We had someone who would, unironically, leave these around the office. It was amusing at first, but then he began targeting individuals with them rather than just leaving them in a few public places and had to be told to stop. I read a bunch of the tracts during that time, they were quite bizarre. I did share the D&D one with my gaming group, though.
A lot of Christians think they are a parody of their beliefs. They are a very odd form of fundamentalism with some serious shade thrown at certain Christian churches.
I did enjoy Cthulhu Tract as a parody of whatever Chick Tracts are.
In the 80s and 90s I'd find them quite regularly. They were definitely fringe, but numerous. I've got family that's this level of fundamentalist; they took stuff like chick tracts literally and gobbled it up.
I think they spread so far because you had one side believing in them and the side going "take a look at this crap". They are almost perfect to spread both ways.
> They are a very odd form of fundamentalism with some serious shade thrown at certain Christian churches.
They aren't that odd for the time. They pretty much reflected fairly common fundamentalist attitudes at the time they were written, including the anti-Catholicism; that's subsequently become muted mostly because the politically-focussed Christian Right realized that right-wing Catholics could be useful political allies, but calling them Satanists made it hard to work together.
Those Tracts went beyond that. They really did go after Catholics, Mormons, and even evangelicals. They don't resemble the actual teachings of any of the mainline US Christian faiths. Sadly, a lot of people are not exactly familiar with what their church teaches and at a cursory glance the Tracts seem to be inline with their beliefs.
> They really did go after Catholics, Mormons, and even evangelicals.
Yes, none of those were uncommon for fundamentalists of the time (the fundamentalist/evangelical split is perhaps the most opaque to outsiders because they seem very similar from the outside, but fundamentalism was a theological reaction against theological trends within evangelicalism.) All of them have subsided, at least in visible terms, because of political convenience in the last couple decades, but even in the early 90s I saw a lot of it, quite openly, from large fundamentalist-aligned organizations.
Chick tracts were notable in their presentation, but not do much their ideas.
I think there is a geographic component as well. I am Roman Catholic. I grew up in the North East US and DC suburbs and while I was aware of anti-catholic sentiment among certain denominations, I didn't really encounter it until I went to college in the Midwest, where it was impossible to miss.
The same actors previously played in a series about an RPG world. The video is hilarious while technically not a parody: it was enough for them to stick to the plot.
Yeah, and he was roundly despised for it (and justly so!)
I do not believe that anyone ever converted to Christianity as a consequence of reading any of Jack Chick’s gospel tracts. But I do believe that thousands of Christians were converted by them into something else — something more like the ugly dishonesty and nasty triumphalism that were those tracts’ main attributes. He helped persuade such Christians that bearing false witness against their neighbors should be the hallmark and cornerstone of their religion.
If he was just an angry bitter old man, it'd be easier to pity him: how awful to live your life in that headspace, right? But he did damage, too, and that's harder to just feel sorry for.
My mother panicked when she found out I started playing D&D with a friend at high school. She consulted the closest mental health professional she knew which happened to be the psychiatrist at work. The psychiatrist didn't see a problem with it as long as I knew where fantasy and reality were. After hearing that, my mother gave her blessing for me to play D&D. I should probably add that my mother worked in the local jail as a nurse.
So to make a long story short, I couldn't play D&D without getting the approval of a prison psychiatrist.
I recently set up a short campaign for a few people at work who had never played D&D but wanted a taste. I was surprised that several people were immediately worried for us because of the "darkness" it would bring into our lives. I always thought that was a concern from decades ago, but apparently I was wrong.
The world has been seeing an uptick in religiousness; Christians have been amassing political and publishing power in many countries. Maybe that has something to do with the ”darkness”.
The western nations have been seeing the opposite of an uptick. Churches are generally in decline, while the number of non-affiliated is rising. Even in the US. Some American denominations still have considerable political power because of various factors, but their membership numbers are shrinking.
Yes, this is precisely what I mean: people are leaving the major denominations because they feel the churches have become too mundane, and choose to affiliate with more radical fundamentalist groups.
The narrative is often that the natural events of recent years and of course COVID are God’s punishment for maintaining support for the mainstream churches after their leaders voiced their acceptance of various oppressed groups of people.
