hysteria, a friend and I figured out how to reverse a cassette tape and we experimented listening for hidden messages in Rock Music cassettes to little success.
The early 1980s were a really weird moment in American history.
On the flip side, I grew up in a religious family. Conservative church three times a week, mom was a preacher's daughter and my dad later became a missionary.
Me and my brother played D&D frequently, had the books (the ones with devils on the covers), and it never bothered anyone. I don't think my parents were too worried a game was much danger to me.
Fortunately for me my parents were basically atheist/agnostic and so I never had to feel what you felt personally with your mother. Nevertheless, I was vaguely aware of this moral hysteria going on in the background, and had the same innate sense of ridiculousness of it all at age 6 or 7. Later when I was in high school I was introduced to Frank Zappa and read his 1985 statement to congress (http://downlode.org/Etext/zappa.html) and it gave me a deep sense of pride that there were still grownups standing up for true freedom in the way that it had always been preached to us in Civics and American History, and not the fear-based politicization of every non-issue that seemed to pass for national politics in those days. I suppose politics are no less ridiculous today, but I think with the crumbling of the Soviet Union there was a real vacuum for common fears and the political machine was a bit out of practice to raise a credibly amorphous spectre such as "terrorism".
> The early 1980s were a really weird moment in American history.
I don't see anything about what you've described (other than the specific subjects of D&D and rock music) that identifies the 80s. The reaction you describe is typical of all time periods; the same thing is happening all over all the time. For some period in the 90s-00s it was violent video games.
The 80s really were weird. Especially growing up in an Evangelical household. Reagan and all the almost flawless propaganda that accompanied his administration, the Japanese electronics boom, the endless stream of 80s style propaganda action movies, the huge surge in religious upswelling at that moment against the godless communists, the space program, Star Wars (the military program and the movies), endless cartoons reinforcing these values and ideas down at a child's level (G.I. Joe, Transformers, Gobots, etc.) the emergence of video games, hair bands, the endless parade of spy movies, and then spy movies where video games played a prominent role. It's pretty remarkable how many popular franchises were started and established in the 80s that are still wildly popular today and the thousands more that have vanished. I get a sense that it far surpassed the decade prior or after in that respect.
It was a really special kind of holistic life-pastiche that I don't think really existed before or sense. The closest I can think of is the late 50s early 60s as being quite so cohoesive and holistic.
I experienced it as a child growing up, so my take on the 80s is from that angle, but when I walk around the toy section at my local store these days, it's like a pale shadow of the vibrancy from that time -- most of the really popular toys are still more or less the ones that came into popularity when I was a kid. It seems like most of the big franchises from the 90s (the last time I really had awareness of the toy section) have died off or been replaced.
My wife is South Korean, and when she grew up, her country was just emerging from a long dictatorship. The popular media was heavily controlled and given their neighbor, was almost a more intense version of what we had in the 80s. In fact, I'm frequently surprised at how much of our 1980s American culture was wholesale imported into hers, but not our 1970s or 1990s culture.
I'd be curious as to your reasoning behind the "endless cartoons reinforcing these values and ideas down at a child's level (G.I. Joe, Transformers, Gobots, etc.)" statement.
What values and ideas were they reinforcing that made them examples of the weirdness of the 80s?
I can get the USA! from GIJoe, but the others that I recall as a kid seem to just fit into the typical good vs evil theme that is older than the written word.
This isn't just childhood memories either as many of my favorites from childhood are on Netflix and have been recently revisited.
Like I said, just curious.
I agree about the vibrancy though. My memories of childhood seemed much interesting in some terms such as toys, Saturday morning and after school afternoon cartoons then what's available for my kids today. They are out there, but it seems you have to work to find good ones when I had multiple options to choose from.
1. There are good and evil, only. The role of good is to fight evil, using violence.
2. The origin of evil is either irredeemable people or irredeemable ideologies. They cannot be reasoned with and do not have internal logic. The only way to end evil is by force.
