Oui bande d’incrédules, encore un post ! Oui ça fait 3 en une semaine. Et non je ne suis pas malade merci. Je voulais juste vous faire partager un article que j’ai trouvé sur internet. Il s’agit d’un petit rappel sur comment non seulement Donjons et Dragons, mais le jeu de rôle en général a été stigmatisé dans les années 80. L’article se concentre sur ce qui s’est passé Outre-Atlantique, mais certains passages ne sont pas sans rapeller les problèmes qu’on a connus en France quelques années plus tard. Surement ont-ils même participé à sensibiliser l’opinion à ce sujet. Vous vous souvenez sans doute de l’émission Bas les masques de Mireille Dumas intitulée : Attention jeux dangereux, diffusée le 11 octobre 1995. Dans cette « émission » tous les protagonistes dénoncaient les dangers du hobby. La seule lueur d’espoir c’est un grand nom du bon sens, j’ai nommé Télérama, qui a eu l’audace de critiquer la partialité de l’émission. Ouf je croyais qu’il n’y avait que moi… Il y a même un certain gendarme qui a écrit un livre expliquant pourquoi les ados qui se sont suicidés étaient sans aucun doute des rôlistes. Dommage que je ne me rapelle plus son nom… Heureusement que ma mère était au faite de ce que le JdR impliquait réellement, sinon je ne serais pas le geek que je suis aujourd’hui.
Bon je vous laisse lire ça, certains passage sont assez drôles, notamment la Curse of Stupidity. En attendant je vais essayer de trouver ou d/l Mazes and Monsters, ça a l’air ultime comme film.
A+
Article paru dans : Der Spiegler, le 12 aôut 2009, article original içi si votre allemand est meilleur que le mien.
How Fantasy Fun was turned into a “Killer Game”
by Thomas Hillenbrand
Whenever teenagers are involved in violent crimes, people like to find the root cause in the use of computer games. This is a similar phenomenon to the controversy over D&D 30 years ago. At that time the Fantasy RPG was suspected of being responsible for deaths.
To call James Dallas Egbert III gifted would be an understatement. At 13 he had graduated High School and worked as an advisor for the air force; at 16 he was already at Michigan State University and studying Information Technology in his fourth semester. However, the wonder child was not happy. He hardly had any friends since the highly intelligent boy did not seem normal to his significantly older and stupider peers. In addition his parents put pressure on him. When Dallas told his mother by phone that he had received a 2+, she let him know that next time he might care to deliver a 1. On 15 August 1979, he disappeared without a trace.
Because the police were not making progress in their investigations, Dallas’ parents hired the well-known private detective William Dear. He quickly found out that Egbert jr. had a weakness for a strange game that was all the rage at this time on US college campuses – “Dungeons & Dragons” (D&D). Per Dear’s research, in this fantasy game the players would take on the roles of Knights, Elves or Mage and travel through dark dungeons that were populated by orcs and dragons.
Dear came up with a working hypothesis based on this flimsy information, which he then rolled out in front of several TV and print reporters. His hypothesis was that Dallas, the psychologically unstable wonder-child, regularly played D&D in the supply tunnels under the university. In the process he had lost his grip on reality and had slid fully into a fantasy world. The boy had probably got lost in the labyrinthine tunnel system.
Dear had no evidence for his theory but that was not necessary. The story of a dreamer teen genius who went mad because of a mysterious game, and staggering through humid tunnels with chain mail and broadsword, was just too good. The reporters ate up the story like chocolate – Egbert’s disappearance was suddenly no longer local news but a national headline.
Depression, Drugs and D&D
The story did not make sense in any way. D&D is played on a living room table, all the characters actions are performed through conversations and dice rolling. The players don’t wear costumes. As became clear later, Egbert had actually gone down into the supply tunnels – not to do role-playing but rather for an unsuccessful attempt to kill himself with sleeping pills. Detective Dear found out later that D&D was the least of Egbert’s problems. The teenager suffered from severe depression, was wrestling with his homosexuality and was addicted to drugs – amongst others, cocaine, self-made PCP, so-called “Angel Dust” – Phenyl-Cyclidin-Piperidin.
Admittedly these details interested no-one. When Dallas Egbert did turn up again in one piece, this merited only five lines in the “New York Times”. The impression that had remained with the general public was that D&D, this strange game with the strange dice, twisted children’s minds.
The person most responsible for the spread of this point of view, next to the press, was author Rona Jaffe. Inspired by the so-called Egbert Steam Tunnel Incident, she turned the 1981 incident into a novel. In Jaffe’s “Mazes & Monsters” , the student Robbie begins to think of himself as the cleric Pardeux. He leaves his girlfriend (because of his celibacy), stabs people (who he thinks are monsters) and in the end tries to jump from the World Trade Center, which he thinks is a mystical temple.
2. In the cinema, Tom Hanks portrayed the crazy D&D player
“Mazes” was very successful and in 1982 was made into a film with Tom Hanks in the leading role. It is entertaining, 30 years later, to see the young Hanks hallucinating while straying through dark chambers in his robe, carrying a lantern. The scenario seems terribly far-fetched. At the time though, many US viewers viewed the sorry spectacle as an authentic portray of fantasy role-playing.
Much of the demonization of D&D is reminiscent of the current debate about so-called killer games like “Counter-Strike”; the media mechanics are totally comparable.
Just like then, there is firstly the lack of knowledge of the subject: The game – invented in 1974 by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, and sold through the TSR (Tactical Studies Rules) label founded by the pair -had become, by the end of the seventies, an underground hit at America’s colleges. Nobody over 25 understood exactly what the kids were doing when they met in their bedrooms for a dungeon crawl.
