D&D in the 80s, Fads, and the Satanic Panic

[Wolfram stout]

Can you remember any specific shows with those panels, and which mainstream news programs might have hosted them other than the famous 60 Minutes episode?


Perhaps we're having a bit of a semantic issue here. There are (depending on how you count) around 15,000 - 18,000 state and local law enforcement agencies in the US. Whether fraudulent trainers on nonexistent "satanic crime waves" are mainstream kind of depends on how common they are, and perhaps whether their teachings were ever incorporated into larger national or regional training kinds or materials, no?

You can have a little cottage industry of these charlatans bilking money out of Bible belt departments run by misguided Evangelicals without it ever becoming a common thing for most departments or agencies.

While I thought the Phil Donohue show had an episode I can't find the specifics, but I did find an episode of Geraldo Rivera show from Oct 1988 that was on "Exposing Satan's Underground". I have not gone back and watched it so I don't know the details. I found the general listing on IMDB.com

 

[Mannahnin]

While I thought the Phil Donohue show had an episode I can't find the specifics, but I did find an episode of Geraldo Rivera show from Oct 1988 that was on "Exposing Satan's Underground". I have not gone back and watched it so I don't know the details. I found the general listing on IMDB.com

Right. Those are the "tabloid TV talk shows" I referenced. Geraldo, Phil Donohue, Sally Jesse Raphael, Morton Downey Jr., etc.

Certainly those were mainstream media, but they had a lot of frauds and hucksters on; at least as many as reputable experts.

 

[Parmandur]

That certainly wasn't my experience. Among all the gamers at my school anyway, pretty much anyone who played had bought--at minimum--the Player's Handbook, the Monster Manual, and the Dungeon Master's Guide. The kids who were hardcore players typically also had the Fiend Folio and Deities and Demigods. I didn't see any greater or lesser book-purchasing habits among DMs than among players: in our school they seemed pretty equal.

Yeah, one experience or the other doesn't tell us too much: however, thst there was such a close correlation of PHB and DMG purchases suggests that the DM as book buyer model was more common, along with modern WotC customer data and 5E DM-centric prodict design. after the failure of the 3E attempt to sell to everyone at the table...

 

[Deset Gled]

Can you remember any specific shows with those panels, and which mainstream news programs might have hosted them other than the famous 60 Minutes episode?

I found a surprisingly interesting Tik Tok channel that specializes in old videos from the Satanic Panic. Lots of good stuff here, mostly from VHS tapes: Satanic Panic at the Disco TikTok

Were the Avalon Hill ones (and those of that style) aimed at older? Did the public at large have any consciousness of them?

The two adult board games that immediately come to my mind first are Risk (a staple of late nights at college, arguably a "light" war game) and Trivial Pursuit. But there are others that are clearly just as much for adults as kids, including Scrabble, chess, backgammon, etc.

 

[Cadence]

I found a surprisingly interesting Tik Tok channel that specializes in old videos from the Satanic Panic. Lots of good stuff here, mostly from VHS tapes: Satanic Panic at the Disco TikTok



The two adult board games that immediately come to my mind first are Risk (a staple of late nights at college, arguably a "light" war game) and Trivial Pursuit. But there are others that are clearly just as much for adults as kids, including Scrabble, chess, backgammon, etc.

I had Trivial pursuit coming out much later in my head!

 

[Bedrockgames]

Can you remember any specific shows with those panels, and which mainstream news programs might have hosted them other than the famous 60 Minutes episode?

Well, 60 minutes was as mainstream as it gets, but I remember it being aired on network news, it certainly made its way onto day time talk shows. It was not just the 60 minutes program. And you had TV movies like Mazes and Monsters, the book it was based on. You also had a ton of religious programing about it (which people can dismiss as fringe, but stuff like the 700 club and Jerry Falwell had considerable cultural pull in the 80s). I believe i even posted clips I found from old news shows here and elsewhere in previous threads (but I can't recall exact programs off the top of my head). And if you go beyond D&D, into music and ritual satanic abuse allegations, that was on pretty much everything, from the nightly news, to daily talkshows and more. But again, just pointing to my own experience of guidance counselors who expressed grave concern about D&D, and people I knew who were in therapy where that was the source of the household ban (not religion). I am not saying it was satanic panic all the way down in the mental health field at that time, but you had all kinds of people testifying in court cases, appearing on TV and showing up in peoples daily lives who seemed to believe there was a potential issue with the game.

Again, I am not claiming my memory is the sole arbiter here, but what I recall from living through it, is that it was quite mainstream for a number of years (and obviously some of that is going to be regional: there was a lot more Satanic panic when I was living in the west coast than I encountered living in the east coast---but the panic was also dying down by the time I moved back east so not sure how much of an impact that had). I think people also tend to forget how religious the country was in the early 80s. I also think people tend to forget how conservative the mental health field could be at that time too.

