Role-playing game

:This article is about traditional role-playing games. See computer role-playing games for their digital counterparts.

Controversy

Almost from the beginning of the role-playing hobby there have been those who have leveled accusations of connections to devil worship, as well as claims that role-playing games lead to suicide.

Related Topics:
Devil worship - Suicide

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The most famous case perhaps being the work of author Rona Jaffe that exploited the hysteria surrounding Dungeons & Dragons in her novel Mazes and Monsters, a thinly-veiled attack on Dungeons & Dragons, released in a time when very few people who didn't play Dungeons & Dragons knew what it actually was about. The book was turned into a TV movie featuring a young Tom Hanks in the key role of a mentally unstable collegian who experiences a psychotic episode and loses himself in the game world. It should be noted that the allegations in the book and film were based on faulty interpretation of William Dear's 1979 investigation. Dear, a private investigator, searched for a wealthy college student, James Dallas Egbert III. While the search proved successful, the brilliant and depressed boy committed suicide after a quarrel with his domineering father. Dear later wrote The Dungeon Master: The Disappearance of James Dallas Egbert III http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1669998 written from case notes. The author described his own experiences learning D&D, as a key to understanding Egbert's withdrawal from reality. Dear also makes it explicitly clear that Egbert's suicide had more to do with family troubles than with roleplaying games. http://ptgptb.org/0006/egbert.html

Related Topics:
Rona Jaffe - Mazes and Monsters - TV movie - Tom Hanks - William Dear - James Dallas Egbert III

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Such negative portrayals of role-players, ironically, may have originated from an initial inability of some outside observers to properly differentiate between reality and the immersive role-playing aspects of gameplay. Perception, or rather misperception, has been the major prejudice that role-players have had to face over the years.

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Religious fundamentalists such as Jack Chick (famous for the anti-RPG tract Dark Dungeons) claim that role-players gain (or seek to gain) the ability to cast "spells" and use "magic" and as such are anathema and anti-God. Such accusations continued well beyond the 1980s and into the 1990s.

Related Topics:
Religious - Fundamentalist - Jack Chick - Dark Dungeons - God

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Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons (BADD) was an organization founded by Patricia Pulling after her son (Irving "Bink" Pulling) committed suicide which she believed was from playing the game. Pulling wrote Interviewing Techniques For Adolescents (1988), a primer for police officers who are dealing with crimes that involve role-playing games.

Related Topics:
Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons - Patricia Pulling

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Studies by Michael Stackpole and others have explored the connection between gaming and suicide and have generally concluded that it does not seem to encourage suicide. In The Pulling Report http://www.rpg.net/sites/252/quellen/stackpole/pulling_report.html (1990), Stackpole uses BADD's own statistics, the suicide rate is actually lower among gamers than non-gamers. Moreover, attempts to catalog incidents which would link role-playing to self-destructive, occult, or obsessive behavior have been observed to typically devolve into myth chasing and sorting through hysterical urban legends, as addressed by Jeffrey S. Victor in his book Satanic Panic (1993).

Related Topics:
Michael Stackpole - Jeffrey S. Victor

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The Swedish National Board for Youth Affairs has published a report on "role-playing as a hobby". The report describes role-playing as a stimulating hobby that promotes creativity.

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Recently, two crimes in Brazil against RPG gamers shocked the Brazilian society http://www.estadao.com.br/cidades/noticias/2005/mai/14/73.htm http://noticias.terra.com.br/brasil/interna/0,,OI532260-EI306,00.html; a discussion in the press about the permission of these games by parents, based on the lack of information, cruelty and format of these crimes, was exposed in the media. In Espírito Santo, the site of the crimes, law projects to ban RPG games have been initiated by religious leaders in the local deliberative assembly. http://www.a-arca.com/v2/noticiasdt.asp?sec=4&ssec=4&cdn=6726.

Related Topics:
Brazil - Espírito Santo

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