3. Wishy washy good guys negotiate, but it never works. Manly good guys shoot first. That works.
4. If you are not succeeding with violence, use bigger, shinier violence.
5. Violence solves the problem, and once it's solved, it's over, and everything goes back to happy.
The unrealistic settings are due to the narrative demands of action-oriented storytelling. If you're watching the Ninja Turtles or Superman or whatever, you want to see the good guys kicking the bad guy's butts.
If a show is about engaging the bad guy in a big moral debate and realizing there are no good guys or bad guys, it would just be lame -- not as much entertainment value.
That being said, I love shows that have moral ambiguity. Four that immediately come to mind are Death Note, Game of Thrones, Puella Magi, and Gunslinger Girl. But that's not everyone's cup of tea. And even though that's my taste, I don't want all my entertainment to be in shades of gray -- I watch Fairy Tail, too.
I get all that, but to me it fits in line with my good vs evil being older than the written word thought. Most of what you wrote I can find in a history book.
I dispute that this is really all that ancient a view.
Christianity, for example, regards violence as only useful backed by supernatural aid, and doesn't see it as the only way to fight, only assigns irredeemable evil to supernatural entities, nominally prefers peace, and does not expect human agency (exploding or otherwise) to be sufficient alone. The 80s could well be viewed as a repudiation of christian ideas of evil.
Well, I don't have sources on hand but I'm fairly certain that what you describe is not necessarily a Christian invention. Many of the stories I recall reading that pre-date Christianity have similar themes.
Well, G.I. Joe was an older propaganda tool from the 60s, but it was substantially rebooted in the 80s as a high tech international global police force of sorts. I think this re-envisioning of the toy line fell in line with the kind of moralistic, American technology will give us the edge because we're smarter and better people than the also sophisticated but not as quite godless "bad guy" -- who happened to be a kind of blend of authoritarianism, terrorism and other enemies of the free and democratic peoples of the world (protected by the very American G.I. Joes).
Transformers are an interesting robot spin on the same theme. Let's be honest, the Autobots were stationed out of America and were largely defending America from the Decepticons. They were super high tech robots and fit nicely into the Star Wars (defense) theme of the Reagan administration.
I agree with the good vs evil spin on those shows. But I think that the actors who filled the good and evil roles were largely filled with American and Soviet/Nazi/Terrorist idealized stereotypes.
I'd add that in the cartoons the motivation of the evil archetype was always nonsensical and unclear. The Decepticons for example were always after energy resources and converting them to energon cubes. Yet the Autobots never seemed to have energy procurement problems. I think this was fed by the larger propaganda of the communists as being nonsensical, vague "bad guys" who were acting as constant aggressors.
MASK, Inspector Gadget, He Man, Danger Mouse, to some point Thundercats, Gobots, etc. all kind of fit this mold. Cartoons from the 70s and 90s largely don't really reflect this kind of good organization vs. nonsensical evil organization zeitgeist of the time.
Well, like I said, I get the GIJoe bit. And I agree for the most part, I just don't necessarily agree with the government propaganda part. Using nationalism and patriotism as a means to sell toys? Sure.
I can't agree with the Transformers as much. I don't recall anything specifically stating they were in America other than suggestions in the dialogue. With redubbing the show could have been placed just about anywhere only limited because of the appearance of the main human characters. I believe there was a British version as well. I could agree that maybe the Reagan administration co-opted Transformers for their own use (much like they did with the Star Wars name but I doubt Lucas was a government propagandist) but you seem to be suggesting that the Transformers exists for the benefit of Reagan's Star Wars program. That's the bit I'm curious about because I just don't see that. It seems too conspiracy theory to me. My reasoning is that Transformers was a part Japanese effort and originally based off existing Japanese toys. It was essentially a Japanese company entering the US market. To say they were propaganda for the benefit of the US government is a stretch to me.
I agree with the stereotypes, but I would say they were more of the typical good vs evil stereotypes. Just because they matched the good vs evil actors of the day doesn't necessarily mean they were created with that in mind. That seems some form of bias to me.