Note that you are talking about your social sphere, assumingly in the US, and generalising that to the world. I am taking nationwide trends outside the US and generalising them to the world.
I'm always amused by this, because I have had to opportunity to DM for clergy several times, and my current group is run by our Deacon.
DnD started out as a kind of fantasy where we have the power to fight darkness directly. The way the genre has evolved has changed that, but to a large degree it's still a game where we act out stories and "practice being good guys."
My first D&D campaign was ended when our Cleric and Fighter (brothers) were banned by their mom who thought it was satanic. We went to the same church, so it wasn't anything from church.
Unlike the post title implies, this article isn't really about D&D in the 80s. From the OP:
> It’s not a major spoiler to tell you that the Dungeons and Dragons connection, highly marketable when The Dungeon Master came out in 1984, proves to be slight...
The OP's title is now "But down in the underground, you’ll find someone true…" I'm not sure if the post title is right: 1) it doesn't seem to actually make sense given the article content (Dallas Egbert is a kid who played D&D who went missing, but the easiest parse has him blaming it with the media), and 2) it only appears in the OP in a pingback that ripped off this blog post.
And our friends at Campus Crusades for Christ and their annual 'D&D is evil' speakers. The sad part was how easy it was to hand out a pamphlet that refuted all of the speaker's sources before the speaker had ever spoke.
Isn't it fascinating how media and parents fear that their children are confusing fiction and reality but in the end it's them who take fiction for reality.
Believers always feel attacked by fiction, because the existence of fiction opens the possibility, that the basis of there faith could also be completely fictitious.
“Reality” is a consensus construct, so part of childrearing is trying to ensure that your progeny have the “correct” subset of beliefs.
(Even if you are a Platonist, which I suppose I am, for part of mathematics at least, there are plenty of people, perhaps a majority, who, for example, know almost no maths at all)
For those interested in media panics over small nothings, check out this full-length 1980's made-for-TV movie about Dungeons and Dragons, featuring Tom Hanks snapping and losing his grip on reality.
Spoiler: the teenage Egbert was hiding out at someone else's house, and eventually phoned himself in. Less than a year later, he committed suicide. Coulda had us a Turing!
> When everything is mainstream, when attractive and popular kids are programming computers, immersed in role-playing games, fluent in comic books, writing the rules and setting the boundaries, what becomes of the kids who still can’t fit in? Dear’s book made me wonder who we’re missing. Where are their steam tunnels, real or imagined? Where do they go when they’re tired of being told how to be?
For me, the mainstream takeover of subcultures has always felt very superficial. The subcultures I've been a part of (Pen&Paper, LARP, early Internet, Gothic) have registered that the masses have taken elements as (often purely visual) tokens and this has often led to a "glut" of new people entering into the subculture, but this was usually not long lasting and was often mostly also purely superficial.
There were always people (and niches) in the depths in which one could feel comfortable. However - I must admit - it became harder to find these depths and to get through the superficiality. The niches have become even more self-isolated and it has become more difficult for newcomers with real interest to immerse themselves.
One of the biggest annoyances for me is when people enter some subculture, then demand the subculture to change to acommodate them rather than them changing to acommodate the subculture.
I had it happen a few times that it changed to something unrecognizable to me and thus I left it for a new one.
So at this point, I feel like gatekeeping, (ofc not based on race gender or such things, but rather specifics to the subculture) has become mandatory, even at the cost of keeping a, possibly sizeable, portion of genuinly interested people out.
Thanks for the reminder. I knew somewhere in the back of my head that there was this reference.
I came later. I never experienced 1993, September. My first glimpse into this net was in fall 1997. So I was part of the eternal September so to speak.
The biggest thing to keep in mind when "gatekeeping" is that it's more important to step up and take on the role of a "initiator" or "sponsor" into the culture, and pass on the community knowledge that makes the culture a special place.
Of course assimilating the new people would be the best outcome. Sadly I have ran into enough that go in with the intention of changing the subculture that I am now VERY skeptical of any new person.
Tabletop games, and any activity where you meet with a small group of regulars, is resistant to the perils of popularity. More people playing D&D means the publisher can publish more books and offer accessories, because they're confident there's a market. But my core playgroup hasn't changed much for years. We meet new people at open events, and if we like then, we'll invite them to join our regular group.
