The Gaming Den

Pretty devout, or more discreet about their deviance while simultaneously more experienced in the applications of both pain and pleasure...

I remember, not specifically demonic, but my parents threw a fit when I was playing Baldur's Gate and/or Planescape Tourment when they saw the D&D logo because something approximately "You will lose touch with reality from playing fantasy games like that, so you should play good wholesome games like Medieval Total War instead."

fbmf wrote:in the 20 years I'd been playing I'd never seen a rule about murder being a part of the game and had never murdered anyone myself

[Fester]: "Haven't you ever slaughtered anyone?"
[Wednesday]: "He's only a child..."
[Festery]: "That's no excuse!"

Loosely related vignette.

In the mid 90s, there was a secondary satanic panic over magic cards. I'm sure extreme fundies are still on about Yugioh or whatever their kids want to play. Those free games built into facebook, those are probably satanic now.

My friend Ryan, his parents were Mormon and very isolated, and I tried to explain what Magic cards were. Naturally, I went "well, they're like baseball cards, you trade and collect them, but then you also can play a game with them." She'd had some conversation with other mormons and thought magic cards were surely pornographic - so she knew that pornographic playing cards existed, but she didn't know what baseball cards were.

Baseball cards were a minor - but ubiquitous - slice of american cultural efluvia. Many kids today probably have no idea what they are:
http://www.beckett.com/news/2012/03/you ... -industry/

But this woman was born in the 1940s, it would be like growing up in England today unaware of the existence of soccer. It's not that she didn't know what stats the cards had on the back or that rookie cards were super-valuable if the player later became famous - she didn't even know that you got cards with pictures of baseball players in packs of gum.

So there are big slices of the U.S. population - and I gather than this problem has gotten worse in the last couple of decades - who have segregated themselves from secular society even if they seem to live in a normal community.

I was definitely conscious for the Magic thing. One of my classmates walked up to me one day and informed me I was satanic because I was holding someone else's island mana in my hand. This lead to me laughing in her face and telling her that was ridiculous.

And then she came back the next day with pamphlets from her church that arrived at the conclusion that Jesus was satanic and evil because he performed miracles. I laughed some more. Someone from the school paper thought this conversation was awesome and decided to do an article on it, which basically concluded with, "Wow. People actually think this crap." And after that, it was over.

My parents were pretty permissive so I think my dad was more disappointed by my nerd hobbies than anything. I suppose by his way of thinking it didn't make sense that I'd break my curfew and risk his wrath without at least getting laid for my trouble.

From what I can remember, Satanism was less of a concern than LARPing in steam tunnels and sewers was.

Specifically because of this guy:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Dallas_Egbert_III

The idea that kids would go off and pretend that storm drains were dungeons full of treasure was much more plausible a concern than anything religious was, at least around where I lived.

university steam tunnels are a lot of fun to crawl around

The only question with university steam-tunnel treasure: metallic or Acapulco?

As has been noted earlier in this thread: there are a lot of parallels between the demonization of marijuana and the demonization of D&D. The primary difference is that marijuana clearly has some drawbacks, while D&D has no negative effects other than acting as a very safe form of birth control.

I don't think the demonization of D&D ever hit folks outside of the US. Did it?

It did in France.

In 1990, a Jewish cemetary was desecrated. It made the front news, since the (left wing) president took it as an opportunity to condemn the extreme right and unite the nation behind left-wing ideas. The official investigation, that had been looking at the extreme-right (on the order of the president) found nothing.

A few years later, a pathological liar accused the son of the mayor (center-right party), who was a RPG player. The extreme right party took that opportunity to counter-attack, saying that they were wrongly accused of something made by the son of someone from a "regular" party and that the investigation had stopped because he was "above the law".

A famous TV show hostess then ran a show about how RPG players were crazy/suicidal/satanists. (I remember reading somehwere that one of the producer of the show was a political enemy of the mayor). Since the whole story was quite big in France at that time (a bit similar to the recent Charlie Hebdo attacks), it had quite an impact on the population. Some schools banned RPGs and some clubs and stored were closed as a result.

It later turned out that the desecration was the work of skinheads (duh) not affiliated with the extreme right party.

US cultural trends eventually drift out around almost all of the world. Reaganomics, war on terra, reds under the bed, war on drugs, kettling protesters, and even various satanic panics. That crap in Russia where you can't be pro-gay in public is about protest movements and church fears of them appearing in Russia a few years after they did the rounds in the US.

Like, the McDonalds in India don't serve beef, and no one else calls it a quarter pounder, but your political, commercial, artistic, religious, and social movements are heard right around the world. People don't all respond the same way to them, there's a lot of different cultural limits out there. Some countries are even North Korea. But for the most part the good and bad alike that make it in the USA will end up everywhere.

It can also go the other way, every now and then, which lets other cultural oddities spread right around the world by first reaching the USA.

Both my parents are religious, but rarely seem to be opposed to my hobbies. They didn't even know what D&D was when I started to get into the hobby.

Ancient History wrote:My mom still asks if any of my books are "anything demonic."

I really hope you didn't answer honestly.