By Don Jolly

Dangerous Games: What the Moral Panic over Role-Playing Games Says About Play, Religion and Imagined Worlds. Joseph P. Laycock. University of California Press, 2015.

Sharpen a pencil and get out a piece of scratch paper. Get some dice from the Risk set in the hallway. Come back when you’re finished. I’m being serious about this. 

Ready?

First off, we need to figure out who you are, exactly. Pick up one of your dice and roll it. If it’s a one, two, or three, you’re male. Otherwise, female. Write this down. Give yourself a name. Your age is 30 plus four dice rolls — minimum 34, maximum 54. Write that down too.

Next, determine your profession. Roll another die. Roll a one, and you’re a private investigator. Two, a stay-at-home parent. Three, a preacher. You can pick your denomination. Four indicates you’re in law enforcement — either a police detective or an F.B.I. agent or some variety of administrator. Roll five and you’re a religious media personality — an evangelist who travels from church to church, giving lectures and distributing tracts. A roll of six means you have two professions — roll again, twice, re-rolling any additional sixes.

Now, let’s find out some of the details of your personality. To do this, you will need two dice you can tell apart — die “A” and die “B.” Maybe they’re different colors, or maybe you just roll the same die twice, taking the first result as “A” and the second as “B.”

Whatever your preference, roll the pair three times, recording the results like so: “A2B5, A5B1, A1B6.” Compare each of these results to the following list. Each roll reveals some new facet of your character. Write this information down, rolling again if you get any repeats.

A1B1 — You know, with absolute certainty, the reality of God

A1B2 — You have felt the Devil’s great strength, working in the world

A1B3 — Your father drank

A1B4 — You grew up watching monster movies: Dracula, the Wolfman — stuff like that

A1B5 — You know that Revelation is real, and that the end times are near

A1B6 — You’ve never shot a man, but you lie and say you have

A2B1 — You have a framed photo of yourself shaking hands with President Reagan

A2B2 — You must constantly battle temptation

A2B3 — People are constantly plotting against you

A2B4 — You’re not paranoid

A2B5 — You read The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe until the binding broke

A2B6 — The divorce was hard on you

A3B1 — You’ve put on a little weight, but you still look good

A3B2 — You can intimidate people easily

A3B3 — When you think about the state of things, you feel like crying

A3B4 — Radio, T.V., popular film — it’s all just mind control

A3B5 — Teenagers scare you. They seem blank these days — soulless

A3B6 — You love your children more than anything

A4B1 — You know that all this misery started when they took God out of the schools

A4B2 — The worst day of your life was when your son committed suicide

A4B3 — Parts of your memory have been recovered by a hypnotist from Kansas City

A4B4 — Your parents were Satanists, and they raised you in the Church of Satan

A4B5 — You have the potential to be the Anti-Christ

A4B6 — You’ve become an expert in “occult crime.” Your work saves lives

A5B1 — You can see patterns in the killings on the news — a hidden witchcraft

A5B2 — When you pray, you feel profound warmth radiating from within

A5B3 — You fast, sometimes. The longest lasted as many days as two dice rolls

A5B4 — There are many demons out to get you — and they come in many forms

A5B5 — You have seen the Necronomicon

A5B6 — You have a gun. You won’t let them take it without a fight.

A6B1 — It breaks your heart, what happens to bright kids on their own

A6B2 — You used to play sports; no more

A6B3 — You have a reoccurring nightmare, but never talk about it

A6B4 — You see signs and signals everywhere. God is telling you something

A6B5 — You remember how great America was, but that’s all over now

A6B6 — Without glasses, all you can see is a soft blur

You see a vast Satanic conspiracy. It’s everywhere, worming into the lives of kids too dumb and numb and disconnected to tell damnation from grace.

What do you do?

+++

Dungeons & Dragons, the popular role-playing game created by midwestern wargamers Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax in the 1970s, functions very much like the preceding experiment. In D&D, players roll dice to generate an alternative persona, a “character” whose role they assume during play. During a D&D game, however, the person asking “What do you do?” is another player: the dungeon master or DM. They serve as a kind of combination narrator and referee. The DM sets the scene, describing what your fictive double sees and hears. What is done with this stimulus is up to you — and the “you” enumerated on a sheet of notebook paper.

