Dangerous Games: What the Moral Panic over Role-Playing Games Says about Play, Religion, and Imagined Worlds

Abstract

Dangerous Games: What the Moral Panic over Role-Playing Games Says about Play, Religion, and Imagined Worlds Joseph P Laycock Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2015. Notes, bibliography, index. 349 pp. $29.95 paper. ISBN: 9780520284920I am old enough to remember what Joseph P. Laycock describes as the 1980's "moral panic" concerning Dungeons & Dragons (DD and, second, a cultural analysis of this moral panic. In the rst section, Laycock presents meticulous research into the events of the early role- playing game era, from the development of D&D and other RPGs, such as Vampire: the Masquerade, to crime stories to media reportage. "is section gathers disparate strands in a thorough and compelling fashion, painting a picture of American society (particularly middle-class subur- ban U.S. society) struggling to come to grips with new paradigms in play and in youthful identity seeking. Reading these chapters brought back memories of my elementary school classmates debating whether Bloody Mary would appear in the bathroom mirror if we called her. Such was the period I grew up in: the occult was almost a part of daily conversation.In the second section, Laycock weaves his historical research together with socio- logical analysis, pointing to ways in which self-styled religious leaders and talk show hosts in%uenced the thinking of millions of Americans, connecting dots between crime and role-playing games in ways that benetted these media gures. …