Mazes and Monsters

Mazes and Monsters is a made-for-TV movie about a group of college students and their interest in the eponymous role-playing game (RPG). It was adapted from a novel by Rona Jaffe. She based her 1981 novel on newspaper stories about the disappearance of James Dallas Egbert III from Michigan State University in 1979. The real life story of Egbert was told by William Dear in his 1984 book Dungeon Master. Jaffe wrote her novel at a breakneck pace in a matter of days because of a fear that another author might also be fictionalizing the Egbert investigation.

Reaction

Though few parents heeded the "warning" espoused by this film, it generated angry reactions from fans of RPG games, especially fans of D&D, seeing it as a direct attack on their hobby. They claimed that the movie misrepresented the RPG-genre in a number of ways:

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• Depicting RPG players as mentally unstable
• To players, playing the game is "living out their fantasy," and few feel a desire for a real-life acting out of the elements found in the game
• The implication that RPG's are an occult activity and played in occult settings
• Most of the elements of an RPG are depicted inaccurately and are almost laughable in their portrayal

Despite their reaction, many non-players of the game believed it portrayed an accurate depiction of RPG games and their players. Since RPG's were a new genre of games in the early 1980s, most viewers had little else to base their opinions on.

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