The reason the Autobots didn't have energy issues like the Decepticons was because they weren't attempting to conquer. They only required what was needed to survive. The Decepticons were gathering resources to destroy the Autobots on the planet, conquer said planet, and then return to Cybertron to finish the war. Works for me. I think it was the major plot point in several episodes.
I disagree with your final statement. There are many modern examples of more-or-less the same themes of good vs evil with similar stereotypes, archetypes, and plots. It's just a lack of interest or failure in connecting them to modern events.
I just don't buy the propaganda for government benefit in the Saturday morning cartoons from my childhood. Now, propaganda for me to want the toys they were selling? Sure enough, and it works.
Well outside of the first generation of transformers being made up of largely common cars you'd see on American roads and American military equipment (not a lot of Mercedes, Opels, Peugeots in the mix) and taking place in what appeared to be the American South West, desert with small mountains and valleys (with nearby American style suburbs the human characters lived in)....they changed this later, with a larger variety of settings. The Animated movie felt like it took place in somewhere, Europe.
Yeah Bumblebee was a VW Bug and Jazz was a Porsche, but there really weren't any other European cars in the show and both of those cars were pretty common in the U.S. Most importantly, Optimus Prime was very clearly an American style semi-truck rather than a British Lorry or Euro style truck.
I guess I wasn't clear though. Those shows really felt like they were at least reinforcing the prevailing propaganda, at a kids level. Part of this was no doubt marketing savvy rather than Government control, but it really made the propaganda machine pervasive, from young to old, top to bottom.
The modern movies are very much an extension of this. The Autobots are allied with Americans, operating out of a base provided by Americans. There's the occasional Aussie or Brit, but by and large it's all American. The cars are all GM cars. It feels natural because it's just an updating of what the Transformers were already doing.
It was brilliant. It tapped into so many threads floating around during the 80s and just pulled them together. High tech robots that fought evil and turned into blue collar American trucks! Bad ASS.
Well, from my memories most of the cars in the cartoon Transformers had little in comparison to real-life cars. I viewed them as more generic truck, generic sports car, and the like. Sure, some of them matched fairly well to real cars but for the most part they did not. Plus I guess it depends on how many American style cars made it into foreign markets.
I agree that if one lived in a country that didn't have deserts with small mountains it might be difficult to relate, but there are many areas of the world that appear much the same as the American southwest. Especially in the generic way it was portrayed in the show. Although, there's a point in there about the style of housing as I'm sure that varies quite a bit.
In the end, since it was a toy line intended to enter the American market, you are probably more correct in that than I am.
The modern movies don't count because what you describe is Michael Bay, not Transformers. The themes you describe in the movies is similar themes in just about every movie Michael Bay directed. A large number of the vehicles are GM cars, due to money I'm sure, but I would say the lineup of vehicles is more diverse than how you describe them in the cartoons.
As for your last bit, if you are stating that in lines of marketing to sell toys, I agree. If it is propaganda to benefit government something or other programs, I fail to see how you've supported that thought even though that seems to be what you are trying to say.
Yeah but Bumblebee was clearly a VW Beetle and he was one of the main autobot characters, Starscream et al were clearly US fighter jets and they were decepticon characters.
For some reason 80s cartoons often had a "moral lesson" tacked on to the end. Whether it was due to FCC regulations or just pandering to parents, I don't know. Some of the lessons were common sense, and some were just bizarre. Most were clearly phoned in. ("Key kids, don't do bad things, mm'K?") The comments on here about the 80s aren't saying they were good or bad, just "weird." Having to watch B grade propaganda after every cartoon definitely qualifies.
That was the beginning of government interference. Over time it started to be mandated that the broadcast networks had to have x percentage of "educational" value in their lineup of children's programs.
The results was the gradual removal of children's programming to the point that my cherished Saturday morning and after school cartoons disappeared.
Until this moment, it never occurred to me that others were also scarred from this period (yay internet!). In our house my father was the one who bought into the hysteria, He Man was also banned, and the D&D cartoon was as well.
