Satanic Panic – Nerds on Earth https://nerdsonearth.com The best place on earth for nerds. Tue, 14 Jun 2022 12:38:14 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.3 https://nerdsonearth.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/cropped-nerds_head_thumb2-100x100.png Satanic Panic – Nerds on Earth https://nerdsonearth.com 32 32 All the podcasts from NerdsonEarth.com, under one umbrella. We create short run podcasts for nerds, covering D&D, Marvel, Starfinder, and more! You vote for your favorite shows and they just might get a second season. Satanic Panic – Nerds on Earth false episodic Satanic Panic – Nerds on Earth jason.sansbury@nerdsonearth.com podcast All the podcasts from NerdsonEarth.com, the best place on Earth for nerds. Satanic Panic – Nerds on Earth https://nerdsonearth.com/wp-content/uploads/powerpress/noe-podcast-logo.png https://nerdsonearth.com/blog/ Understanding the Hellfire Club of Stranger Things and a Very Real Satanic Panic https://nerdsonearth.com/2022/05/understanding-the-hellfire-club-of-stranger-things-and-a-very-real-satanic-panic/ Sat, 28 May 2022 20:09:44 +0000 https://nerdsonearth.com/?p=38570

Millions of kids played D&D in the 80s. But millions more parents were nervous that the imaginary demons in the D&D books might corrupt those same kids. We look at how the Hellfire Club of Stranger Things portrays that.

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Back in my day, children were allowed to spend days wandering unsupervised through the woods. In fact, it was expected, because that’s how us little rascals entertained ourselves before everyone had our devices.

Fortunately, I grew up in West Virginia, so I could find woods just by walking out my back door. As a junior high kid, a shout of, “Mom, I’m going to go play in the woods!” would be greeted with, “OK, be back before dark!

Some of my best memories are of the woods, particularly because I’d explore the area behind the junkyard and that allowed for a little serendipitous salvage. There was also an abandoned house that my friends and I wandered into only to find a detached doll’s head with creepy eyes that we were convinced was Chucky, an experience that fostered weeks of sleepless nights.

Other woodsy activities included building lean-tos out of fallen trees, damming up streams to build little hydroelectric experiments, catching salamanders, just barely missing putting our eyes out with BB guns, and practicing throwing ninja stars into trees.

The point is that it was no big deal for kids to wander the woods in the 80s and there were no cell phones to check in on them anyway. Just ask the kids from Stranger Things.

the Hellfire Club’s nod to Claremont X-Men is brilliant.

But our story takes a twist, as as evidenced by the opening episode of season 4 of Stranger Things. Eddie, the leader of Hawkins High School’s “Hellfire Club,[1]” reads a Newsweek article about how Dungeons and Dragons is for Satan worshippers. “The devil has come to America,” Eddie reads aloud. “Studies have linked violent behavior to the game, saying it promotes satanic worship, ritual sacrifice, sodomy, suicide, and…even murder.”

I’m sure you’ve guessed by now. Not everyone was comfortable with children exploring the woods. In fact, there were millions of people in the 80s who were absolutely convinced the woods were brimming with satanists and all sorts of evil things that you’d expect to inhabit the Upside Down.

All this looks perfectly normal to me.

So, let’s talk about what was happening culturally at that time in the 80s. I’ve written previously about the 1970s anxiety about cults, driven largely by Charles Manson murders. That was part of it, but changes in the Unites States economy played a huge factor as well.

Gas prices soared, inflation was out of control, and anxiety about Russia limited economic confidence, trends that could never happen today obviously. But that economic reality meant that both parents were entering the workforce in record numbers.

Whereas the mother may have previously planned trysts with Billy and stayed at home to greet the kids after school, it was increasingly a culture of “latchkey” kids who would let themselves in the house, then be expected to entertain themselves for several unsupervised hours. Many, like me, would wander off to play in the woods.

Parents had unexpressed guilt about this and these worries about their kids being unattended would often come out sideways, driven by irrational fears. We’ve established that Charles Manson stoked a cultural anxiety that kids were being scooped up by crazy cults. But soon another anxiety would layer on top of that.