The only thing that was known was that it was something to do with Monsters, Mage and murder and this disturbed many adults. Nobody knew how the game was actually played – and this was reflected in the media reports. When two young army recruits in North Carolina dressed up as Ninjas and massacred an old married couple, the “Houston Chronicle” explained to its readers that this was the sort of battle dress that “one can wear during a D&D game”.
The Mass Market and massive Image Problems
If D&D had remained a niche phenomenon, the public disgust would quite possibly have died down again. However, the game became the biggest winner that the game world had seen since Monopoly. By the mid-eighties, there were almost four million D&D sets in circulation. Purely for statistical reasons, there were an increasing number of cases in which D&D boxes were found next to youths who had taken their own or someone else’s life. Of course it was equally likely that there would be a Risk game or baseball cards in the child’s room – yet role playing games had now become the chief suspect and every new case garnered significant attention in print.
To many observers the suspicion of D&D seemed plausible. Were these role-playing games not extremely violent? Did they not encourage children to torture and plunder in their imagination? And was it not inevitable that these imaginary acts of violence would spill over into normal life?
D&D inventor, Gary Gygax, defended himself vehemently against the accusations. The “witchhunt” was not acceptable – if someone is mentally unstable and has lost grip on reality, then that was clearly not the fault of dice and fantasy stories. TSR refused event to have a warning label on the packaging. Gygax sneered that people would also have to “put a sticker on dogs”, since they could bite someone.
TSR came under increasing pressure in the mid-eighties. On an almost weekly basis, US newspapers would report on teenagers who had played D&D before their death. Also, there were now two media-savvy experts constantly on hand , ready at any time to attest to the enormous danger of role-playing games for the soul and psyche of adolescents.
First there was Pat Pulling; the founder of the Initiative Bothered about D&D (BADD) maintained that, “I have already been physically attacked by children at events. They suddenly change into their (role-play) character. Pulling was convinced that the suicide of her, in her words, “absolutely normal” son, Irving was triggered by a “Curse of Insanity” which a D&D game master was supposed to have issued.
Research in the US Newspaper archives from 1975 to 1990 shows that apparently every US journalist who was looking for a critical voice in his role play article at that time, would call Pulling. The woman from Richmond, VA, had no legal, sociological or medical qualifications. Even her knowledge of role-playing was negligible. Pulling’s “Curse of Insanity” cannot be found in any D&D publication. The game designer, Michael Stackpole, provided meticulous proof that she did not understand even the basics of the game and had presumably never played.
Pulling however had an excellent feel for what worked in the press. At TV interviews, she would bring her small daughter with her who then, with tears in her eyes, would tell how her late brother Irving had threatened her with death and how D&D was to blame for everything. Hardly anyone questioned why an anxious mother suddenly became an expert on youth culture, suicidology and various other topics. Pulling even showed up several times as an expert witness in court.
3. Pithy Quotes, but no kind of scientific basis
Chief critic number two was Chicago psychologist Thomas Radecki. He asserted that there were 45 documented cases of death that were clearly attributable to D&D. “Children are being murdered because of this game”, he warned. “Our teens can no longer get out of the dungeon”. Naturally Radecki – who meanwhile had twice lost his license because of “professional misconduct” – could provide no evidence for his theories.
Years later, studies by the American Association of Suicidology and the CDC came to the conclusion that there was no causal relationship between suicide and fantasy role-playing games. Even today, Radecki sees things differently. He explained that there was an “overwhelming amount of evidence” that the consumption of TV shows and computer games that glorified violence dulled people’s senses and increased their propensity for violence. As a result one had to conclude that this was no different with role-playing games even though there were no detailed studies.
All facts to the contrary, the D&D critics succeeded in harassing TSR more and more. Above all, Pulling became even more influential when she brought the religious right on board. Once she was established in the media as an expert, she began to assert that D&D was a game conceived by Satanists, to propagate rape, cannibalism and necromancy.
Naturally there was no sort of evidence for this either. For devout Christians, it was enough just to see the D&D cover. There they could see horned devils, wizards or sacrifices of virgins. Game shop owners now had to deal every morning with groups of outraged fundamentalists in front of their shops. Fantasy author Tracy Hickman, close to resignation, formulated the reaction of most people to his hobby in the following way: “Role-playing games? Oh you mean that evil game.”
Devils banned from the game
At some point, TSR gave in. Under pressure from the religious right, the company censored the content of its “Monster Manual”, a book that listed the villains to be fought by the heroes. The demons and devils listed there now had to be called Tanar’ri and Baatezu. It was only a decade later that Wizards of the Coast, now the publisher, dared to reverse this – and even today the more sinister elements of the game are cordoned off in a separate hard cover book like the “Book of Vile Darkness” complete with an age advisory. Many role-playing game publishers routinely state in the foreword a that there is no such thing as magic and demons in real life.
Once the D&D boom had passed its peak in the mid-eighties, the uproar died down somewhat. It is hard to tell whether the drop-off in criticism was because the game’s critics could never provide tangible evidence or whether the discussion about the damaging influence of certain media forms on youths shifted to other fields such as rock music or computer games.
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The last major “D&D Death Case” dates from 1988. 20-year old Daniel Kasten had shot his adoptive parents in Suffolk County, NY. Ten weeks after the crime, he testified that role-playing games had driven him to commit the crime. Kasten’s attorney explained to an astonished jury that a “Mind Flayer” was guilty of the offence. This evil D&D monster possessed telepathic powers in the game and could enslave men psychologically. Kasten believed, according to the defence, that the Mind Flayer had driven him to murder. As a result the young man was not responsible for his actions. For the jury, this was too much fantasy – they stuck the D&D player into a quite ordinary dungeon.
Encore que là j’ai fait de gros efforts pour faire des choix softs…