We've talked about it since, and he has no memory of telling us (me and my siblings) that listening to secular music would lead us to the devil. He wasn't religious before this episode, and hasn't been since. I've always held resentment toward him from this time, but to find he didn't even remember was a shock.
My question for you guys is: how did it effect you? How did you recover? For me the result was, at the time, going to school and spewing this nonsense to my friends and ostracizing myselft. I had socialization problems anyway an that just increased my perceived isolation. Took years to work thru all that.
I personally never bought into it since I could never understand the mechanism that took somebody from playing a board game (my reference point at the time was Monopoly and Chutes and Ladders) to all the kinds of terrible things being discussed. It never made sense to me so I didn't carry that around with me.
Instead I became deeply skeptical of my parent's ability to parse these kinds of issues out for my well being. Which of course led to all kinds of wonderful moments as a teenager ;)
Over the years I also discovered that my mother was deeply susceptible to counter-mainstream, alternative movements. So I also grew up with all kinds of weird fad diet of the year, carb-load, bran, high citrus, vegetarian, soy, uncooked veggies, low-carb, acai, quinoa, dozens of others, or a stint where we all did Chinese medicine and ate lots of ginseng or a brief stint with homeopathy. No surprise my mother eats gluten free today but I suspect that's about to change as the next fad diet starts to infiltrate popular culture - Metabolism B, Dash, Paleo whatever. I usually indulged her at home (after all some of the diets were pretty tasty) and just ignored it all when I was out on my own.
More importantly it's made me very skeptical whenever large groups of people cotton onto something. It seems the more intense the group interest in something is, the less I'm inclined to go along...whatever it is. I grew up almost anti-cool - skeptic kind of personality. It saved me from most of the terrible fashion fads that everybody I grew up with regrets these days.
But in terms of what HN would be interested in, I tend not to really "get" large scale trends either -- since I've basically been trained to revolt from them unless there's a clear advantage to following it. So it definitely had an impact on my thinking in that sense.
I was warned against D&D, violent video games, and various harmless television shows. It was a bit silly at my house; violent games included Scorched Earth and Starcraft, and inappropriate TV included Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Simpsons. I thought at the time that my parents' fears were misplaced, and I argued as much . . . but I respected their rules because they were my parents. When I moved out, I asked my mother if she would prefer I continue to avoid those things out of respect for her, and she told me that as an adult, that sort of decision was mine to make. I promptly installed TONS of violent video games day 1 at college, and went on to form a rather excellent D&D group. ;)
I resented my parents a little bit for the parts of geek culture I missed out on. And it cost them a bit of respect that I couldn't rationally persuade them they were wrong (we had a relatively robust debate culture at our house). But you know, those have both since mended. It's easy to go back as an adult, and pick up things you missed. And their rules relaxed a lot, shortly after I moved out, to the point that my adult siblings and I can have a Left 4 Dead LAN in their living room, and they think nothing of it.
Looking back, it really was only a handful of things they taught me that were wrong; they taught me a lot of very valuable things that were right, too. I find that the older I get, the more I quote them. And while they laid down certain rules I disagreed with, they very much raised me to think for myself and make up my own mind, and for that I'm grateful. And I'm grateful for the opportunity to think hard about when rebellion against authority is necessary on moral principle, and when it would be selfish even if you're right.
As a kid, I had great respect for their judgement, and I don't think it was misplaced. They were occasionally wrong, but I think I was wrong a lot more often. I understood they had greater experience and wisdom than I did, and greatly valued their opinions. That's still true, and I still do. Part of me resents not playing Magic with my geek friends in junior high, but a larger part of me is glad that I respected their decisions. I think it was the right thing to do, and I'd do it again.
I was a rebellious little brat, so my mom's hysteria only increased my interest in D&D and Rock and Roll. I still enjoy these things today so I'd say it worked out well for me.
It is a little crazy in hindsight. I mean - who did I play D&D with? The other nerds who also never got in trouble. We were by and large the teachers pets.
I remember meeting a cop at GenCon when this hype was happening, and he said, "The stats suggest that D&D players commit crimes at a miniscule level compared to the general population."