The late 1970s also featured a cultural rise of the Religious Right, organized by televangelists like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson of the 700 Club. Remember, there were only a few television stations at that time and no Internet, which meant YouTube, Hulu, and Netflix were out of the question. So shows like the 700 Club had tens of millions of viewers.

These televangelists would consistently book fringe voices and conspiracy theorists over and over, normalizing them, much like Fox News does today. Suddenly, a single, isolated crazy like Charles Manson felt like a reality where there was a crazy under every bush and around every corner.

And the Religious Right kept tossing chum out into those waters, feeding the frenzy. It was as if anxiety was taking shape, starting to feel a little more tangible. Indeed, folks started to believe that literal demonic forces were swirling around them.

Says Religious Studies professor Joseph Laycock, “Many Americans truly did feel the corrupting presence of an invisible force that seemed to be all around them, corrupting their children and undermining the values of the family. This anxiety was expressed in symbolic terms, and these symbols were mistaken for reality.”

I love that the kids on Stranger Things play D&D, in part because that’s exactly what I was doing when I was their exact age at that exact time in American cultural history. But OG D&D players know the anxieties we’ve been talking about were thick in the culture at that time.

D&D fans remember it being called the “Satanic Panic” and thousands of kids had their D&D books confiscated by anxious parents or teachers. Already nerdy, the Satanic Panic pushed D&D players deeper “underground” for fear that they’d be ostracized for playing “the devil’s game.” This, ironically, further deepened the misunderstanding and mystery of the game.

I should know, the 80s tried to beat into my head that my beloved D&D was a direct journey to Satan. While my mom never forbade D&D books, she was a little nervous about them, her only sin being that she loved her son and wanted him to be safe.

Lo and behold, despite my life-long love of D&D, I have been a pastor most of my career. I must have failed a saving throw along the way.

The Mind Flayer was just a monster in a book, yet millions of Americans truly felt like it was lurking in the woods, eager to steal the innocence of our nation’s children. This is what the writers of Stranger Things have captured so perfectly.

Stranger Things is a brilliant show that portrays a moment in American culture pitch perfectly, and is darned entertaining to boot. Nowadays, our nation’s symbolic fears have a new face and you might actually see someone wearing a D&D t-shirt in public, but the Hellfire Club of Stranger Things reminds us that cultural anxieties have been around a long time.


[1] I love this clever naming nod to Claremont X-Men, comic books that were wildly popular at the time. Stranger Things captured the little details of the 80s perfectly.

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Nerd Obsession: Dungeons & Dragons, the Hall of Fame Roleplaying Game https://nerdsonearth.com/2020/11/nerd-obsession-dungeons-and-dragons-the-hall-of-fame-roleplaying-game/ Thu, 05 Nov 2020 13:00:00 +0000 https://nerdsonearth.com/?p=26801

Our nerdy obsession with Dungeons & Dragons, the 40-year-old game that remains misunderstood.

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Surrounded by buddies and playing a game where I pretended I was an elf were important moments for me as a kid, even if it’s difficult to articulate. Dungeons & Dragons absolutely contributed positively to my development as a human being, and certainly to my becoming a life-long geek.

I am introverted and as a kid I was extremely shy and withdrawn as well. But like any other kid, I wanted to fit in and be “normal,” and I awkwardly and embarrassingly accumulated a list of failures when I tried to be cool. I was a nerd, plain and simple. I was more likely to get teased than get invited to a party, which was well enough, as I was too scared and shy to cut a rug anyway.

As a result, spending a Friday evening reading the Fiend Folio was more comfortable to me than a school dance. I found my people among nerds, and solace within those pages. Plus, those D&D books taught me a lot about life and about myself. Throughout my early years playing D&D, I learned that any obstacle can be overcome through some very simple principles: creative problem solving, understanding systems, imagination, and perseverance.

Sure, those principles were buried behind piles of discarded Dr Pepper cans and empty Doritos bags, but I learned them while surrounded by loyal friends, all while facing creatures likes owlbears and bullywugs.

In the meantime, my “normal” peers spent their weekends getting drunk, getting high, and taking part in other activities that were seen as much more mainstream and normal than playing games in a basement like the kids from Stranger Things.

But by playing “childish” games like D&D, my friends and I became adults.

