Quoted from mbeardsley:Me and a bunch of my friends started playing D&D at college in 1982. We still all get together once a year (even though we are spread all across the country now), and spend 3-4 days playing.
We've been playing the same "campaign" now for 40 years - though most of our original characters have died and been replaced (at least once).
By contrast, I was only 7 years old in 1982, and it was the height of Satanic Panic mania. My parents were going through a protracted “born again” phase, and it was just sort of “in the air”; Dungeons and Dragons was *particularly* to be feared. I remember seeing a “Special Report” about the perils of having your kid fall under the sway of this dangerous pastime, how kids would be bound up with demonic forced and kill themselves if their character died in a game. They told us about this stuff in Sunday School all the time, with grisly detail that really makes you wonder at the sadism of some adults. Little kids don’t have the guile to recognize when the adults might be full of it, after all.
I lived with some pretty damn vivid (and 100% baseless) fears through the course of my childhood and adolescence. Eventually some friends of mine took an interest in role playing games (the very phrase itself seemed laden with danger to me at the time), and at a sleepover they “initiated” me into the D&D world. I confided that I had been warned off of such games because of the emphasis on demons and the like, and they were totally confused. My friend said “but that’s who you’re *fighting*!” A bit later his dad checked in on us and made a crack about “you’re not in there sacrificing small animals, are you?” Somehow that night and in that moment the spell of anxiety around a simple game which relies on imagination was broken by a sane adult who recognized the absurdity of the bad rap around those games. Lenny Bruce and George Carlin would be proud.
Anyhow…in a way I kind of enjoy looking back on the ridiculousness of the stuff that scared me as a kid. It sort of made the world more “exciting”, knowing it was all so fraught with danger at every turn. On the other hand, seeking solace and refuge in the suffocating din of the drywall and commercial carpeted church activities available as an alternative didn’t hold too much appeal to me. My older brother was always managing to get horror movies and punk rock albums into the house. That world seemed dangerous to me, but in the way a rollercoaster seems dangerous. Just exciting, really. Church was full of adults who seemed bent on making sure that you only had whatever version of “fun” they set out for you. (Usually something to do with an organized sport activity, group singing of awful songs, and maybe eating some hot dogs.)
My parents’ religious phase cooled off eventually (and just at the time I would have started rebelling against it in a big way); by the time I was a couple years into high school my dad was back to digging on rock and roll and hipped me to Frank Zappa. All’s well that ends well, I guess…
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Mojave Desert, NV
Kitchener, ON
