The Dungeons & Dragons Scare

For a stretch of the 1980s a great many American parents believed that a game sold in a cardboard box could kill their children. The danger lay in the imagination itself, not in any choking hazard or sharp edge. The game was Dungeons & Dragons, and the fear ran that a boy who spent enough evenings pretending to be an elf with a sword would stop being able to tell the pretending from the real, would slide toward the occult, and would, in the worst tellings, take his own life on the instruction of the game or the demons it had summoned. It reads as absurd when it is set down cold. Told at the time, in a church basement or on a daytime talk show, by a woman who had buried her son, it was one of the most persuasive stories in the country.

The game and the tunnels

Dungeons & Dragons was published in 1974 by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson through a small Wisconsin company called TSR. It was strange even to hobbyists: a game with no board and no winner, run by a “Dungeon Master” who narrates a world the other players move through by describing what their characters do and rolling oddly shaped dice to see whether they succeed. It sold slowly at first, then explosively, and by the end of the decade it had reached the campuses and suburbs where its trouble would begin. By 1981 TSR was a multimillion-dollar company and the rulebooks sat on ordinary shelves next to Monopoly.

The trouble arrived with a specific boy. In August 1979 James Dallas Egbert III, a gifted sixteen-year-old at Michigan State University, disappeared from his dorm. His family hired a private investigator named William Dear, a flamboyant Texan who learned that Egbert played Dungeons & Dragons and seized on a theory that the boy had gone into the university’s steam tunnels to act the game out for real and had become lost or unhinged down there. The press adored it. Newspapers across the country ran the story of the honours student who had vanished into a fantasy game’s underworld, and the image of the tunnels did the rest of the work.

The theory was wrong in every part that mattered. Egbert was a profoundly troubled teenager, precociously bright and badly isolated, who had gone into the tunnels intending to end his life, survived, fled to Louisiana, and was found weeks later by Dear himself. He died by suicide the following year, in 1980, at seventeen. His pain had roots in his family and his mind that owed nothing to dice. Dear said as much, eventually. But the tunnel image had already lodged itself in the public mind, and Dear’s later book, The Dungeon Master, kept it in circulation. Rona Jaffe turned the same raw material into a 1981 novel, Mazes and Monsters, filmed the following year with a young Tom Hanks as a student who loses himself in the game and nearly leaps from a tower believing he can fly. The fiction and the fear had begun to feed each other, and neither needed the facts of the Egbert case anymore.

A mother’s grief and a mailing list

Every panic needs an organiser, and this one found its most tireless in Patricia Pulling. In June 1982 her sixteen-year-old son Irving, known as Bink, died by suicide. Searching for a reason in the wreckage, Pulling settled on Dungeons & Dragons, which Bink had played in a school club. She came to believe that a curse laid on his character during a game had driven him to it. She sued the school principal and then TSR, and though both suits failed, the campaign did not. In 1983 she founded Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons, or BADD, and began mailing pamphlets, briefing police departments, and appearing wherever a microphone was offered.

Pulling was sincere, and that is the part that has to be held onto. She was a mother trying to make an unbearable thing legible, and the game gave the grief an object it could grip. BADD’s literature catalogued the demons, spells and deities in the rulebooks as though they were a syllabus in practical occultism, and those pages arrived on the desks of officers and reporters who had no way to check them and every professional reason to worry. Pulling styled herself an expert witness and a consultant, and for a while the title stuck.

She was not working alone. A whole cottage industry of “occult crime” seminars grew up in the same years, in which self-appointed experts trained police departments to read heavy-metal patches, horror paperbacks and gaming manuals as evidence of satanic activity. These were the “cult cops”, and the D&D rulebook was a fixture of their slide decks. In 1985 the fear reached its widest audience when 60 Minutes devoted a segment to the question, setting Pulling opposite Gary Gygax, the game beside the coffin, and letting the arrangement make the argument.

Running alongside all of this was the wider religious campaign. The fundamentalist cartoonist Jack Chick published a tract in 1984 called Dark Dungeons, in which a teenage girl’s gaming group turns out to be a front for a real witch’s coven and a player kills herself when her character dies. Chick tracts were handed out by the million, left in laundromats and tucked into bus seats, and Dark Dungeons fused the game to the occult in the crispest possible form. To understand why the ground was so ready, it helps to place all of it inside the larger Satanic Panic that gripped the decade, the same climate that produced the ruinous day-care abuse trials. Dungeons & Dragons was one node in a wide network of dread about a hidden evil reaching for the young.