These games of wholly imaginative scenarios have had a tangible benefit on my life. Rather than mere escapism, there is a benefit of the fantasy world in daily life. Not only is D&D fun to play, but it is a source of great meaning.

So, let’s use this edition of Nerd Obsession to give you an overview on why D&D had the power to shape childhoods, mine as well as a million others. Then we’ll look at how it it’s now bigger than it’s ever been. Roll initiative.

Gary Gygax, The All Father of Nerds

Timeline

  • 1967: The International Federation of Wargaming was founded by Gary Gygax and others to provide a venue for wargame fans to exchange their amateur game designs.
  • 1969: Gygax meets Dave Arneson at the second Gen Con – a convention that Gygax had founded the previous year in Lake Geneva, WI – and the two express a mutual interest in collaborating on game rules.
  • 1971: Gygax’s Chainmail – a game that introduced medieval miniature warfare with wizards, heroes, and dragons – was published. Shortly thereafter, Arneson used Chainmail as rules for his Blackmoor fantasy campaign that featured forays into a dungeon of monsters and treasure.
  • 1973: Gygax and Arneson collaborate on drafts of Dungeons & Dragons. Gygax forms Tactical Studies Rules (TSR) with Brian Blume and Don Kaye to help produce the Dungeons & Dragons game.
  • 1974: Dungeons & Dragons is published in as three booklets shipped in a woodgrain-colored cardboard box: Men & Magic, Monsters & Treasure, and Underworld & Wilderness Adventures.
  • 1976: The Dragon – the first professional magazine devoted to fantasy and science fiction gaming – is published. TSR Hobbies publishes the Monster Manual, the first book in the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons product line, the following year.
  • 2016: Year that D&D was entered into the Toy Hall of Fame.

Who is Gary Gygax?

Gygax was born in the shadow of Chicago’s Wrigley Field to “Posey” Burdick and Ernest Gygax, a Swiss immigrant and Chicago Symphony Orchestra violinist. He was named Ernest after his father, but he was commonly known as Gary, the middle name given to him by his mother after the actor Gary Cooper. 

As a boy, his family moved to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, where Gygax soon made friends with several of his peers, including Don Kaye and Mary Jo Powell. During his teen years, he developed a love of miniatures games and a voracious appetite for pulp fiction authors such as Robert Howard, Jack Vance, H. P. Lovecraft, and Edgar Rice Burroughs.

A mediocre student, Gygax dropped out of high school in his junior year, just a few months after his father died. Living with his mother, he commuted to a job as a shipping clerk. Smitten with Mary Jo Powell, Gygax persuaded her to marry him at age 19.

Gygax was in love with gaming to the point that Mary Jo, pregnant with their second child, believed he was having an affair and confronted him in a friend’s basement only to discover him and his friends sitting around a map-covered table.

Gygax had been working at an insurance company for nine years, but lost his job in October 1970. Unemployed and now with a family of five children – Ernie, Luke, Heidi, Cindy, and Elise – he tried to use his enthusiasm for games to make a living by designing board games for commercial sale.

The rest is history.

By the Numbers

  • 20: The number of sides on the iconic dice used in D&D.
  • $882 : The amount of money grossed by Gygax in his first year trying to make a living creating games.
  • 1,000: The number of copies of the hand-assembled first print run of D&D.
  • $16 million: D&D’s sales in 1982.
  • $30 million: D&D’s sales in 1984.
  • $1.5 million: D&D’s debt by 1985, due to mismanagement, lavish living, and expenses incurred with getting a movie off the ground in Hollywood.
  • 359 and 150: Number of print issues of Dragon Magazine and Dungeon Magazine, respectively.
  • $25 million: The purchase price of TSR by Wizards of the Coast in 1997.
  • 30+: Number of adventure modules written by Gygax.
  • 10 million: The number of views of the 1st episode of the 2nd season of Critical Role’s D&D-themed YouTube series.

A Little History Lesson

Dungeons and Dragons is a 40-year-old game so it should be slowing down due to a bad knee. But a darned thing is happening: it’s drawing in orcish hordes of brand new players.

