[THEORY] An odd thought about Star Trek and the history of D&D -- Am I wrong?

Please bear in mind that I am by no means an expert in the history of D&D, but I imagine that several people on this forum must be far more knowledgeable than I am.

I know that in 1982 one overwrought conspiracy theory blamed the game itself for one gamer's suicide, and RPGs in general (among which only D&D had broad name recognition in its own right) were villified for several years. 
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It was in 1989 that I (then 12yr old) first saw D&D for sale in a toy store, and I've often wondered what event triggered the turnaround in public perception to reinvigorate the game and make today's far more richly diverse RPG market possible. 

Last night, I was watching Star Trek: The Next Generation on Netflix, and I think that the answer smacked me in the face. 

Season one, episode 12: "The Big Goodbye" (originally aired January 11 of 1988). In which Captain Picard makes use of the holodeck to play out an adventure game in the role of an in-universe fictional character, the 20th century private detective Dixon Hill. 

The Captain of a starship, by all indications a mature and accomplished responsible adult. A good role model; playing an RPG. 

And as I was re-watching the episode last night, I was struck by the... hunch that this was the inciting event to D&D's resurgence shortly thereafter. 

So, people who know more than I do about the history of D&D; do you know of any reason why this hunch of mine is wrong?‎‎

ST:TNG was hardly the cause of this. More likely it was just using a bit of pop culture to build an episode around.

See, despite that negative PR by some nut jobs in the early 80's? D&D (and other RPGs) flourished. YEARS before ST:TNG, D&D had a cartoon on Saturday morning TV. It had a line of toys. A long running series of "choose-your-own-adventure" books. The Basic & Expert boxed sets were widely sold through mass market retail (here in the USA that was KB Toys, Childrens Palace, Toys-R-Us, the Sears & JC Penny Christmas catalogues etc). The AD&D (1e) books & adventure modules were sold in all the main stream book stores of the time. And the selection got more varied once you found your way to a specialty hobby or comic shop.
And the original Dragonlance novels were best sellers. People who had no idea what the game was read them.
There were plenty of D&D style movies through the 80's.
All before ST:TNG.

Oh, and eventually the nut jobs were pretty much debunked/laughed off the stage. Once that happened & there wasn't a "story" who's negativity could be mined for ratings the media quit caring.

Umm...

I'd argue that most Star Trek viewers are already part of 'geek culture' and thus this is an example of 'preaching to the converted'. I doubt it had any effect on D&D's resurgence (assuming you agree that there's actually been a resurgence at about this time).

By the time that particular episode played on TV I had already played several iterations of D&D, Dragonquest, Call of Cthulhu, Gamma World, Space Opera, Paranoia, Rolemaster, Top Secret, James Bond 007..... just to name a few. That's not even a comprehensive list of what was available at the time. Since D&D's initial success, there have been a plethora of RPGs. Because they were seen as "geeky" and "uncool", they just didn't make it to mainstream consciousness. With the mining of geek culture and the growth of the Internet, such things have simply become more obvious.

Also at this time D&D had an image change, in the 2nd Edition of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons many of the references to Demons and Devils were removed from the text, the removal of the Assassin class, and other tweaks to make it more friendly to users and to take away any of the occult accusations from the early eighties. From a marketing perspecitive, TSR did something interesting in 1989 and 1990 for the BECMI they got rid of the Red Box in favor of a board game shaped Black Box which made it look better on store shelves and more attractive to parents and children treating it as a regular board game.

Also, there was an episode of the original Trek series where the crew encountered a recreation planet that did the same thing as the holodeck, only with fabricated robots instead of holograms. At the end, the caretaker of the planet shows up and he and Kirk converse about how play is important for working minds.

You know what they say — correlation is not causation. More likely is that both things were responses to the same environment.


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MechaPilot said:

Also, there was an episode of the original Trek series where the crew encountered a recreation planet that did the same thing as the holodeck, only with fabricated robots instead of holograms. At the end, the caretaker of the planet shows up and he and Kirk converse about how play is important for working minds.

Click to expand...

To paraphrase, "The more complex the mind, the greater the need for the simplicity of play."

Ryujin said:

To paraphrase, "The more complex the mind, the greater the need for the simplicity of play."

Click to expand...

Or else you find yourself going
[video=youtube_share;ZtjkYF-nv1I]https://youtu.be/ZtjkYF-nv1I?t=39[/video]

Moral panics come and go. MAinly because the most of the masses do not have long term memory.