It's naturally resistant to mainstream dilution. More so because it's a game where we write the narrative, choose the themes, and freely change the rules.
I've read a bit about this story over the years -- perhaps it's a little more popular given that about half of my (very large) graduating class attended Michigan State University.
I was the "computer geek" growing up and somehow I managed to avoid getting into D&D. I ended up finding out, later, that it was mostly by design. My parents had been familiar with this story and were generally of the belief that D&D was "of the devil"[0].
When my parents first explained the story and why they didn't want me playing D&D[1], I did what most kids did and polled my friends to see if anyone played. Much to my surprise, a kid two doors down was obsessed. So five of us sat in a room while my friend, walked us through what I can only describe as "playing pretend with dice[2]".
I learned that day that "Tabloids" and "The News" are distinguishable from one another only in that the former is expects you to be skeptical, the latter expects your trust. At the end of the day, the product is very nearly identical. As a young man when Columbine occurred, which I followed very closely, I think my faith in the general news media was completely destroyed.
Here I am, sitting in a room with four of my friends, one behind a board with notes, random-seeming things happening requiring dice rolls. Dude. I was bored as hell. Common sense, at that point, told me that if someone became so immersed in this that they lost their mind to ... insanity ... SATAN ... what-have-you that the issue wasn't D&D, it was a far more complicated mental illness. How come a 13-year-old kid could see this but a flurry of adults -- my parents included -- couldn't? Had D&D not existed, this would have still happened, and I'm confident that "The Media" would look for an explanation outside of "human beings sometimes do shocking things" or "mental illness". Those don't have easy solutions.
And I think a lot of it is our fault as consumers. Not because we watch the news, but because we want to know that a tragedy like this "has a reason". We want the news to tell us that "Violent Video Games", "D&D", ... I don't know ... "GMO Foods" are the reason and if we just ban those things, we won't have to worry ourselves with that whole classification of problems. It's a knee-jerk reaction because we're uncomfortable accepting the fact that bad things happen for complicated reasons and people do bad things, and that often "good people" are capable of incredible evil.
Consequently, I've been a bit vague about exactly what happened because I don't know that I ever received the "true story". My parents recollection was as good as an urban legend and I got a chuckle out of the opening line: "you probably heard tales from a college your friend’s brother’s cousin attended on the fringes of wherever you lived". It reminded me of the year after High School, when somehow, nearly every girl I knew from High School who was a Freshman at MSU somehow narrowly avoided being abducted on the "Rape Trail"[3].
[0] I think the only other thing we were told was "of the devil" was a Ouija board.
[1] I was never forbidden from playing, but they weren't buying, I had no income and I hadn't found any friends who were into it.
[2] If it's not already clear, my knowledge on this subject is just about zero. I'm really not trying to bash D&D by over-simplifying -- this was my impression as a 13-year-old kid and since I've had no further experience, it's the one I carry as an adult. It's also not the point.
[3] My attempts to triangulate the location of this mysterious Rape Trail resulted in the discovery that there wasn't a general consensus across campus of what really was the "Rape Trail&q...
Google and Amazon seem to have done a pretty good job of scrubbing this 1979 book from the face of the earth. Does anyone have “The Dungeon Master” ISBN?
Mazes and Monsters, starring a young Tom Hanks, was sponsored by Procter & Gamble Productions. Now decades later, it appears that they keep trying to pander to people's baseless fears.
> "To understand Egbert’s mind, Dear gets so implausibly immersed in a D&D game run by a college kid that he loses his sense of self. A mysterious woman stalks Dear’s room while he’s out investigating the case, strange phone calls and notes hint at sinister conspiracies, and reporters camp out in the hotel lobby, ravenous for news."
This sounds like coming from the blurb of a Paul Auster novel.
I can't believe so many here played D&D. I thought it was terrible, simplistic, shallow, restrictive and just for kids. I refused to play it. AD&D, otoh, is pretty great.
The Crit Role people, if you watch the interviews, have a shared perspective that a campaign is a collaborative fiction writing exercise akin to improv comedy. The DM writes a Choose Your Own Adventure, and the players work together to convert that into a long form story.
