By Dr. Michael Robinson – Communication Studies Professor
Dungeons and Dragons poster from the classic 1983 – 1985 television series from IMDB.com
Dungeons and Dragons has won. Once mistreated and maligned through moral panic, D&D is now as mainstream as it can be. I know this because I bought D&D stamps from the post office over the holiday. By design, nothing is threatening about stamps.
D&D got its dangerous reputation because of the misunderstood death of a Michigan State University student in 1979. Rumors, urban legends, and bad journalism involving those rumors and urban legends led to a moral panic about the game. Anti-D&D propaganda spread. The most infamous examples are Mazes and Monsters, a 1982 movie starring a very young Tom Hanks as a college student who experiences psychological problems when too deeply immersed in a D&D-like game, and “Dark Dungeons,” a 1984 Jack Chick cartoon tract that wrongly labeled the game as an anti-Christain tool that promoted witchcraft and Satanism.
Given the Satanic panic surrounding the game, I got into D&D in an unusual way. My mother had heard of the game and thought it might keep my imagination busy. My paternal uncle was an avid player. She asked him about it. He ran a sample game for me (my character helped to kill a phase spider!), and I was hooked. Soon I had the classic boxed set, and not long after, I began scouring through the many volumes of rules for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.
In the early days, I played a valiant and noble paladin, but later in my gaming career, I got more excited about my Drow Thief character. There was something more challenging in the vulnerabilities of sneaking around and getting into trouble than just battling monsters as the group’s holy warrior tank.
I also ran D&D games, which meant that I voraciously read modules (pre-made adventures) and endlessly filled graph paper notebooks with floor plans for my own dungeons. Later, it became clear that superheroes were more my gaming genre, so I ran a lot of sessions of Villains and Vigilantes.
Gaming is a fascinating experience. Gamemasters can make highly detailed plans and preparations. But to paraphrase the popular saying, no role-playing game adventure plan survives contact with the players. In this fascinatingly shared way, the experience becomes wildly improvisational. That experience is useful in life, particularly in teaching.
Gaming has not defined all my friendships, but it was something that many of my friends and I loved, and still love, to do. I also realized along the way that role-playing gave us an incredible opportunity to entertain one another. My friends are quite knowledgeable about popular culture. They have seen it all, so I figure I’ve done something any time I can keep them excited about an adventure.
While I would not wish for the return of those vile moral panic misconceptions and Satanic panics, I can become weirdly nostalgic about the edgy early days of D&D. That’s probably because it was fun to shock other people who believed in the rumors and misconceptions. That said, I see those stamps as victory stamps. I am glad D&D won. Playing D&D and the other games that emulated it and followed it remains an authentic nerd experience in all the best possible ways.
