Going back at least to the 1690s, when the elders of colonial Salem, Mass., executed 20 women and men for supposedly practicing witchcraft, there have been Americans who find the devil’s hand in all manner of human activity.
Satanic messages have been ascribed to the corporate symbols of major companies like Starbucks and Procter & Gamble. Some religious fundamentalists are certain that 666, the number of the beast in the Book of Revelation, lurks in swirls that are central to the logos of the Olympic Games, Google Chrome and the Walt Disney Company. The Harry Potter series, with its incantations and wizardry, has also come under fire (and brimstone) for ostensibly promoting occultism.
Then there is Dungeons & Dragons, introduced in 1974 as the first role-playing game made commercially available. D&D players, working collaboratively, can let their minds roam free through stories about brave warriors locked in combat with trolls, orcs, dragons and other evildoers. The game’s millions of players include prominent writers like Junot Díaz and Cory Doctorow, who have described it as their apprenticeship to storytelling, a gateway to the essence of fantasy and narrative.
But not everyone has smiled benignly upon D&D. That is reflected in this offering from Retro Report, a series of video documentaries examining major news stories of the past and their reverberations.
The 1980s were prime years for accusations that the game fostered demon worship and a belief in witchcraft and magic. Some religious figures cast it as corrupting enough to steer impressionable young players toward suicide and murder. As Retro Report recalls, fears began to be stirred in 1979 with the disappearance of James Dallas Egbert III, a gifted 16-year-old student at Michigan State University and a devoted D&D player. The game warped his thinking and drove him to behave erratically — or so some insisted. In reality, the boy was already troubled. After a month’s absence, he was found. But in 1980 he ended up taking his own life.
A nationwide focus on his plight propelled interest in D&D. Sales soared, with the numbers of players leaping from the thousands into the millions. Condemnation rose as well, usually after bad things happened to D&D gamers. When Irving Lee Pulling II, a high school student in Virginia, killed himself in 1982, his mother, Patricia A. Pulling, blamed the game and formed a group called Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons. D&D was also attacked after a few murders, like the 1984 strangulation of a Missouri teenager, Mary C. Towey, by two young men, Ronald G. Adcox and Darren Lee Molitor.
A “moral panic,” as cultural critics labeled it, set in. It was not unlike 1950s fears over gory comic books and 1980s worries over sex-laced rock music. But researchers, including those with the Centers for Disease Control, established no causal link between the game and violence. Much of the finger-pointing seemed rooted in a classic fallacy in logic: Mr. Adcox and Mr. Molitor played D&D. Mr. Adcox and Mr. Molitor became killers. People who play D&D become killers.