Does playing Dungeons & Dragons make you satanic?

• And suddenly, everything gets carried away… This summer,

  20 Minutes

  returns to the phenomenon of “moral panics”, used by conservative movements to denounce societal developments.

• While the concept was analyzed in the 1960s, there are older moral panics – like the Salem witches, and some very recent ones.

  In this series of articles,

  20 Minutes looks

  back at several examples over time.

• Today, back to the mother of moral panics, around the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game.

We don't do better in Proust's Madeleine register, at least in its geek version.

In an opening scene that will have brought tears to the eyes of all old role-players, the now cult series

opens with an emblematic scene: the meeting of a small band of kids in a basement, for an epic Dungeons & Dragons campaign, D&D for insiders.

But if nostalgia is at its best, with its sweet scent of childhood and golden age, the 4th season, put online at the beginning of the summer on Netflix, recalls a less cheerful aspect: playing D&D in the In the 1980s, it was like facing the suspicious or anxious gaze of adults, terrified by the considerable amount of nonsense peddled by the most hysterical opponents of a leisure accused of all evils.

To understand the roots of the phenomenon, a brief look back is helpful.

Soon to be fifty years old, role-playing games were still a brand new hobby in the early 1980s. Heir to the old wargames, D&D was born from the imagination of Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson around a simple concept: rather than moving armies on a map, why not embody characters, heroes with their own characteristics and their own story?

Quickly refined, the concept takes shape to give birth to the modern role-playing game (RPG): a collective narrative, improvised by players who must cooperate to advance through the pitfalls of the scenario under the authority of a

, master of the rules that organize the universe and guarantee its consistency.

For the rest, there is no other limit than that which the players set themselves together, accompanied by a slight risk all the same: their actions do not always succeed, far from it – hence the famous bizarre dice, dear to any good roleplayer.

In short: RPG runs on the imagination in a universe directly declined from that of fantasy, somewhere between Tolkien's

,

Robert E. Howard's

or Michael Moorcock's

Double Panic

Marketed in 1974, the game had a timid start: in 1979, TSR, the maker of D&D, still only sold 1,000 copies per month throughout the United States.

Still confidential, the new leisure for teenagers nevertheless immediately encountered powerful opposition, triggered in two stages.

The first episode dates from August 1979 and begins in Michigan with the disappearance of a particularly gifted student, James Egbert.

While the police trample, the private detective hired by his family discovers that the young man was playing D&D, and participating in a life-size version of the game in the basements of the university.

It does not take more than some media to say without a shadow of proof that an accident took place during one of these parts.

While the investigation shows that James Egbert – finally found in Louisiana – suffers from an addiction to methaqualone and experiences very badly a homosexuality that he does not dare to confess to his family, the press persists in putting all of his troubles on the back of D&D, scapegoat for a case all the more tragic as James Egbert committed suicide the following year, in 1980.

, with a very young Tom Hanks, established the idea in 1981 that D&D players could no longer distinguish the game from reality... In other words, part of the public is already prepared for the second episode, that which really launches the wave of collective hysteria which will gradually affect the whole small world of role-players, beyond the only D&D for that matter.

On June 9, 1982, a 16-year-old high school student, Irving Pulling, committed suicide in Virginia.

While the investigation highlights a series of factors ranging from bullying to chronic depression, the young man's mother, Patricia Pulling, decides to sue the principal of her son's high school, accusing him of having authorized the creation of the role-playing club of which his son was a member.

For her, there is not the slightest doubt: it was D&D that pushed her child to death, and she also decided to sue TSR, the game's publisher. Without success: in 1984, justice decides in favor of the principal on the one hand, of the editor on the other hand.

Who's BADD?

Patricia Pulling decides to pursue her fight differently, which therefore takes on the appearance of a moral crusade.

In connection with an Illinois psychiatrist, Thomas Radecki, Patricia Pulling founded an organization whose name cannot be invented: the BADD, for

(“concerned about Dungeons & Dragons”).

Close to evangelical currents and the Republican Party, the BADD confuses in the same hatred the role-playing game itself and other "threats" such as heavy metal, Satanism and a taste for witchcraft, the occult and paganism.

Together, explains the BADD in substance, the cocktail in question poses a serious threat to traditional values, youth and the very existence of American society – yes, just that and the least we can say, it is that Patricia Pulling and Dr. Radecki aren't going with the back of the spoon.

In the book

("The Devil's Web"), D&D is thus described as "a fantasy role-playing game that uses demonology, witchcraft, voodoo, murder, rape, blasphemy, suicide, assassination, alienation sexual perversion, homosexuality, prostitution, satanic-type rituals, gambling, barbarism, cannibalism, sadism, desecration, invocation of demons, necromancy…” – n' throw more.

And Patricia Pulling added: "There have been a large number of deaths across the country where games like Dungeons and Dragons have either been the deciding factor in teenage murders or suicides, or have played a major role in the violent behavior at the root of such tragedies”.

Basically, if your child is playing D&D, he's either going to kill himself,

The Hellfire Club is disbanded

With each teenage suicide, each family drama, each shooting, the BADD brandishes the role-playing card and insists that D&D is the marriage of Beelzebub, metal and crime.

