The Great Dungeons & Dragons Scare of the 1980s

One of the most absurd and even comical scares in history was that over Dungeons & Dragons in the early '80s.  The game had been released a few years before, and many kids of my generation were fascinated by the imaginative nature of it.

I remember first walking into my cousin's bedroom to find a bunch of pencils and paper and strange looking dice around the floor.  I asked where the game was and they said that was it.  I didn't get it until about halfway through the game when I started picturing everything in my mind.  Our whole party got killed, (that often happened in first edition,) but I was blown away by the possibilities.

Of course, since it became popular, the parents all had to panic over it, especially the religious ones, which was the community my family lived among.  I even went to a religious school, and there were outcries for the books to be burned or buried and for kids to stay away from the evil.  God forbid any of them should actually do any research and learn what D&D actually was.

There was even a TV movie made about it starring Tom Hanks in his very first ever role where he loses his mind to the game.  I was excited to watch it thinking it was going to be a D&D story made into a movie.  You know, something productive.  But instead it warned about a danger that didn't exist.  News specials followed, and warnings to parents.  Of course, none of them actually did any research into what was going on.

Even 60 Minutes fell for the hype, doing a whole special where they described kids who had been "hooked" to the game that killed themselves.  In every instance the kids had other problems, such as substance abuse or child abuse problems, or sometimes poverty or something like that.  But no, it's the game that's the problem.

I didn't realize until recently how much of this was a generational gap issue.  It took me a long time to accept the fact that the Baby Boomer generation is simply the laziest and most judgmental in a long time.  They are absolutely the type of generation that would see something unusual and, rather than learn about it, they just pass judgment on it.  Far from the social change generation they pretend to be, they were the generation that expected conformity, and adjusted the change worse than anyone.

The '70s and '80s were a period of fearing the unknown.  The Cold War was winding down.  Terrorism and the ambiguous war in Vietnam left people uncertain who and what to trust.  That mixed with the strong religious ties that generation had made for a mixture of manufactured fears.  Additionally, being a pre-internet time, learning the truth, or countering rumors took effort that was hard for anyone to do, especially a generation of entitled people who didn't want to do any research.

And thus, the fear mongering of D&D took hold, giving it the Satanic reputation it had.  This video below gives an even better in-depth description of this fear, and of the generation gap that caused it.