These new players are enjoying the 5th edition of the game (D&D 5e), so they may not be familiar with the history of D&D and how the game got to where it is today.

I realize 82% of readers went narcoleptic at the mere mention of the word “history,” but let’s have some fun with this. If you’ve played any game – tabletop or video – and you’ve leveled a character, had hit points, chosen a class, used a spell, or added equipment or gear to a character, then that game owes a debt to D&D. Compound interest over 40 years means that’s a biiiiiiig debt, so modern gaming really owes a dragon’s horde to D&D.

Indeed, it’s truly nigh impossible to overstate the influence Dungeons & Dragons has has on all of gaming, so let’s spare a thought for the various iterations of D&D over the past 40 years.

In the Beginning

The All Father, Gary Gygax, was an old school wargamer, meaning soldiers on a grid. In 1974, he released 3 little booklets that were a mashup of J.R.R. Tolkien and his miniatures wargame, Chainmail.

That first 1974 release featured only a handful of the elements that the game is known for today. It only had three character classes (fighting-man, magic-user, and cleric); four races (human, dwarf, elf, and hobbit); and just a handful of monsters.

But D&D was a radically new gaming concept at the time, so it was just getting warmed up.

The release of the Greyhawk supplement (Gary Gygax’s home-brew creation) removed the game’s dependency on the Chainmail rules, and made it much easier for new, non-wargaming players to grasp the concepts of play. Then supplements published over the next two years greatly expanded the rules, character classes, monsters, and spells.

New options were periodically published in a magazine, The Dragon.

Leveling Up

An updated version of D&D was released as Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (AD&D), reorganizing the game rules into three hardcover rulebooks. Compiled by Gary Gygax between 1977 and 1979, the books were the Monster Manual (1977), the Player’s Handbook (1978), and the Dungeon Master’s Guide (1979).

Gygax had formed the company TSR and was cranking out books, adventures, and boxed sets at a pace that was too furious and confusing to fully recount here. Let’s just agree it was awesome, as AD&D was a beautiful thing throughout the 80s. They were still experimenting, adding rules, and writing some of the adventures that are classics to this day.

Authentic Street THAC0s

Then, in 1989, a small team of designers at TSR lead by Zeb Cook created the second edition of the AD&D game. Numerous mechanical changes were made to the game, including modifications to the combat system. The most memorable of which may have been the THAC0 (“To Hit Armor Class ‘0’”) number, a simplification of 1st edition’s attack matrix tables.

The release of AD&D 2nd Edition also corresponded with some important cultural pressures that affected TSR. An effort was made to remove aspects of the game which had attracted negative publicity, most notably the removal of all mention of demons and devils, and the elimination of character classes like the assassin.

The 2nd Edition stressed heroic roleplaying and player teamwork and the target age of the game was also lowered, being aimed primarily at teenagers.

A New Millennium

In the year 2000, D&D went pro, with TSR having been acquired by Wizards of the Coast. The word “advanced” was dropped and the new 3rd edition (or 3e for short) was back to just being named Dungeons & Dragons. Underlying 3e was a system (the d20 System) that went all in on the 20-sided dice, and went the other way with armor class, making a higher number better.

New character options were introduced. Skills and a new system of feats are introduced. And, most notably, the d20 System was presented under the Open Game License, which made it an open source system that allowed for 3rd party D&D-compatible content. Remember this for later.

In July 2003, a revised version of the 3rd edition D&D rules (termed v. 3.5) was released that incorporated numerous little rule changes, even as the basic rules were fundamentally the same, and many monsters and items are compatible (or even unchanged) between those editions.

Pathfinder Roleplaying Game

Then the Github code was forked. Using the Open Game License, the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game was first published in 2009 by Paizo Publishing. It was intended to be backward-compatible with D&D v. 3.5 while adjusting some rules balance.

This earned it the nickname “version 3.75” by fans.

Pathfinder became the best-selling role playing games in the industry, and D&D 4e (see below) became the game that ended up in used bookstores.

4th Edition

On August 15, 2007, WotC announced the development of D&D 4th edition, and the Player’s Handbook, Monster Manual, and Dungeon Master’s Guide were released in June of the next year.