> My parents (mostly my mother) are very religious and I remember being driven around town with the local Christian radio station on and it being just wall-to-wall fear mongering about Satanism, backmasking in rock songs and D&D.
will be on these kinds of "generated worries"? Will the fear mongers simply fade away, or will they find some different way to incite fear in others for their own gain?
Tumblr. Tumblr "feminism" (not to be confused with actual feminism). Tumblr "thin privilege" (not to be confused with people trying to practise healthy diets).
I think that's more generated outrage spawned from a place of immense disenfranchisement than generated fear spawned from a place of wanting desperately to belong to the cultural group you identify with.
If the scientific community were ever as pervasively and objectively wrong on an issue as the Christian community was on the whole Satanic Panic thing, there would be a fundamental loss of credibility. And yet...
One is that the scientific community, or large part of it, has never been wrong about something. I guess that could depend on how you define what makes the community.
Two is that everyone in the religious community reacted the same as the loudest complainers in the group. Again, depends on how you define the community.
Loss of credibility doesn't necessarily come from being wrong, it depends on how you react to being wrong. Both communities have been wrong before, and both communities have on occasion reacted badly to it. But in any of those cases, I doubt there was any one thing that could be used to properly denounce the entire group for all time.
Huh? It happens all the time. Look at plate tectonics. Why would there be a loss of credibility? We don't remember Marie Curie as the idiot who poisoned herself.
So how are your parents today? Have they come back down to earth? Do they recognise this hysteria and admit that it was all rather silly or are they still stuck in the cult-like droning of radio stations and the like?
Because that stuff can turn outright dangerous. What if she caught you watching that cartoon and decided you needed to be ritually cleansed by (for example) submerging into holy water until the demon's convulsing stopped? Just a thing I randomly thought up, but TBH I'm sure it happened.
My father always just supported what my mother was doing. And my mother tends to move on from fad to fad pretty quickly. I'd say outside of a few really hysterical outbursts over the years, I never really felt unsafe. The best modern analogy I can put is like being with somebody who watches Fox News all day and listens to Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck in the car on the way to/from work and gets all spun up over whatever the issue of the day is and every once in a while throws a hissy fit about the end of America or whatever.
Same basic mechanism and response, just different subject material.
Yes. MTG even caved to the pressure by removing Demon and Devil cards from the game for quite a few years.
Pokemon's opposition was less religious, but still there, some complainers even likened it to promoting slavery in how a trainer owns and treats their monsters.
I grew up in the same town as Bob Jones University. So they were really frothing at the mouth over the game (I picked it up just after AD&D came out). They were into picketing at the time, and protested outside a couple of bookstores that sold the game (they also protested Monty Python's Life of Brian, which I am proud of having crossed their picket line into 94 minutes of sin & depravity).
It was pretty counter-culture for the time. Some of my friends would have been called "goth" in later years, but this was before all that.
In college I drove down to Jacksonville for GenCon South, and got eliminated from the tournament pretty quickly (our party wandered the desert, got lost and died - we never even found the temple. Bah.) But it was amazing how many other people were into the game, way more than just the 4-5 people who played that I knew.
I grew up in Greer (about 20 minutes down Wade Hampton Blvd from BJU), and my mother, even in 2005, still believed that D&D was satanic. She had converted to Judaism, never went to BJU, and still she held that belief because of the moral panic in the 80s. It's amazing to me how easily some people will accept a moral position on something they know nothing about simply because someone else told them they should.
I actually got her to play D&D with me. It was interesting. We sat down and set up the game, had little tokens for our characters (it was the starter set), and dice and all of that. We selected our characters, entered the dungeon, and were promptly killed by the first orcs we came across. We stopped playing after that, but I think it opened her eyes to the misconceptions she had of the game.
BJU would go into K-Mart and demand they stop playing certain radio stations because the students couldn't shop there if they played rock music. They also caused a shitstorm when they tried to expel some students for holding hands when walking across campus because one was black and the other white, and this was in 2001. I even had a guy in my high school get into their weird religious beliefs trying to tell us in Biology class that the world was 3000 years old and the devil put dinosaur bones there to test us.
