Satanic Panic

The Satanic Panic was an issue that afflicted the tabletop roleplaying community, centering itself on the Dungeons & Dragons fandom, from a period of roughly the end of the 1970s to the start of the 1990s. In a nutshell, it boils down to American moralfags accusing D&D of being a bad influence on their communities and actively persecuting D&D players or anyone who could be mistaken as a D&D player.

Global Context

Or at least, we're talking largely about the Anglosphere. So let's backtrack just a second. American moralfags accusing D&D. Emphasis on American. The fact that there was no analogous (or at least proportionate) moral panic about Warhammer or, probably even worse, Warhammer 40,000, in the UK, definitely says something about the populations in question, at the very least about the relatively placid nature of the Established Church. It sure doesn't say anything about the content in question; I'd defy anyone to present any bit of contemporary D&D/AD&D lore that is as edgy as one page of content relating to Slaanesh or perhaps even the Realms of Chaos: Slaves to Darkness supplement as a whole (or even it's cover.)

We could go way, way, deep into the history of American religion (well, I guess part of the problem is that the relevant American religions are no more than a few hundred years old at most) to seek some of the justification for this (basically being that, starting around the end of the first quarter of the 19th century, especially in the frontier, anyone who fancied himself a preacher or prophet could set up shop and with enough charisma gain a following, even if what he was preaching had very traction on common sense, as long as was quick on his feet with often-out-of-context Bible verses.) This being a natural consequence of widely-dispersed settlements of small numbers of often ill-educated people, a pattern began to arise of easily-whipped-up religious hysteria on the part of what would be by the early 20th century known as "fundamentalist" Protestants.

Britain and continental Europe, on the other hand, having suffered much older, and much, much, much bloodier religious controversies than her wayward, westerly, stepchild, largely decided that there were bigger fish to fry theologically and worked in separate directions, traditional and modern, Catholic and Protestant, but seldom got hung up on single issues as did the "Pentecostal", "Evangelical" (a term with a very different meaning in U.S. English than German), and "fundamentalist" churches, which kicked off nothing remotely as extreme as the American "Satanic Panic," with the possible exception (in England anyhow) of [Inquisitor Greyfax|Mary Whitehouse]]'s campaign against "video nasties."

'Ere We Go

The roots of the whole mess began in 1979, when a trouble teenager named James Dallas Egbert III disappeared for a month after, reputedly, having earlier attempted to commit suicide in the utility tunnels under the campus of Michigan State University. Failing to off himself, he instead hid in a friend's house for a month. During that time, private investigator William Dear, hired by Egbert's parents, speculated to the media that he might have gotten lost during an attempt to use the utility tunnels for a Live Action Roleplaying session. The press, of course, ate this shit up, especially when Egbert went and blew his brains out in 1980.

This incident was later used by hack writers to produce the cheesey 1981 "horror" novels "Hobgoblin" and "Mazes and Monsters", both of which had the basic idea of "roleplayer loses his mind because of roleplaying and ultimately ends up killing or nearly killing himself" - Mazes and Monsters even got a freaking film adaptation a year later.

This controversy was bad enough, but at the time, America was tying itself up in knots over widespread fears about the existence of Satan-worshiping cultists being everywhere, seeking to subvert Good Old Traditional Values and commit murder, rape and torture. The advent of real albeit relatively harmless "Satanic" groups like the Church of Satan as well as other cults that allegedly kidnapped and brainwashed children gave Jerry Falwell's growing Moral Majority movement and other Christian fundamentalists even more fuel for their paranoia. At the same time, therapists and social workers were pushing for greater recognition of child sexual abuse as a serious crime, and in spite of their good intentions they developed a tendency to be overzealous in investigating possible abuse; this was itself exacerbated further by the growing awareness of post-traumatic stress disorder and the assumption that memories "recovered" via hypnosis were perfectly accurate representations of events, (as opposed to being artificially induced by the therapists and social workers themselves). All these things became a heady brew together, all thanks to one asshole:

Meet Patricia Pulling. When this fuckwit's son Irving killed himself in 1982, she claimed it was because he had been placed under a "D&D curse". She tried to sue first Irving's principal, and then TSR itself. Naturally, the legal system threw her out on her ear, noting that this made absolutely no sense and that the more logical answer had to do with pre-existing social and psychological problems, such as being bullied at school. But the damage was done in giving her a public appearance to begin with.

Inspired by the two-year legal battle, some fucktards in Canada produced the 1983 film "Skullduggery", which went a step beyond its equivalents from before, where a roleplaying game explicitly identified as D&D (Hobgoblin had titled itself after a fictitious Celtic-themed RPG, whilst Mazes & Monsters had used its same-name D&D pastiche) ultimately turned a player into a serial-killing lunatic.

Furthermore, by 1983 Mrs. Pulling was making connection with a bunch of fundy Christian groups, and also with Illinois psychiatrist Thomas Radecki, director of the National Coalition on Television Violence. Together, they founded Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons - a collection of religious bigots, bullies, jerks, clueless parents and assorted well-meaning but brainless idiots out to stop the depredation of "evil D&D". When Pulling's case was finally dismissed in 1984, BADD (a name that implies someone on the marketing team was phenomenally self-aware or unaware) went into full attack mode. Incidentally, the infamous Dark Dungeons tract by Jack Chick was written during that same year.