We have seen more, but it works: carried by the media and the conservative parties, the message infuses in a few months.

The BADD literally inundates American society with studies, petitions and letters, each more frantic than the other, targeting in particular elected officials, religious leaders, the educational world, law enforcement, educators, centers leisure, bookstores, specialty stores… Basically, all structures that embody authority, education or morality.

Everywhere, the message is the same: Dungeons &

Dragons undermines America's moral traditions and turns young players into dangerous lunatics and potential criminals.

Throughout talk shows, conferences and publications, the same message is repeated even in role-playing conventions where the BADD leaves little gems of reactionary hysteria lying around like comics.

.

Not without effects: throughout the country, there are countless numbers of disbanded clubs, distraught parents and kids placed under surveillance by an entourage who ends up seeing in the slightest evening between friends the promise of a demonic ritual.

For many role-players, the end of the 1980s is that of a hobby that is practiced clandestinely and on the sly, for lack of being seen as a band of dangerous crackpots – the Hellfire Club, in the last season of

, gives a fair enough image of the effects of the great moral panic orchestrated by the BADD.

Demonic handiwork and imaginary statistics

Perhaps the best part is that the organization literally never comes up with any proof of increasingly fanciful claims.

In 1985, Patricia Pulling asserted that 8% of Americans practiced Satanism and that the city of Richmond alone had 58,000 of them – for 200,000 inhabitants… The BADD reached a peak of ridicule a little later by asserting that American youth rushes on a demonic work, the Necronomicon – a somewhat problematic point insofar as the book in question, born of the imagination of the writer HP Lovecraft is… purely fictitious.

All of the movement's attempts to give a semblance of scientific credibility to its theses have ended in resounding failures, particularly on the issue of suicide.

While the organization insists that role-players are more likely than other teenagers to end their lives, the Center for Disease Control and the National Safety Council, two federal public health agencies, establish that the suicide rate among gamers of role-playing are very significantly lower than that of the adolescent population as a whole.

"Culture of Horror"

At the end of the 1980s, the excesses and exaggerations of a BADD seriously angry with the facts and the statistical studies ended up undermining their image with the media as well as American officials, including the most conservative.

But the slander leaves traces and the practice remains all the more sulphurous as certain role-playing games – Call of Cthulhu, Paranoia, Vampire: the Masquerade – take malicious pleasure in playing on this bad reputation.

But D&D is not quite done with the dark legend that surrounds what was initially only a hobby: with a few years of delay, Australia and Europe are in turn affected by the storm. moralizing that has just hit North America.

Thus, while the French media had until then taken a rather indulgent look at role-playing games, the atmosphere changed at the end of the 1980s, when the conservative press began to relay the BADD's assertions.

In 1990, 34 Jewish graves were desecrated in Carpentras.

While the investigation is directed towards the circles of the extreme right, some media evoke without the shadow of an element the track of role-players, sons of notables launched into a sectarian drift.

, is illustrated in particular by a report which depicts role-players as people “who are inspired by Satanism, medieval legends, but also by an ideological jumble where Celtic crosses and delusions of nazillons intermingle.

In short, a culture of horror liable to go off the rails at any moment”.

In 1996, the investigation finally made it possible to arrest the four neo-Nazis guilty of the profanations – without much concern at

or elsewhere to correct the unfounded attacks against the small world of role-players.

In 1994, a second drama strangely similar to those which had triggered the American moral panic put role-playing games on the grill again, with the suicide in 1994 of a young practitioner, Christophe Maltese.

While the investigation finds no correlation between the game and his tragic gesture, the parents of the young man affirm on the set of

, the program of Jacques Pradel, that D&D is responsible for the suicide of their child with the support from psychiatrist Jean-Marie Abgrall, a specialist in… sectarian phenomena, who asserts that the practice of JDR can lead to confusion between the imaginary and reality.

, the same year, engages by taking up the whole list of BADD assertions, yet dismantled for a long time in the USA.

Damage and saves for roleplaying

But THE trauma, the great moment of television which all French role-players still remember with an amusement tinged with anger, is Mireille Dumas's

broadcast on October 11, 1995 - an hour and a half freewheeling on the theme " Attention dangerous games” and a Jean-Marie Abgrall who calmly asserts that the JDR causes mental illnesses.

None of the journalists or guests obviously understand what they are talking about, none have worked on the role play, no contradictory points of view have their place on the set, but the impact of the show, broadcast at a prime time, is real.

And if, as Julien Pirou reminds us in a recent book, "no police raid will handcuff an author or game publisher (...) the impact of these articles and these broadcasts is pernicious (...) the mistrust sets in”.

In fact, many role-players remember panicked reactions from their parents, principals and town halls: clubs closed, local associations taken over, books confiscated... It will take years for the practice to finally become commonplace and for the pop culture does the rest by presenting RPG from a more objective, if not more favorable angle.

And still, not everything is settled, as evidenced by season 3 of the

, centered on the dramatic consequences of a game baptized Griffons & Gargoyles – G&G for D&D, it is difficult to make clearer.

Mysteries, dramas, disappearances, demonic influence… With

, proof is made that the bad reputation of role-playing games is not entirely a thing of the past.

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Targeted communities, exaggerated threat… What is the concept of “moral panic”?

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