This is similar to the moral panic that happened around pokemon and harry potter in the 90s, and the daycare rape panic that happened in the 80s. It seems like moral outrage is a way that some people band together and identify.
It's still happening now, my university I went to is being attacked for giving a summer reading book that is about a lesbian. People are viciously attacking faculty and alumni from the university, and the state legislators have even taken to fining the schools for it.
because the students couldn't shop there if they played rock music.
In the days when car radios had dial pointers, BJU had a teacher whose job it was to go through the commuting student parking lot each day and issue demerits to those whose radio was tuned to the local rock station -- AM 1440.
Yeah, they finally racially integrated about ten, fifteen years ago. The feds put a lot of pressure on them, and their excuse of "We're integrated - we have two black students" didn't fly (obviously).
In France too there was lots of bad mouthing about role playing games in the mid to late 80s, when it was really popular (while it was nowhere as popular as in the US), and fearmongering in newspapers and media. A couple of years later, (early 90s, basically), video games were targeted, and they made it sound like people who were playing video games were retarded.
There was a documentary about Eric Chahi as he was finishing his work on Another World on Amiga (one of the milestones in Gaming!) in 1991-1992, and the reporters described him almost as being autistic. The media suddenly changed their stance on video games after Sony's success with the PS1 turned most young people into gamers and gained mass approval.
> ...the PS1 turned most young people into gamers and gained mass approval.
Mass approval is a means of consensual intellectual deference. Mass media is perfectly made to broadcast these messages.
The story's always the same: $NEW_MEDIA is harmful, and the domain of ill-adjusted individuals. Until, of course, a vague future when it isn't, even though nothing has changed. No mention is made of the errors in perception made in the past: "we've always been accepting of gaming."
Pop culture can only exist in the present. It cannot bring itself to look back in time, for in doing so it'd have to confront it's mistakes and ephemeralness.
UK newspapers are sensationalist, so we had a bit of it over here, although it did tend to concentrate on music or satanic abuse.
On a slight tangent I remember a Scottish religious group in the 1980s who did not let children use calculators because "Satan talks through screens" - they extended a ban on TVs to include calculators. This is the kind of thing that I find very hard to get results from a search engine with. So, any advice from DDG or Googlers about best way to get that info would be lovely!
I grew up in middle class, suburban Kansas. But, did not experience any of this hysteria. I guess I'm lucky. I've been playing RPGs for 30 years.
Lots of people play today. I strongly encourage anyone even slightly interested to visit local game shops, look for meetup.com rpg meetup and try it out. If you happen to be in austin http://www.meetup.com/dnd-823/
I'm happy to answer any questions about that meetup (which I organize), finding / starting a game, or RPGs in general. Here or email njharman@gmail.com
I continue to play today as well, it's a REALLY great hobby for a software engineer in particular, since it involves heavy and somewhat complex rulesets, some minor math, and a great way to socialize with staring at a computer screen. It really makes it easier to connect and talk to others as there is a built and fun subject to talk about. Playing RPG's has improved my life quite a bit since I picked it up again.
I honestly thought this was a parody for 90% of the strip, then like most religious material, instead of a punchline, there's a testimonial. I wonder if there's some kind of law about this, like how porn movies and action movies have similar ratios of story to fight/sex scenes?
Until the last panels I wanted to believe this was a parody. The intense occult training through D&D prepared Debbie to accept the invitation to enter a witches' coven.
The funny thing is that in the 90s, after the scare was mostly over, when adults would see me and my friends with rule books and pieces of paper full of numbers they'd always congratulate us for being 'studying hard'. ;)
Ah, we lost our cleric and fighter (they were brothers) to that, since their mom heard that it was "satanic." Most ironic thing is that they were the only 2 in the group that attended the same church as me.
Is it so bad that my cleric is lawful evil and gets his powers from Asmodeus? Does that make me a devil worshipper? Come on Mom, it's Asmodeus, not Satan.
