It possibly seems, two decades into the new millennium, a relic of ye olden times to imagine hysterical Christians praying for the depraved players of a game brought to the Earth for the sole purpose of luring innocent children into the hands of the devil. Yet in the 1980s and even into the early 1990s there remained a significant stigma attached to Dungeons & Dragons, and other role-playing games tainted by simple proximity and nomenclature. I can corroborate the phenomenon because I felt its presence, even though I never experienced it directly myself.
Genesis
The crisis of D&D as an end-time threat to the god-fearing members of church groups was only a small part of what might be more properly considered the panic “proper”. This overarching cultural phenomenon involved a perhaps unsurprisingly circumstantial, largely discredited, and eventually pointless, line of thought by one or two primary sources which were latterly picked up by a hungry mob, eagerly fed by media conglomerates spoiling for controversial material. In this case, it was the notion that satanic rituals had become embedded in a number of activities which had become popular in the 1980s. Activities which many vocal Christians—most of whom, then as now, probably didn’t even speak for the actual majority—had grown to disdain for their own puritanical reasons.
The classics, basically: cinema generally; pornography specifically; video games; non-mainstream music; prostitution; and, most of all, wrapped inside the neat bow of the grand-daddy of all paranoid delusions, anti-government conspiracy theory. No matter how filthy the degenerates got, there was always a bureaucratic division of “the government” behind it all. Secret. Control. Cabal. Throw “paedophile” in there for some moral shock value. Only “we”, the “enlightened”, have access to the “truth”. The tropes are all so hackneyed; you get the point. None of this shit is new.
Anyway, not unlike McCarthyist anti-Communism, or the reign of anti-Semitic terror under the Nazi regime, the panic began with some quite specific targets but ended up driven by a number of disparate interests. Losing sight of its original intent, such buffoonery eventually blows itself out with its own hot air—but not before it has done irreparable collateral damage. Perhaps someone picked up a Monster Manual once and was outraged to see cartoonish images and descriptions of a devil staring back at them. Being at that point accustomed to having their every moral impulse studiously appeased, every outrage indulged, suddenly Dungeons & Dragons was on the menu.
My own parents are not religious and, mercifully, Australia is not as evangelically Christian as, say, the United States. But the parents of friends were sometimes religious, and every now and again an adult would approach me and—to be fair, politely—suggest that playing Dungeons & Dragons could possibly result in antisocial or problematic behaviour. Beware, was their message, especially if they used the phrase “that game” rather than its actual name.
The irony and ignorance of such accusations were not lost upon me (nor the fact that adjacent games such as, say, Cyberpunk, had nothing whatsoever to do with the unholy). The “safe” methods of social interaction for a young teen in the early 1990s—let’s say at a non-specific high school in a non-specific country town—often involved both physical and verbal abuse on a level which would rarely be tolerated among adults. The kind of casual brutality that, if actually reported and treated like an adult crime, might likely have resulted in jail time. At school, that was called “lunch time”. But no, no, no… its D&D that will fuck you up. I begged to differ.
Perhaps these well-meaning busybodies were instead expecting me to attend parties, get shit-faced, and cause more socially-acceptable forms of trouble? I experienced D&D as an escape; a valuable and safe activity far removed from any threat of devil-worship. For me it is, and has always been, creative rather than debased.
Satan—that undoubtedly talentless hack—discusses a lingering appreciation for their DM’s plot twist and subsequent TPK from the previous session. Image: New Line
Numbers
It might be forgotten lore now, but demons and devils didn’t even appear in the 2nd Edition of the game, precisely because of this phenomenon. Yet in the current fifth edition, released in 2014, there are various classifications for all sorts of creatures—aberrations, constructs, elementals, monstrosities, undead, and so on—and the one befitting creatures from the netherworlds are called fiends. This specific classification only exists in the first place because of the need to explicitly remove the terms “demon” and “devil” from the game.
The latter terms have long since been reinstated but the erstwhile restriction is nevertheless now a part of the game’s history; just as in cinema the Hays Code in the 1930s created the genre of film noir, so the satanic panic contributed to a more nuanced method for classifying monsters. Not nearly the same achievement, but it is nevertheless hard to imagine that the game would have developed the way it did under a more lenient set of circumstances. Necessity, as the saying goes, is the mother of invention.