Inspired by video games like World of Warcraft, 4th edition saw a major overhaul of the game’s systems. Combat became very tactical and reinforced the use of squares to express distances.

Changes in spells gave all classes a similar number of at-will, per-encounter and per-day powers. A system of “healing surges” were introduced.

The initial print run of the 4th edition sold out during preorders, but things went south from there. Many players instead chose to continue playing older editions, particularly v3.5. This happened despite Wizards of the Coast releasing an Essentials line of the D&D 4th edition rule set in 2010 to provide simple player character options intended for first-time players.

Today’s D&D

But you can’t keep the world’s first RPG down for long. In January 2012, Wizards of the Coast announced a new edition of the game, developed in part by a massive open playtest.

The D&D 5e Starter Set (Mechanically, 5th edition pulls inspiration heavily from prior editions, while also introducing some new mechanics intended to simplify ease of play.)

Skills, weapons, and saving throws now all use a single proficiency bonus that increases as level increases. Multiple defense values of 3e have been removed, returning D&D to a single defense value of armor class.

The “advantage/disadvantage” mechanic was introduced, streamlining conditional modifiers into a simpler mechanic: rolling two d20s for a situation and taking the higher of the two for “advantage” and the lower of the two for “disadvantage.”

Even at age 40, D&D is in fantastic shape. It’s streamlined like never before, which is understandable, as it’s been on a long run.

Pick up a copy. Of course you can get the excellent current stuff now. And please do, you’ll love it: 5e Player’s Handbook (or even Pathfinder). And Noble Knight is a game store that specializes in out of print classics. They have it all: 4e3e2e1e.

Seeing is Believing

If you want to see D&D in action, watch this video below. Watching it is as enthralling as watching most major motion pictures.

Go Down a ? Hole

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How the Upside Down of Stranger Things is Very Real in the Mind of Millions https://nerdsonearth.com/2018/02/stranger-things-dnd/ Tue, 13 Feb 2018 13:00:42 +0000 https://nerdsonearth.com/?p=15861

Millions of kids played D&D in the 80s. But millions more parents were nervous that the imaginary demons in the D&D books might corrupt those same kids. We look at how Stranger Things portrays that.

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Back in my day, children were allowed to spend a day wandering unsupervised through the woods. In fact, it was expected, because that’s how us little rascals entertained ourselves.

I grew up in West Virginia, so I could find deep woods by walking out my back door. As a jr. high kid, I’d shout, “Mom, I’m going to go play in the woods!” and be greeted with, “OK, be back before dark!”

I had so much fun in the woods, particularly because I’d choose the area behind the junkyard that allowed for a little serendipitous salvage. There was also an abandoned house that my friends and I could wander through. Other woodsy activities included building lean-tos out of fallen trees, damming up streams to build little hydroelectric experiments, catching salamanders, and practicing throwing ninja stars into trees.

Later, BB guns were involved, but those are stories for other posts. The point is that it was no big deal for kids to wander the woods in the 80s and there were no cell phones to check in on them all the time anyway. Just ask the kids from Stranger Things.

But our story takes a twist, as I’m sure you’ve guessed by now. Not everyone was comfortable with children exploring the woods. In fact, there were millions of people in the 80s who were absolutely convinced that the woods were brimming with demons and satanists and all the sorts of evil things that you’d expect to inhabit the Upside Down.

Let’s talk about what was happening culturally at the time. I’ve written previously about the 1970s anxiety about cults, driven largely by Charles Manson murders. That was part of it, but changes in the Unites States economy played a huge factor as well.

In the 1980s the economic reality was that both parents were entering the workforce in record numbers. Whereas the mother may have previously stayed at home to greet the kids after school, it was increasingly a culture of “latchkey” kids who’d let themselves in the house, then be expected to entertain themselves for a few hours. Some–like me–would wander off to play in the woods.

Parents had unexpressed guilt about this and their worries about their kids being unattended would often come out sideways, driven by irrational fears. We’ve established that Charles Manson stoked a cultural anxiety that kids were being scooped up by crazy cults. But soon another anxiety would layer on top of that.