Edit: Actually, I don't know if a cleric could get powers from a devil rather than a god. Dungeon Master's Guide check please? Ah, well. It's an RPG. We could do whatever we wanted as long as the DM approved.
From my memories, a devil would be interpreted as a demon so they might be able to give you limited abilities if they happened to be particularly powerful. But not the full abilities a god could provide.
I was more into Dragonlance so things might be a tad different for you.
Plus, as you say, whatever the DM decides if there's no specific rule defining the outcome.
> From my memories, a devil would be interpreted as a demon so they might be able to give you limited abilities if they happened to be particularly powerful. But not the full abilities a god could provide.
That's how I understood it as well. In the base AD&D 1st Edition, you had a cleric and no other backstory. There wasn't a backstory to go with the game, it was just the base rules to be applied to any world. Then there were different worlds which came later in expansion sets.
In Forgotten Realms, I believe your cleric could get certain unique powers based on which god your priest followed. For example, if you followed the god of magic, you would gain the ability to cast minor spells as you gained levels.
I also seem to recall the same info about following a devil. I believe you could follow certain major devils (probably had to control their own "circle" of Hell) but that you actually took a hit to your powers. Because these beings were less powerful than gods, you got less powerful abilities.
I imagine this was much the same no matter what expansion you went with. You needed the expansions to get a backstory and fill-in for the "lore." It's was a bit of a strange situation. There were specific gods for each setting, but each setting had access to the same "planes" with Hell being one of those. The way I remember this being setup is that each setting had a different world but they all literally shared the same planes. A Dragonlance player might actually be able to meet a Forgotten Realms if they bumped into each other in the planes. I think this was all intentionally left a bit blurry because it wasn't fully fleshed out.
Gary Gygax was a Christian. In February 1969, he wrote an article in IFW Monthly explicitly stating he was a Christian and making an argument why Christians shouldn't celebrate Christmas; he justified his argument with Biblical sources. See http://boingboing.net/2012/12/24/gary-gygax-explains-why-chr...
Original D&D included Christian symbolism: Clerics used holy water and a cross. Gygax's 1975's D&D Supplement I: GREYHAWK (page 34) states:
"All Vampires are affected by the cross, despite any former religious background, as it is sovereign against them."
Furthermore, the demons and devils in early D&D were presented as adversaries, not as role models.
I started playing D&D in the early 80s. I went to Catholic grammar school. We were taught by priests and nuns. We played D&D in the schoolyard. Nobody discouraged us from playing.
I was also bullied quite a bit in grammar school and high school, and I think I would have gone nuts if I didn't have D&D as an outlet. D&D also got me interested in reading books and studying probability. D&D helped improve my grades from Cs and Ds to straight As. I eventually got a B.S. in math with a 4.0 GPA.
As a grown up, I played in a group DM'd by a fundamentalist Christian, who didn't see any conflict between his religious beliefs and fantasy role playing games.
One of the various crimes that the media tried to tie to D&D was the murder of Lieth Von Stein. It became the subject of a few books and made-for-TV movies. Basically the guy's stepson and friends murdered him for insurance money/inheritance, and although they were really into D&D, the real vector (other than greed and malice) was LSD and coke.
One of the books about the case is called Cruel Doubt[1] and in 1997, I listened to the audio book in a road trip with my parents (I was like 14). It's a really well-done book (skip the made-for-TV movie starring Blythe Danner and a 16-year old Gwyneth Paltrow), but it focused a lot on the D&D controversy, because that was so much a part of the D&D narrative.
Anyway, I share all this because a) the book is really good (I got the Kindle version a few years ago and re-read it for the first time in 15 years) and b), my own mother still harbors negative feelings about D&D because of how the book explained the controversy and the supposed associations between the game and the murder.
She'd missed the whole brouhaha in the 1980s, because she had two daughters and the only one who could ever be interested in D&D (me) was born in the early 80s, and thus a toddler during most of the media maelstrom.