I think it’s telling that a couple of the characters are notoriously bad at fight mechanics and action economy, and yet the story part glosses over some of that. The story happens despite the dice rolls. All the dice say is whether the heroes live at the end or are martyred to the cause.
Really bizarre that this author refers to the college student as a "child" and refers to college students in the 70s as "proto-adults" implying that today college students are children. College students are young adults. Its really frustrating to see people treat them like children and especially to imply that they should be treated like children.
76 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 166 ms ] threadahh, back when the satanic panic spread by mimeograph and the spittle-flecks of rage and fear damn near left flecks on the page.
Yes, this is an actual publication by a christian organization; it's not a parody.
I did enjoy Cthulhu Tract as a parody of whatever Chick Tracts are.
They aren't that odd for the time. They pretty much reflected fairly common fundamentalist attitudes at the time they were written, including the anti-Catholicism; that's subsequently become muted mostly because the politically-focussed Christian Right realized that right-wing Catholics could be useful political allies, but calling them Satanists made it hard to work together.
Yes, none of those were uncommon for fundamentalists of the time (the fundamentalist/evangelical split is perhaps the most opaque to outsiders because they seem very similar from the outside, but fundamentalism was a theological reaction against theological trends within evangelicalism.) All of them have subsided, at least in visible terms, because of political convenience in the last couple decades, but even in the early 90s I saw a lot of it, quite openly, from large fundamentalist-aligned organizations.
Chick tracts were notable in their presentation, but not do much their ideas.
I think I'd rather get the fabled apple with a razorblade in it than Christian gospel in my trick or treat pail.
The same actors previously played in a series about an RPG world. The video is hilarious while technically not a parody: it was enough for them to stick to the plot.
I do not believe that anyone ever converted to Christianity as a consequence of reading any of Jack Chick’s gospel tracts. But I do believe that thousands of Christians were converted by them into something else — something more like the ugly dishonesty and nasty triumphalism that were those tracts’ main attributes. He helped persuade such Christians that bearing false witness against their neighbors should be the hallmark and cornerstone of their religion.
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2016/10/24/haw-haw...
If he was just an angry bitter old man, it'd be easier to pity him: how awful to live your life in that headspace, right? But he did damage, too, and that's harder to just feel sorry for.
So to make a long story short, I couldn't play D&D without getting the approval of a prison psychiatrist.
Sometimes it takes someone who has seen real problems to put things in perspective.
To reiterate: she works at a prison.
In the realm of moral panics I thought were settled in the 20th century see: https://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/ct-life-grand-thef...
Really bro?
The narrative is often that the natural events of recent years and of course COVID are God’s punishment for maintaining support for the mainstream churches after their leaders voiced their acceptance of various oppressed groups of people.
The whole “hurricanes are God’s wrath on the US for gay rights” kinda thing isn’t really a wide swath even for the more evangelical set.
At least in my experience which is a bit considerable.
In fact the only time I’ve encountered that sort of rhetoric has been from mainline denominations.
https://europeanacademyofreligionandsociety.com/news/the-ris...
DnD started out as a kind of fantasy where we have the power to fight darkness directly. The way the genre has evolved has changed that, but to a large degree it's still a game where we act out stories and "practice being good guys."
> It’s not a major spoiler to tell you that the Dungeons and Dragons connection, highly marketable when The Dungeon Master came out in 1984, proves to be slight...
The OP's title is now "But down in the underground, you’ll find someone true…" I'm not sure if the post title is right: 1) it doesn't seem to actually make sense given the article content (Dallas Egbert is a kid who played D&D who went missing, but the easiest parse has him blaming it with the media), and 2) it only appears in the OP in a pingback that ripped off this blog post.
Ah, pharisees, gotta love them.
Nerd on nerd violence has to stop.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://mssv.net/2020/08/02/what-args-can-teach-us-about-qan...
https://medium.com/curiouserinstitute/a-game-designers-analy...
It contains many of the familiar "satanic panic" elements such as wild allegations of child abuse.
