Wisconsin Forums

[Crys]

I play RPGs. Heck, I am involved with WRITING a live-action rpg, and I have been running Live-Action Role Playing Games for over a decade. I even play the dreaded Dungeons & Dragons. And when I go out clubbing on the weekends, I even wear *GASP* blue lipstick and black clothing.

I don't even know where to even start to answer this. A group of people getting together to tell cooperative stories or play cards is a VERY far cry from a CULT. In fact, rpgs promote a sense of teamwork and hone the player's problem solving skills and creativity. Gaming helps keep kids drug-free and off the street. Frankly, watching gory war movies is a heck of a lot more of a problem than "how does your character get past this obstacle?", but because the people in the war movies don't look different, they must be ok, right?

Here is an excerpt from a well-written FAQ about gaming at http://www.theescapist.com/basic_gaming_faq.htm:

Why do rpgs have a bad reputation?

It stems mainly from a pair of isolated incidents, one of which occurred in 1979, and the other of which happened in the early 1980s.

The first incident involved a young man named James Dallas Egbert, a 16-year-old boy who was bright enough to be attending college at such a young age. Egbert had much more than his fair share of problems; he was under constant pressure from his parents to exceed, and was hiding his drug addictions and homosexuality from them.

Egbert went into hiding for nearly a year, and was pursued by William Dear, a private investigator hired by his uncle to find him. Dear discovered that the boy occasionally played Dungeons & Dragons, and began searching for him based on the hunch that Egbert was playing the game in the steam tunnels beneath the dormitories. This sparked media stories associating the game with Egbert's dissappearance; stories that were never retracted when the truth came out. When Egbert took his own life a year after being found, Dear let the story stand as it was, untrue and misleading, to "protect" the Egbert family from the truth about James' secret life.

This event not only began the myth that role-playing can inspire suicide, but it also started the urban legend that gamers like to play in places such as steam or sewage tunnels.

The second incident involved a young man named Irving "Bink" Pulling, who killed himself in 1982 with his mother's handgun. His mother Patricia claimed that his suicide was due to a curse that had been placed on his character in a D&D game he played at his school. Irving's story, however, showed a collection of deeper problems: he idolized Adolf Hitler, had trouble fitting in with his schoolmates, and was often seen running through his backyard while howling at the moon. In addition, when asked about the events of the game, none of his fellow players remember any such curse happening to Irving's character.

Pulling went on to form Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons (B.A.D.D.), a group that sought to ban D&D from schools and have a label placed on the covers of game books warning that the contents could cause suicide. She and her group were moderately successful in the former, but failed at the latter. During her involvement with B.A.D.D., Pulling would often distribute newspaper articles that had been edited to help prove her point - she would change the order of paragraphs to put an anti-game slant on the story, and remove anything that did not support her beliefs. This is not only dishonest and misleading, it is illegal.

Ever since these two events occurred, many have associated gaming as a possible cause in any crime committed by, or even against, a gamer, or someone who is assumed to be a gamer. In this manner, gaming has been associated with every crime imaginable, from robbery, burglary, and drug abuse to rape, suicide, and murder. This certainly has been assisted by people such as Mrs. Pulling who have done all that they can to propagate such untruths.

Yet in every case, a saner, more realistic, and more probable cause can easily be found. That is, when games are even involved at all; 20% of all "game related" cases do not involve any form of game, but are assumed to by investigators and reporters. The Columbine massacre is possibly the most famous example of this.

Since CCGs began their existence with Magic: The Gathering (which is based on a fantasy spell-casting environment) and were born out of the popularity of RPGs, they have received a "guilt by association" charge by many of the anti-gamers.

The truth is, as proven by Albert Einstien University and the Department of Suicidology, is that role-playing games do not cause their players to kill themselves. With this knowledge in hand, all of the remaining accusations against games and gamers become dubious.

In fact, when one compares the 80-plus cases of crimes where gamers were involved versus the millions of people who enjoy games on a regular basis, an abysmally small percentage, way below the norm for people of any specialty group, is the result. Could it be that playing D&D or Magic actually prevents crime?

If you want the truth and not just close-minded unthinking bigotry, you may also be interested in this forum thread at flamesrising.com, a local gaming site that I'm involved with (but which I must point out is _completely_ unaffiliated with theBubbler): http://flamesrising.com/index.php?na...iewtopic&t=227
But if you're not interested in learning and would rather condemn something just because you think it's different, please do not post there and make trouble. The site is moderated.