Yet the narrative of that book (which again, really isn't against D&D and doesn't make it out to be a catalyst for the murder, beyond sharing the real fact that yes, the murderers did lots of LSD and played D&D all day instead of going to work or school), was enough for my mom to give me a lecture at 17 when I happened to go hang out with my then-boyfriend and his college friends who happened to be playing a tabletop game.
Anyway. This comment adds nothing to the discussion, I just wanted to plug Cruel Doubt because it's a really good true crime book. And I associate it with helping corrupt my otherwise intelligent mother into believing a game was the product of the devil and evil. Don't worry, I set her straight.
When I got into Dungeons and Dragons, I remember my mother getting worried about something she heard on the news about kids going and playing D&D-inspired make believe in sewers, and lecturing me at length about how I should never ever that.
We lived really far out in the country at the time. Nothing but wells and septic systems for 20 miles in any direction.
While the idea of teenagers literally worshiping Satan was a moral panic, I suspect many Christians would find D&D incompatible with Christianity, given its emphasis on violence, personal power, and the occult.
Violence, personal power and the occult? You're going to find a lot more "violence" and "personal power" by switching on the TV or going to the library. Anyway, combat is often (depending on who you play with, but it has been my experience when I played tabletop) a very small part of a scenario.
As for "the occult" in D&D, come on. Throwing a die to check the damage of a fireball never turned anyone into Aleister Crowley.
The "violence" part is particularly ironic, considering the amount of God-sanctioned wholesale slaughter in the Bible. Maybe the Bible is incompatible with Christian beliefs as well ? :)
A large part of the Bible is incompatible with Christian beliefs. Then again, "Christian beliefs" isn't a well-defined term; it ranges from "there is some guy up there" to "gays are causing the hurricanes".
>As for "the occult" in D&D, come on. Throwing a die to check the damage of a fireball never turned anyone into Aleister Crowley.
I meant that D&D contained occult themes, not that it presented these ideas as factual or encouraged people to take them seriously. A fair reading of my post would have indicated this anyway, since my post started with "While the idea of teenagers literally worshiping Satan was a moral panic..."
And yet, those are frequently described in the bible; lots of violence in the old testament, some in the new, and again lots in the post-biblical eras; personal power, I'm pretty sure God is the pinnacle of that; the kings in the old testament another (they (re?) conquer Israel of all things), Jesus yet another (cult/religious leader). Occult, I don't know what falls under that, but plenty of talking to the dead / satan / higher beings there.
I consider myself a devout Christian, and I find nothing inherently un-Christian in D&D. If one wants to indulge fantasies of evil, well, sure, there's the Book of Vile Darkness. But the nice thing about D&D is that it's like Lisp---so free-form that it can be whatever you want it to be. It is much more archetypal to play a band of shiny heroes---which is a good thing to aspire to.
If any particular Christian finds something that would lead them to sin in D&D, then they should avoid it. But all things God has made are good in their proper place, and that includes imagination.
Nah, not really. I think the main drive against things like D&D comes from a fear against anything which makes people think outside of the ordained box. The more people think - be it about fantasy and monsters or DNA and atoms - the less control you have over where their thinking might lead them. Free thinkers are the bane of organised religion, so anything which encourages free thinking is discouraged by it.
For the amount of people that profess to Christianity, its amazing how many ignore the core tenets. I'm sure Bush was praising the Lord as he set the war machine in motion, or Bernanke saying a humble prayer as he pillaged the wealth of the middle class. Ah, the land of Christian principles. Thank God I'm not there.
History is replete with documentary evidence that whatever their creed (whether religious or political), men are more than willing to spill a lot of blood, as long as the blood belongs to the "wrong" group of the moment.
Really? GTA? Every FPS ever? Video games in general?
This "moral panic" behavior is by no means limited to conservative/traditionally religious causes.
As an example that will likely challenge many here, try comparing environmental panics (historical and present) with religious ones. There is a very similar pattern of catastrophic predictions, frantic hyperbole, disregard of contradictory data (usually combined with demonizing those pointing it out), and the inevitable eventual shift to a new topic for panic.