According to the anthropologist Gary Alan Fine, a game of D&D, requires players to enact several frames of reality simultaneously. The first frame is composed of the mundane: a group of friends sitting around a table, tossing dice and talking. Or a person sitting with their laptop, reading a book review and, improbably, following its instructions.  The second frame contains the game’s rules: the pattern of die rolls it demands and the mechanism by which those rolls are given meaning. Here, two dice showing 2 and 4 are contextualized as A2B4 — “You’re not paranoid.” Finally, there is the third frame —  an interactive narrative generated by the creativity of players in interaction with the rules. If you imagined how your alternate self in the first section might react to “a vast Satanic conspiracy,” the content of that fantasy is in the third frame.

In D&D and similar role-playing games, the fun lies in giving some measure of “belief” to a fantasy contrived by the imagination of your friends: “For a few hours, everyone agrees to accept that world, to accept the pretense that you are a magician who can throw exploding balls of fire from one hand,” said the game designer John Eric Holmes in an article on the subject for Psychology Today. “The fantasy has become a reality, a sort of folie á deux, or shared insanity.”

Ironically, outsider perceptions of this “shared insanity” have spawned insanities of their own. In 1979, a brilliant young college student and occasional D&D player named James Dallas Egbert III (AKA, Dallas) vanished from the campus of Michigan State University. With the national media watching, Egbert’s family hired a grandstanding private investigator named William Dear to find their son. Dear set to work immediately, exploring what he thought was a complicated web of clues Dallas had left behind — a web of fantasy and the occult which, Dear believed, Dallas had constructed during a game of D&D become terrifyingly “real.”

In fact, Dallas had just been anxious and depressed. He ran away to escape academic pressure and the difficulties of being young, gay, and out. After about a month, he called his family and asked to come home. By that time, however, Dear’s narrative had assumed a life of its own. For many who followed the story, Dungeons & Dragons became irretrievably linked with the idea of gifted young men led astray by occult fantasies.

The resurgent Christian right was especially fascinated with this idea. For them, D&D became known as a game that could drive smart children to acts of sadism and suicide — a cursed object, capable of dismantling a young person’s sense of reality. In the 1980s and 90s, moral crusaders of every description came emerged from the woodwork with denounce role-playing games as satanic, dangerously imaginative and purposely perverse. “You” would’ve fit right in.

In Dangerous Games: What the Moral Panic over Role-Playing Games Says about Play, Religion and Imagined Worlds, released this February from the University of California Press, professor Joseph P. Laycock surveys the various insanities shared by both role-playing gamers and their religious opponents from the 1970s to the turn of the century. It’s a big, odd topic, but Laycock approaches it with admirable clarity. The result is an indispensable resource for anyone with an interest in role-playing games. More than that, however, Laycock’s volume serves to break apart accepted divisions between “reality” and “fantasy,” “serious” and “play,” examining the historical origin of various “programs of truth” and the ways in which they have been undermined. It is, for the most part, a virtuosic performance.

Laycock begins by presenting a history of role-playing games and the “moral panic” surrounding them, touching on everything from D&D’s antecedents in the wargames of the early twentieth century to the panic about “real life vampires” inspired by Vampire: The Masquerade, one of D&D’s most influential descendants (One of Dr. Laycock’s earlier books discussed the Vampire phenomenon in detail).

Histories of the hobby have appeared before, but Laycock’s is at once the most readable and one of the most comprehensive. With few alterations, this initial portion of Dangerous Games could be sold as an introduction to the social phenomena of role-playing games as a whole.

By placing its focus somewhere between games, gamers and their ideological opponents, Dangerous Games resists the temptation of insularity presented by its highly technical and self-involved subject matter. Laycock’s history rarely dives into individual game rules or the complete dogmas of D&D’s religious foes. Instead, the author shows discernment in selecting material for inclusion. When a specific game rule is discussed (D&D’s hardwired system of moral “alignments” is given a thorough overview) Laycock takes pains to underline its relevance to the “moral panic,” making sure even minor mechanical points are pulling their weight as part of Games’ argument. As a result, the historical portion of Dangerous Games contains few blind alleys.