The late 1970s also featured a cultural rise of the Religious Right, organized by televangelists like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson of the 700 Club. Remember, there were only a few television stations at that time and no Internet, which meant YouTube, Hulu, and Netflix were out of the question. So shows like the 700 Club had tens of millions of viewers, who even if they weren’t into it, didn’t have anything else to watch.

These televangelists from the Religious Right would consistently book fringe voices and conspiracy theorists and plug them over and over, normalizing them, much like Fox News does today. Suddenly, an isolated crazy like Charles Manson felt like there was a crazy under every bush and around every corner.

And the Religious Right kept tossing chum out into those waters, hoping to bloody them up even more. It was as if anxiety was taking shape, starting to feel a little more tangible. Indeed, folks started to believe that literal demonic forces were swirling around them.

Says Religious Studies professor Joseph Laycock, “Many Americans truly did feel the corrupting presence of an invisible force that seemed to be all around them, corrupting their children and undermining the values of the family. This anxiety was expressed in symbolic terms, and these symbols were mistaken for reality.”

I love that the kids on Stranger Things play D&D, in part because that’s exactly what I was doing when I was their exact age at those exact years in American cultural history. But OG D&D players know that the anxieties we’ve been talking about were thick in the culture at that time.

D&D fans remember it being called the “Satanic Panic” and thousands of kids had their D&D books confiscated by anxious parents or educators. Already nerdy, the Satanic Panic pushed D&D players deeper “underground” for fear that they’d be ostracized for playing “the devil’s game.” Of course, this simply further deepened the misunderstanding and mystery of the game.

I should know, the 80s tried to beat into my head that my beloved D&D was a direct shot to Satan. Lo and behold, most of my career I have been a pastor. I must have failed a saving throw along the way.

The demogorgon was just a monster in a book, yet millions of Americans truly felt like it was lurking in the woods, eager to steal the innocence of our nation’s children. This is what the writers of Stranger Things have captured so perfectly.

Stranger Things is a brilliant show that portrays a moment in American culture pitch perfectly, and is darned entertaining to boot. Nowadays, our nation’s symbolic fears have a new face and you might actually see someone wearing a D&D t-shirt in public, but Stranger Things reminds us that cultural anxieties have been around a long time.

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Does D&D Warp Our Ability to Tell Truth from Fiction? https://nerdsonearth.com/2018/01/dnd-warp-minds/ Tue, 09 Jan 2018 13:47:15 +0000 https://nerdsonearth.com/?p=15852

Critics of roleplaying games have long said that they warp young minds. We spend 900 words explaining why that is bananas.

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Throughout the 40 year history of Dungeons and Dragons, there has always been a small but vocal group of critics who insist that D&D warps the ability of players to identify truth from fiction.

My first instinct in response to these few but vocal critics is always to imagine them pouring out of a crazy clown car as I roll my eyes so hard that it causes me to black out for a fortnight. But in the age of “fake news” and manipulative propaganda that millions are endorsing and sharing without thought to the voracity or “realness” of it, I think it’s worth 900 words to use D&D as an analogy for identifying truth versus fiction.

dnd at dragon*con
That’s headless Clave in the background.

Buckle up, nerds. We’re venturing into the Upside Down, the world where psychology and Dungeons and Dragons history meet.

These accusations of confusing fact from fiction get their start via a few high profile tragedies that happened decades ago. The most infamous case was 16-year-old Dallas Egbert, who disappeared from Michigan State University in 1979. Dallas’ desperate parents hired a private detective named William Dear to help locate their missing son. Unfortunately, Dear was a narcissistic former Florida highway patrolman who was more interested in self-promotion than in discovering the truth about Dallas.

Dear honed in on a theory that a mysterious “dungeon master” had brainwashed the young and naive Dallas Egbert. Dear’s theory that D&D warped Dallas’ mind was proven to be pure hogwash, but the disappearance of a child prodigy from a wealthy family was catnip to the media. The month that Dallas was missing was more than enough time for the story to sweep the nation, driven by public anxieties that feared for the minds of young people. The narrative of D&D being a “dangerous game” was solidified and millions of Americans now feared that young people couldn’t discern a Mind Flayer from a Dungeon Master.

