Back to the ’80s, because we never left them

Back to the ’80s, because we never left them May 28, 2015

Item One: “Dangerous Games”

At The Revealer, Don Jolly reviews Dangerous Games: What the Moral Panic over Role-Playing Games Says About Play, Religion and Imagined Worlds, by Joseph P. Laycock. Here’s a description of the book from its publisher, University of California Press:

The 1980s saw the peak of a moral panic over fantasy role-playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons.

LaycockA coalition of moral entrepreneurs that included representatives from the Christian Right, the field of psychology, and law enforcement claimed that these games were not only psychologically dangerous but an occult religion masquerading as a game. Dangerous Games explores both the history and the sociological significance of this panic.

Fantasy role-playing games do share several functions in common with religion. However, religion — as a socially constructed world of shared meaning — can also be compared to a fantasy role-playing game. In fact, the claims of the moral entrepreneurs, in which they presented themselves as heroes battling a dark conspiracy, often resembled the very games of imagination they condemned as evil. By attacking the imagination, they preserved the taken-for-granted status of their own socially constructed reality. Interpreted in this way, the panic over fantasy-role playing games yields new insights about how humans play and together construct and maintain meaningful worlds.

Ding. Yes. That. After a long and amusingly weird introduction, Jolly’s review focuses on this part of Laycock’s argument:

In D&D and similar role-playing games, the fun lies in giving some measure of “belief” to a fantasy contrived by the imagination of your friends: “For a few hours, everyone agrees to accept that world, to accept the pretense that you are a magician who can throw exploding balls of fire from one hand,” said the game designer John Eric Holmes in an article on the subject for Psychology Today. “The fantasy has become a reality, a sort of folie á deux, or shared insanity.”

Ironically, outsider perceptions of this “shared insanity” have spawned insanities of their own.

In the context of the game, this “shared insanity” is contained, proportional, and kept in perspective. It’s people at play for the purpose of fun, amusement and entertainment. In the context of the “moral entrepreneurs” and their moral panic in backlash against such games, the “shared insanity” was not kept in perspective or contained — it was unleashed in an attempt to reshape the culture and politics of the real world.

The same elements of play, seeking the same emotional rewards — the fun of pretending to be valiant heroes battling fantastical monsters — were at work in that moral panic. But, unlike the gamers, these folks were less conscious of the fact that they were just pretending, just enjoying a role-playing game.

The D&D backlash of the 1980s wasn’t sustainable because the unreality of the imagined threat eventually became impossible to deny. But while this particular form of symptom spiked and dissipated, the disease remains — with the moral entrepreneurs continuing their role-playing fantasy by concocting and warring against ever-new sets of imaginary monsters.

 

 


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