Where the record and the story part

The claim that could actually be tested was the numerical one. Pulling asserted that the game drove players to suicide and to violence at an alarming rate, and BADD circulated figures to prove it, at one point implying that many thousands of suicides a year could be traced to the hobby. When researchers examined those figures, the case dissolved. The connections were assumed rather than shown: the young people on the list had played D&D, and they had died, and the game was named the cause because it happened to be present in their lives. Given the many millions of players by the mid-1980s, ordinary base rates guaranteed that a share of them would die by suicide whatever they did at the weekend, and the arithmetic of the panic never accounted for that denominator.

The formal rebuttals followed. The writer Michael Stackpole assembled a detailed takedown, the Pulling Report, that went through BADD’s claims and Pulling’s own credentials and found both wanting. Academic work in the same period, including a 1991 study led by the psychologist Suzanne Abyeta, found no evidence that players were more prone to suicide or psychological disturbance than their peers. Bodies including the American Association of Suicidology examined the alarm and could not substantiate a link. The Association of Gifted-Creative Children and other groups pointed out that the players being buried were often exactly the bright, sensitive teenagers already at statistical risk, and that the game had been present at the scene the way a favourite record or a library card is present.

There is a quieter irony buried in the record. The activity the panic warned against, sitting around a table for hours describing an imaginary world with a regular circle of friends, is close to the opposite of the isolation that actually shadows adolescent despair. A weekly game gives a lonely teenager a standing appointment and a group that notices when they are absent. Some of the very children the pamphlets set out to protect were being warned away from one of the few social structures holding them steady.

The game answers back

TSR itself was not silent through the years of accusation, though its position was awkward. The company depended on the goodwill of the same suburban parents being handed BADD pamphlets, and it responded partly by softening the product. When the second edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons arrived in 1989, the words “demon” and “devil” had been quietly retired from the monster lists in favour of invented terms like tanar’ri and baatezu, and the assassin character class, along with some of the frankest occult trappings, had been pared back. The company issued statements stressing that the game was a collaborative exercise of the imagination with no more power over its players than a novel has over its readers. It was a defensive crouch, and it conceded ground the company did not strictly owe, though it also reflected a genuine wish to keep a hobby alive against a tide of suspicion.

The suspicion receded on roughly the timetable of all such panics. Patricia Pulling’s public activity faded through the early 1990s, and she died of cancer in 1997, still convinced of the danger she had spent a decade fighting. The cult cops found their occult-crime seminars quietly defunded once the FBI’s own investigator, Kenneth Lanning, published a widely read 1992 report finding no evidence of the organised satanic networks the seminars had been built around. Without a supply of fresh horror stories that survived contact with a reporter, the machinery of the scare ran out of fuel. The children kept playing, and the promised harvest of ruined lives never came in.

What the fear was really about

Strip away the demons and the dice and the D&D scare is a story about parents confronting a world they could not enter. Their children vanished for whole afternoons into a place with its own vocabulary, its own rules, and its own authority figure who was neither a teacher nor a priest, and they came back speaking of things the adults did not recognise. That opacity is frightening in exactly the way a locked diary is frightening, and multiplied across a decade already primed to see Satan behind ordinary closed doors it hardened into certainty. The rulebooks, dense with invented gods and monstrous names, looked to an anxious eye precisely like a grimoire.

The scare also performed the oldest work of the moral panic, which is to give a formless catastrophe a face. When a child dies by their own hand, the people who loved them are left holding a silence that answers nothing and accuses everyone. A cursed character sheet is a terrible answer, and it is still an answer, and an answer can be fought and banned and sued and warned against in a way that the true tangle of a young person’s inner life never can be. Patricia Pulling was neither a fool nor a fraud. She was a mother doing what grief drives people to do, reaching for a cause she could name because the real one had slipped through her fingers, and a whole frightened culture reached for it alongside her because it was frightened of the same dark.

The panic burned out slowly as the children of the eighties grew up unharmed and became the parents and programmers of the nineties. The underlying instinct never retired; it simply moved on to each fresh medium the young found to disappear into, from the Slender Man born on a forum to the Momo face on a phone screen. Dungeons & Dragons, meanwhile, went on to sell in supermarkets and to headline streaming shows watched by the grandchildren of the people who once feared it. The dice were always just dice. What the scare really measured was how frightening it is to watch a child walk into a room you cannot follow them into, and how badly the rest of us want the danger in that room to have a shape we can name.