Erving Goffman was a Canadian-American sociologist who was considered by many to be “the most influential American sociologist of the twentieth century.” In 1974, Erving “Magic” Goffman wrote what he considered to be his more important work, a model of social organization that he called “frame theory.”

“Frame” analysis was his attempt to explain how individuals conceptualize, structure, and perceive the world around them. The research was about the organization of experiences that guide the actions of individuals, groups and societies. To illustrate the concept of the frame, Goffman uses the example of a picture frame. Obvi. A person uses the picture frame (which represents structure) to hold together his picture (which represents the experiences in his life).

Let’s take this straight to D&D, where it will make the most sense to us nerds. Using Dr. Goffman’s work, we can sort D&D into 3 frames of meaning:

1. The content of the fantasy. This frame is the imagining your character as an elf or what have you, plus includes the roleplaying aspects of the characters. It’s a frame of engrossment in an imaginary fantasy world.

2. A second frame would be the rules of the game itself. Think of this frame as a really cool picture frame with d20s glued around the edges. Maybe you got it from Etsy or something, IDK. The picture inside would be a bunch of +1 modifiers, d8s for damage, your 8 CHA, and all the other rulesy stuff.

3. The final frame of meaning is the commonsense reality of our lives, this example being folks sitting around a kitchen table with paper, pencils, and books in front of them.

Despite what William Dear and other critics of D&D claimed, players are easily able to move fluidly between the frames, never once confusing fantasy with reality. An example:

“Lay down your weapon, orc, and we’ll allow you to live this day! I rolled a 14 plus 3 for my modifier, giving me a 17 for my intimidate check. Hey, can somebody pass me those Doritos?”

Sentences like the above are commonplace around the D&D table. And a group of players knows instantly which frame everyone is referring to at any given moment, the above example illustrating this. “Lay down your weapons, orc” (frame of imagination), “I rolled a 14” (frame of the game), and “pass me those Doritos” (frame of MSGs) is clearly evident. Not a single D&D player would confuse fantasy for reality and believe that the buddy next to you is a ferocious orc who is munching on delicious MSG-laden tortilla chips.

In fact, the term “metagaming” arose for those times when players may attempt to act on information they know but their character likely would not. A player saying, “Hey, stop metagaming!”, is illustrative that another player is purposefully mixing frames 1 and 2. But there is no mental confusion there. The meta gaming player is simply trying to get a leg up in the game.

Still, critics say that people confuse fantasy and reality, which is cuckoo banana pants absurd. Even small children intuitively understand the frames of reality that Dr. Goffman outlined. My daughters play with Barbies and I promise you that they’d be the first astounded if a Barbie would come to life and start talking to them.

And if you do actually confuse a Mind Flayer for a Dorito? Well, that’s a problem that is beyond the scope of my 900 word limit. But for the rest of the 99.9% of D&D players? We’re just thankful we have a game that is wholly imaginative, has a wonderful set of analytical rules, and also plays best with some delicious snacks nearby.

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How Charles Manson Inadvertently Inspired the Runaways Comic Book https://nerdsonearth.com/2018/01/runaways-cult/ Wed, 03 Jan 2018 12:55:05 +0000 https://nerdsonearth.com/?p=15858

America in the 70s and 80s were driven by fears of Santanic cults that kidnapped children. What does this have to with Hulu and a comic book?

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Charles Manson and his followers murdered 9 people in 1969. Manson believed in what he called “Helter Skelter”, a term he lifted from a Beatles’ song that he claimed described a coming race war. He believed that ordering his followers–known as the Manson Family–to murder would help precipitate that war. Suddenly notorious, Manson became an emblem of insanity, violence, and the horrific.

The American cult leader Reverend Jim Jones formed “Jonestown” in northwestern Guyana. On November 18, 1978, a total of 918 people died in the settlement from cyanide poisoning, in an event termed “revolutionary suicide” by Jones. It was the largest single loss of American civilian life in a deliberate act until September 11, 2001. A third of the victims were children and all who drank poison did so under duress, giving rise to the idiom “drink the Kool-Aid.”

Anxiety in American culture about evil acts performed by cults was heating up throughout the 1970s. Although cults performing monstrous acts were limited to only a handful of examples like the two listed above, the American public suddenly began to see boogymen under every bush and in every dark basement.