The word infernal means ‘of a place below’, as in the underworld or its various equivalents, and similar to the Italian word ‘inferno’ (literally, “Hell”), which in modern English is synonymous with a raging fire. Certain types of infernal creatures in D&D were renamed “tanar’ri” or “baatezu”, standing in as direct synonyms for ‘demon’ and ‘devil’. By the third edition of the game, which was released in 2000, such creatures simply became sub-types of the fiend monster type—a more generic term collating all types of demon or devil—but their genesis was in fact born from an attempt to expurgate any literal reference to Christian paraphernalia which might upset those most delicate and prone to panic.
Simply borrowing a few foreign terms and making up a few more did the trick. It’s possible that, having never actually played the game—and well before the enlightened age of PDFs and the Ctrl-F key combination—its denouncers weren’t prepared to invest more than a cursory examination once they had been reassured of its due deference to their strident hyperbole. That is, once TSR (the publisher at the time, and no, not that one, you giant nerd) had duly bowed and scraped and promised to remove such references, they promptly gave up. That the game was even required to take such steps, however, illustrates the degree to which this unnecessary hysteria legitimately threatened the commercial success of its published material.
Lamentations
Dungeons & Dragons might now be the most famous role-playing game in the world (though it is certainly not the best), but it’s earned that right and endured its time as an artefact of derision and hostility. Not unlike many of us who played it at that time. Very few of its so-called “moral” critics seemed to understand that the game’s player heroes were usually pitted against creatures from the burning pits of wherever, but the self-righteous shrieking caste (of any stripe) are often blind to nuance.
Naturally, the panic itself didn’t actually go away, it just turned its shrill voice toward other media—like violent movies, then violent computer games, then to heavy metal, then rap, then… whatever came next. I’ve lost track. It’s a tired regime, to say the least.
Nevertheless, role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons endured a long period of being perceived as culturally peripheral activities unworthy of mainstream recognition nor artistic merit. While that general consensus may not have entirely shifted in the interim, it is greatly rewarding to see the way in which D&D in particular has received growing popularity via live-acted shows like Critical Role (truly, a phenomenon, a creative wonder, and quite simply a joy to watch) and as a cultural artefact in the popular Netflix series Stranger Things.
It is quite interesting that the latter has, thus far, largely ignored the cultural reputation of the game at that actual time, probably because it has simply been forgotten, or perhaps for fear of offending part of the demographic which makes up their target audience. To their considerable merit, I have to say that the contemporary Christian community, in my personal experience, seems no more or less supportive of D&D than any other particular group, which is obviously quite a shift.
[2022 addendum, and inconsequential Season 4 spoiler: it turns out Stranger Things didn’t ignore this aspect forever]
Exodus
I spent my high school years lugging hard-cover books around in my backpack—usually D&D manuals, but often those of other role-playing games—with something akin to a muted sense of pride. That is, when confronted about it, other kids were usually disdainful of them; sometimes violently so. Yet, despite the stigma, I was content with my identity as a nerd and simply found solace in congregating with a number of like-minded people.
The pleasing shape, and strength, of my adult shoulders may possibly be a reflection of the sheer volume of written material I insisted on hauling around with me at any given time during my teens. But the ability to pull out a book with a friend, and play a game—or, even better, memorise its rules over a series of lunch-time sessions and then not even need the book at all—was worth all the effort.
I discovered recently that my high school is about to be demolished, and replaced with an equivalent modern educational hub which is currently à la mode amongst the bureaucratic élite. The hellish existence of my high school years—perhaps infernal is the most apt term, given the cultural reputation of my favourite pastime—is an era I would say I endured rather than enjoyed, to put it mildly. Yet after a period of reflection, I feel as though the destruction of that place will put a permanent end to a particular way of thinking and replace it with something new.
Part of that obsolete perception is that games like Dungeons & Dragons are weird or strange or somehow reflect poorly on the player in some way, suggesting a level of ineptness—usually a projection of the instigator’s own intellectual insecurity—which bears no relation to actuality.
The new perspective is one which recognises role-playing games as a brilliant tool for fostering imagination and creativity, for facilitating social interaction between people both young and old who perhaps struggle to foster such engagement in other contexts. Role-playing games, by their very definition, allow people to explore aspects of their identity vicariously, or parts of themselves which they are curious to explore without the inconsiderate judgement of their peers.
It might also accidentally teach a bunch of kids some maths, which can’t be a bad thing. So out with the “old school”. In with the new.