My single complaint about Laycock’s history occurs when he discusses the various products released by the White Wolf game company of Stone Mountain, Georgia. Through titles like Vampire: The Masquerade and Werewolf: The Apocalypse, White Wolf presented players with the opportunity to imagine themselves as supernatural creatures living clandestinely in the modern world. According to Laycock, “White Wolf distinguished itself by emphasizing role-playing over rules,” a conscious attempt to “steer the role-playing game away” from its sometimes legalistic origins. While this intent on the part of White Wolf did exist, Laycock’s description of the company and its products sometimes resembles advertising copy.

When discussing D&D, Lacock allows for the juxtaposition between how the game’s producers would like it to be played and how adolescents actually play it. Often, Laycock acknowledges, the elevated fantasies of Tolkien are a far-cry from the typical D&D session. The former finds its cornerstone in moments of surprising, victorious grace. The latter often devolves into a medieval crime spree. Laycock admits to being a Vampire partisan in the 1990s, explaining that as a high school student playing White Wolf’s game, he “discussed philosophy with female college students in leather corsets.” A little brand loyalty is to be expected, I suppose, but my own experience with D&D makes me wonder what, precisely those co-eds had to say.

Following its historical material, Dangerous Games moves on to a theoretical analysis.. This section, divided into three chapters (“How Role-Playing Games Create Meaning”, “How the Imagination Became Dangerous” and “Rival Fantasies”) is more uneven than its predecessor but remains successful on the whole.

Most of Games’ problems occur in “How Role-Playing Games Create Meaning.” Laycock’s explanation for this process draws on a variety of theorists and thinkers, from Mircea Eliade and Emile Durkheim to Tolkien and Peter Berger. Some of the ideas contributed by these figures are essential to the argument of the book. Others are not.

However convincing its quotations, this chapter is based on an unconvincing model of religious studies scholarship – the one interested in pointing out the “religious” elements of supposedly “irreligious” phenomena. Laycock’s “games,” then are like “religion.” They require ritual, they sometimes lead to an interest in the “occult,” and so on. There are moments of interest and necessary insight in the chapter. They are, however, sadly outnumbered.

The final two chapters are the highlight of Dangerous Games. In “How the Imagination Became Dangerous,” the author gives a capsule history of panics regarding the confusion of fiction and fantasy from the Greeks to 18^th century anxiety about the overexcitement elicited in women by the reading of novels.. These outrages, Laycock explains, serve to demonstrate the shifting lines of truth and fiction, the “serious” and the “playful.” The rules of such distinction are produced by “projects of truth.” Other projects have murkier aims. Today, games – and God – confound the truth-tellers. As Laycock says, “the imagination is inherently threatening to those who seek to preserve order and the status quo.”

In his final chapter, “Rival Fantasies,” Laycock explores the similarities between role-players and their opponents, concluding that, “both get to experience being heroes who save the world from the powers of darkness.”

Those who imagine D&D to be a tendril of Satan’s influence in the world condemn “these games” because doing so is the “only way [available] to enjoy them” short of abandoning the particular truth programs in which their outrage was allowed to grow.

Actually playing D&D would force its faithful opponents to realize that the same program of imaginative truth used to construct “religion” can be deployed with altered terminology as a “game.” Tear down the wall of “play,” and the universe collapses.

Dangerous Games, like Kathryn Lofton’s 2011 study Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon, renders a somewhat incomprehensible pop-culture phenomenon comprehensible.. It not only vindicates its project but serves to demonstrate that the behaviors and epistemologies rudely swept into category of “religion” are, in actuality, relevant to far more of the modern world than most assume.

At their worst, studies of the religious thread in popular culture can be perfunctory and superficial. Laycock’s Dangerous Games is neither.

Pick it up. While you’re reading, keep the piece of paper you filled in a few minutes ago. As you read, figure out what “you” think of Dangerous Games.

Take this experiment seriously.  Everyone else does.

***

Don Jolly looks human but isn’t. His work has appeared on Boing Boing, the Los Angeles Review of Books and The Ampersand Review.