(Even if you are a Platonist, which I suppose I am, for part of mathematics at least, there are plenty of people, perhaps a majority, who, for example, know almost no maths at all)
And then there’s deflection where you accuse people of things before they can accuse you of them.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_(David_Bowie_song)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpcL-fQNPfQ
> When everything is mainstream, when attractive and popular kids are programming computers, immersed in role-playing games, fluent in comic books, writing the rules and setting the boundaries, what becomes of the kids who still can’t fit in? Dear’s book made me wonder who we’re missing. Where are their steam tunnels, real or imagined? Where do they go when they’re tired of being told how to be?
But... what's the answer?
There were always people (and niches) in the depths in which one could feel comfortable. However - I must admit - it became harder to find these depths and to get through the superficiality. The niches have become even more self-isolated and it has become more difficult for newcomers with real interest to immerse themselves.
I had it happen a few times that it changed to something unrecognizable to me and thus I left it for a new one.
So at this point, I feel like gatekeeping, (ofc not based on race gender or such things, but rather specifics to the subculture) has become mandatory, even at the cost of keeping a, possibly sizeable, portion of genuinly interested people out.
[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
I came later. I never experienced 1993, September. My first glimpse into this net was in fall 1997. So I was part of the eternal September so to speak.
It's naturally resistant to mainstream dilution. More so because it's a game where we write the narrative, choose the themes, and freely change the rules.
I was the "computer geek" growing up and somehow I managed to avoid getting into D&D. I ended up finding out, later, that it was mostly by design. My parents had been familiar with this story and were generally of the belief that D&D was "of the devil"[0].
When my parents first explained the story and why they didn't want me playing D&D[1], I did what most kids did and polled my friends to see if anyone played. Much to my surprise, a kid two doors down was obsessed. So five of us sat in a room while my friend, walked us through what I can only describe as "playing pretend with dice[2]".
I learned that day that "Tabloids" and "The News" are distinguishable from one another only in that the former is expects you to be skeptical, the latter expects your trust. At the end of the day, the product is very nearly identical. As a young man when Columbine occurred, which I followed very closely, I think my faith in the general news media was completely destroyed.
Here I am, sitting in a room with four of my friends, one behind a board with notes, random-seeming things happening requiring dice rolls. Dude. I was bored as hell. Common sense, at that point, told me that if someone became so immersed in this that they lost their mind to ... insanity ... SATAN ... what-have-you that the issue wasn't D&D, it was a far more complicated mental illness. How come a 13-year-old kid could see this but a flurry of adults -- my parents included -- couldn't? Had D&D not existed, this would have still happened, and I'm confident that "The Media" would look for an explanation outside of "human beings sometimes do shocking things" or "mental illness". Those don't have easy solutions.
And I think a lot of it is our fault as consumers. Not because we watch the news, but because we want to know that a tragedy like this "has a reason". We want the news to tell us that "Violent Video Games", "D&D", ... I don't know ... "GMO Foods" are the reason and if we just ban those things, we won't have to worry ourselves with that whole classification of problems. It's a knee-jerk reaction because we're uncomfortable accepting the fact that bad things happen for complicated reasons and people do bad things, and that often "good people" are capable of incredible evil.
Consequently, I've been a bit vague about exactly what happened because I don't know that I ever received the "true story". My parents recollection was as good as an urban legend and I got a chuckle out of the opening line: "you probably heard tales from a college your friend’s brother’s cousin attended on the fringes of wherever you lived". It reminded me of the year after High School, when somehow, nearly every girl I knew from High School who was a Freshman at MSU somehow narrowly avoided being abducted on the "Rape Trail"[3].
[0] I think the only other thing we were told was "of the devil" was a Ouija board.
[1] I was never forbidden from playing, but they weren't buying, I had no income and I hadn't found any friends who were into it.
[2] If it's not already clear, my knowledge on this subject is just about zero. I'm really not trying to bash D&D by over-simplifying -- this was my impression as a 13-year-old kid and since I've had no further experience, it's the one I carry as an adult. It's also not the point.
[3] My attempts to triangulate the location of this mysterious Rape Trail resulted in the discovery that there wasn't a general consensus across campus of what really was the "Rape Trail&q...
This sounds like coming from the blurb of a Paul Auster novel.
I think it’s telling that a couple of the characters are notoriously bad at fight mechanics and action economy, and yet the story part glosses over some of that. The story happens despite the dice rolls. All the dice say is whether the heroes live at the end or are martyred to the cause.