 

[Mannahnin]

Oh, I know, but being a "board wargame" was not being a "board game" and I imagine you would get some angry stares walking into a board game event and asking them how they liked their board games.

I'm honestly not sure! I had a few of these games, but in my early con-going days in the 80s, getting in on a game of Yaquinto's Adventurer, GW's Talisman, or GDW's Harpoon was kind of a consolation if I couldn't get into a D&D game.

The Peterson books definitely talk about about how the board wargamers kind of saw themselves as grownups and of a more historical and scholarly bent than the fantasy gamers.

 

[Warpiglet-7]

cough**QAnon**cough

So what you are telling me is hard to grasp. Are you insinuating that we are NOT being run by reptilian humanoids that were modeled on the 4 hit die creatures in the game?

You do know that most things from D&D were first talked about in the actual world/earth? These monsters come from somewhere.

When I pay my taxes I KNOW they are financing the breeding rodents for a reason. Food. Until you can show me a detailed list of government expenditures, you have not disproven the presence of the child abusing lizards.

Keep living in your dreamland! No wonder so many of you play Dungeons and Dragons! It’s practicing keeping your head in the fantasy land! Pretending our pizza parlors are safe and that our lizard overlords are beneficent!

Edited: bad grammar in a dire warning!

 

[Mannahnin]

Well, 60 minutes was as mainstream as it gets, but I remember it being aired on network news, it certainly made its way onto day time talk shows. It was not just the 60 minutes program. And you had TV movies like Mazes and Monsters, the book it was based on. You also had a ton of religious programing about it (which people can dismiss as fringe, but stuff like the 700 club and Jerry Falwell had considerable cultural pull in the 80s). I believe i even posted clips I found from old news shows here and elsewhere in previous threads (but I can't recall exact programs off the top of my head). And if you go beyond D&D, into music and ritual satanic abuse allegations, that was on pretty much everything, from the nightly news, to daily talkshows and more. But again, just pointing to my own experience of guidance counselors who expressed grave concern about D&D, and people I knew who were in therapy where that was the source of the household ban (not religion). I am not saying it was satanic panic all the way down in the mental health field at that time, but you had all kinds of people testifying in court cases, appearing on TV and showing up in peoples daily lives who seemed to believe there was a potential issue with the game.

Again, I am not claiming my memory is the sole arbiter here, but what I recall from living through it, is that it was quite mainstream for a number of years (and obviously some of that is going to be regional: there was a lot more Satanic panic when I was living in the west coast than I encountered living in the east coast---but the panic was also dying down by the time I moved back east so not sure how much of an impact that had). I think people also tend to forget how religious the country was in the early 80s. I also think people tend to forget how conservative the mental health field could be at that time too.

I agree with you that the panic was fairly mainstream in the culture. Again, I met people even here in New England who bought into it.

My recollection from a few decades of hobby study, including a bit of formal undergraduate study in the 90s, was that there was never any peer-reviewed or substantive scientific, psychological, or medical evidence to support there being anything harmful or dangerous about roleplaying.

And in fact the opposite, as later studies demonstrated, such as the ones on the suicide rates of teenagers in general vs. D&D playing teenagers, which showed that RPG gamers have a fraction of the rate. Which in retrospect seems totally logical- having a group of friends you socially interact with regularly for a fun activity is exactly the antonym of a risk factor.

I can't remember the names of any real experts who did such testifying. Radecki and Pulling were all over the place, but were literal frauds.

TSR hired Dr. Joyce Brothers to do some spokesperson work after the Egbert incident to try to counter the myths, but sadly the stories of prevaricators and perjurers like Pulling, Radecki and Dear got repeated a lot.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Perhaps we're having a bit of a semantic issue here. There are (depending on how you count) around 15,000 - 18,000 state and local law enforcement agencies in the US. Whether fraudulent trainers on nonexistent "satanic crime waves" are mainstream kind of depends on how common they are, and perhaps whether their teachings were ever incorporated into larger national or regional training kinds or materials, no?

You can have a little cottage industry of these charlatans bilking money out of Bible belt departments run by misguided Evangelicals without it ever becoming a common thing for most departments or agencies.

I don't know what the numbers are, but I know it was big enough that you would see stuff on the nightly news where it was being taken seriously by reporters, law enforcement and people in high positions. Again it was much bigger than dungeons and dragons. D&D was just a small aspect of the satanic panic. It cut through music (with subliminal satanic messages, subliminal suicidal messages), it led to wrongful allegations of satanic ritual abuse of children, etc. Even as late as 1990 (granted from something that happened in the mid-80s), you had the Judas Priest trial (and there were plenty of people taking the whole subliminal messaging seriously during the 80s. And it wasn't just limited to evangelicals (certainly more prevalent in those communities, but the counselors I had in mind were in the north east, very far from any kind of evangelical culture).