What was only a few isolated events was magnified into a cultural crisis by a panicky public. Even the Canadians grew panicked. Published in 1980, Michelle Remembers  is a book co-written by Canadian psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder and his psychiatric patient (and eventual wife) Michelle Smith.

Michelle Remembers chronicles Pazder’s therapy in the late 1970s with his long-time patient Smith. Smith confided that she had something important to tell him, but could not remember what it was. Over the next 14 months Pazder spent over 600 hours using hypnosis to help Smith recover alleged memories of abuse that occurred when she was five at the hands of her mother and others, all of whom Smith said were members of a “Satanic cult” in Victoria. During one session Smith screamed for 25 minutes non-stop and eventually started speaking in the voice of a five-year-old.

The book was a wildly successful best-seller. However, the book was quickly discredited by several investigations which found no corroboration of the book’s events, while others pointed out that the events described in the book were extremely unlikely or impossible and simply “the hysterical ravings of an uncontrolled imagination.”

The book being nonsense didn’t matter. It significantly contributed to a widespread belief in what was to be called “Satanic Ritual Abuse.” In one case, a mom (who incidentally had been diagnosed with acute schizophrenia) accused a preschool worker of abusing her child via Satanic ritual. So the police questioned the two hundred children of the preschool. During the interrogations, the preschool children reported seeing their day-care teachers fly and lead them into tunnels under the school. Natch.

The $15 million dollar trial generated an FBI report that definitively concluded there was not an organized network of Satanists secretly abusing thousands of children or conducting human sacrifices, but this hardly mattered to the general public. In fact, the case demonstrated that the public was prepared to believe pretty much anything related to Satanic conspiracy.

I should know; this fear of satanic cults even swept through my small town when I was a boy. I recall regular and dramatic warnings from my mother to always be alert and hyper-vigilant, lest a Satanic cult lure me in. As a result, I started to see “evidence” of these cults everywhere. Once I was playing in the woods as a boy and when I saw an old doll’s head laying in the leaves, my first thought was it must have been a Satanic cult that was practicing for future child sacrifices!

Never mind that the folks in my small town couldn’t operate a toaster, much less organize a nefarious cult. Heck, the folks I grew up with weren’t even competent enough to operate toast.

OUCH! MY EYE! I JAMMED ME TOAST INIT!!

 

So what does this have to do with Runaways, a 2003 Marvel comic book by Brian K. Vaughan and Adrian Alphona that is now a television series on Hulu? Well, Runaways features a group of teenagers who discover that their parents are part of an evil crime organization known as “The Pride.” The teenagers spy on their parents and learn that while Pride is masquerading as a charity organization, it is really a criminal group of mob bosses, time-travelers, dark wizards, mad scientists, alien invaders, and telepathic mutants that routinely participates in human sacrifices.

Aghast at discovering that their parents are part of a secret cult, the kids steal weapons and resources from their parents, and learn they themselves inherited their parents’ powers:

  • Alex Wilder is a prodigy and leads the runaways teens
  • Nico Minoru learns she is a powerful witch,
  • Karolina Dean discovers she is an alien,
  • Gertrude Yorkes learns of her telepathic link to a dinosaur,
  • Chase Stein steals his father’s futuristic gloves,
  • and young Molly Hayes learns she is a mutant with incredible strength.

The kids band together and defeat their parents, atoning for the sins of the nefarious secret cult.

Yeah, it sure seems that the 41-year-old Vaughan–who would have been a kid during the 80s heyday of the “Satanic Panic”–has taken this old school cultural anxiety and flipped it on its head in Runaways, huh? Remember, a consistent ancient of parents is that their teenagers would be rebellious. You mash that up with a secret cult and turn it into a “family” tale, and you have yourself a hit.

Runaways is a fresh spin on an old anxiety. And this irrational fear of cults must seem silly to the younger nerds who are reading this. After all, no one walks around afraid that a crazed Satanist will jump out of the bushes at them. No, the irrational fears of our culture have shifted to other things–brown people, women in the workplace, and having our guns taken away, just to name a few.

But us old school nerds remember a time when the scariest thing imaginnable was being kidnapped into a cult.

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