It must be repeated that BADD lost every single attempt at litigation they ever attempted, but the credulous public ate up their bullshit and responded by shitting on D&D players everywhere. Teachers, parents, Christian pastors and even on occasion the police tried to stomp on those who liked to roleplay; they used everything from verbal and emotional harassment to seizing and destroying roleplaying materials, blocking RPG groups from using public spaces to socialize, sabotaging groups by planting false evidence of satanic rituals, and/or possession of drugs and/or pornographic materials before calling the police, tacitly encouraging violence, theft and abuse being directed against gamers, privacy invasion, expulsion from school for continuing to play after a ban had been put in place and harassment/arrest for supposed satanic desecration of graves and churches.

Reactions

Amazingly, during the 80s, the gaming community seemed to actually just take this shit. For a significant portion of the 80s, the prevailing attitude was one of apologetic self-censorship, striving to prove that they were moral people by passive resistance. However, behind the scenes, angry players were going on the attack; writers began publishing investigations into the seedier side of many anti-D&D big names in Dragon Magazine. The academic credentials of Thomas Radecki and Patricia Pulling were debunked. Numerous links were forged with academics and government agencies studying youth suicide and academic publications on gaming were collated and made available to gamers wanting to investigate and/or debunk anti-RPG claims.

Gamers began to coordinate lobbying campaigns by phone, letters, public forums, the burgeoning internet and word of mouth as a means of informing the media, law enforcement, educators and local government about RPGs and their role in youth culture. Links were forged with the Skeptics Society and other secularist organizations who had been independently questioning the existence of "Satanic ritual abuse". Articles were written in Skeptics Society journals and journals of psychology, and law enforcement officers and criminologists, such as Robert Hicks, began to debunk and expose the supernaturalist origins of anti-gaming claims and question their relevance in law enforcement initiatives. Perhaps the greatest blow to B.A.D.D, Patricia Pulling’s and Thomas Radecki’s credibility was the publication of Michael Stackpole’s “Pulling Report” in 1989, which severely criticized the ethics and methodology of anti-RPG campaigners, provided conclusive evidence that the suicide rate was lower amongst roleplayers, and was widely distributed amongst law enforcement, educational bodies, game manufacturers, gamers and government agencies.

The cultural zeitgeist changed: Thanks to years of work by D&D's defenders and other skeptics, the "Satanic Ritual Abuse" phenomenon being exposed as equal parts mass hysteria and con artistry, and the recurring failure of its attackers to actually win any legal battles or otherwise fail to avoid being debunked, people grew out of it. People tried to keep the fire of it going - for example, in 1988, authorities chose to focus on Chris Pritchard's being a D&D player as the "reason" for his murdering his stepfather, rather than his long history of mutual antagonism and his heavy drug & alcohol use - but years of moral hysteria with no actual payoff, combined with a steady stream of actual intelligence and growing information access revealing that most of the supposed witnesses giving "testimony" to the abuse were remembering things that never actually happened and couldn't have possibly happened as described (such as accounts of people flying or mass human sacrifices in an area where such activity would never have gone unnoticed), had robbed BADD and its fellow shitheads of any significant standing from anyone beyond fundamentalists and the paranoid. When, in 1989, an absolute fuck by the name of William Schnoebelen published a pair of articles that claimed D&D was a New Age Satanist front to steal people away from Christianity, most people looked at how he claimed D&D could actually summon real fiends and work real magic (and the fact he was being bankrolled by Jack Chick) and dismissed him for the mindless screwhead he was.

Not That BADD

Ironically, the Satanic Panic had some rather positive effects on the RPG world:

• First and foremost, it was instrumental in forging a shared sense of community amongst roleplayers of all types; they might still bicker and argue over internal minutia, but now they'll come together in the face of an outside threat. Prior to the Panic, RPGers had just been hobbyists; coming together for support under the Panic's suffocating blanket made them a culture in their own right.
• Secondly, it established roots between roleplayers and alternative religious subcultures. Though the sentiment is waning now, during the late 80s and the 90s, the roleplaying community became extremely critical of Christianity, if not outright hostile. The years in which the most public face of all Christian churches and doctrines had been of violent bigots eager to oppress people for their "sin" of enjoying the innocent pasttime of roleplaying had bred a strong resentment of Christianity into the RPG community despite the fact that one of the game's two co-inventors, Gary Gygax, was Christian himself. The only good things to come out of this are an increase in fact-checking among all sides involved and a willingness to branch out in story elements, which led to the rise of games franchises like Call of Cthulhu in the 80s and White Wolf in the 90's.

The Satanic Panic in the Modern Era

There are still some lingering attempts to tap into this long-dead phenomena - in 2013, several news articles claimed that in Israel, playing D&D was actually frowned upon by the Israeli Defence Force. Almost immediately, reporters who'd done actual research reported that this was complete bullshit; D&D is hugely popular in Israel, to the point that a good DM can actually get paid money for being willing to run peoples' games. This situation in the IDF was probably confined to the certain type of Jewish fundamentalist who objects to pictures of women being published in newspapers. Fundamentalists, who by their very nature assume that any form of media not exclusively about praising Jesus must be a tool of the devil, still sometimes make the same old complaints under the pretense that "the Satanists are powerful enough to hide the evidence" in-between bouts of attacking other boogeymen of the day, but nobody listens outside of their own echo chambers for the most part. While the panic has never truly stopped since its inception, the major driving forces have long since subsided in the eyes of the public.

On an amusing note, Thomas Radecki would later be arrested in 2013 and sentenced for 11-22 years in prison for over-prescribing addictive opioids through a crooked rehab program, dealing in proceeds of unlawful activity, and trading said opioids to 13 different female patients in exchange for sex. Figures that the loudest moral guardians always have a few skeletons in their closets.

This was the Satanic Panic. Good fucking riddance, but it's a shame that history keeps repeating itself.