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Joseph Laycock

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

by Joseph P. Laycock (Author)

4.5 57 ratings

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The 1980s saw the peak of a moral panic over fantasy role-playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons. A coalition of moral entrepreneurs that included representatives from the Christian Right, the field of psychology, and law enforcement claimed that these games were not only psychologically dangerous but an occult religion masquerading as a game. Dangerous Games explores both the history and the sociological significance of this panic.

Fantasy role-playing games do share several functions in common with religion. However, religionas a socially constructed world of shared meaningcan also be compared to a fantasy role-playing game. In fact, the claims of the moral entrepreneurs, in which they presented themselves as heroes battling a dark conspiracy, often resembled the very games of imagination they condemned as evil. By attacking the imagination, they preserved the taken-for-granted status of their own socially constructed reality. Interpreted in this way, the panic over fantasy-role playing games yields new insights about how humans play and together construct and maintain meaningful worlds.

Laycock’s clear and accessible writing ensures that Dangerous Games will be required reading for those with an interest in religion, popular culture, and social behavior, both in the classroom and beyond.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Dangerous Games presents a detailed and multi-layered history of the social realities surrounding Role Playing Games (RPGs), analyzing a complex legacy of cultural and religious epistemologies, in order to argue that the corresponding moral panic over such games is itself a form of dangerous corrupted play. ... Overall, Dangerous Games is an important read for students and scholars of contemporary history, religion, popular culture, and mythology." (Nova Religio)

From the Inside Flap

"Joseph P. Laycock's book delves into the minds of both avid gamers and evangelical Christians and returns with surprising and unsettling conclusions. Gaming, Laycock shows, teaches social and psychological strategies to resist cultural authority and to view reality from radically new perspectives. This book affirms the transformational power that motivates this increasingly popular activity, and thus it is essential reading for scholars of both contemporary popular culture and American religions."Bill Ellis, Professor Emeritus, English and American Studies, Pennsylvania State University

Laycock’s book brings a robust, theoretically informed eye to a topic that has been understudied by sociologists. His case is presented in such a way that other scholars could apply his method and understanding of moral panic to other aspects of popular culture. This is a crucial aspect of scholarship. Laycock writes engagingly, tells a deft story, and advances our understanding.”Doug Cowan, Professor of Religious Studies and Social Development Studies, Renison University College

Laycock provides an in-depth, theoretically informed analysis of fantasy role-playing games that will both help scholars interpretively and further allow instructors to provide students with a more sophisticated view of their culture. This book more broadly examines the social construction of reality, particularly religion. Laycock's approach makes a much-needed contribution to the understanding of the human need and capacity for creating and inhabiting multiple realities. A truly novel interpretation.”David G. Bromley, Professor of Religious Studies and Director of the World Religions and Spirituality Project, Virginia Commonwealth University

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ University of California Press (February 12, 2015)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 368 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0520284917
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0520284913
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.4 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 1 x 9 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #8,824,555 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2,205 in Dungeons & Dragons Game
- #3,134 in Psychology & Religion
- #26,417 in Popular Culture in Social Sciences

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4.5 57 ratings

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Joseph Laycock

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I am an associate professor of religious studies at Texas State University. I write on a variety of topics related to American religious history, including American Catholicism, moral panics, and new religious movements (NRMs). In my writing I try to strike a balance between advancing a scholarly conversation about religion and reaching out to include the public in that conversation.

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Sensei Macho Solo

Excellent History

Reviewed in the United States on April 8, 2024

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This book is a perfect history of the Satanic Panic and how it consumed the game hobby. It is deeply researched, and engagingly written. I cannot recommend it too highly if this is a topic you are interested in!

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RDD

Excellent Analysis of the Moral Panic Over RPGs!

Reviewed in the United States on August 6, 2018

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In “Dangerous Games: What the Moral Panic over Role-Playing Games Says about Play, Religion, and Imagined Worlds”, Joseph P. Laycock argues, “Much of the energy that evangelicals put into framing fantasy role-playing games as either madness or a heretical religion was actually a defense mechanism to assuage their own doubts. The realization that a game of imagination can resemble a religion naturally leads to the suspicion that one’s religion could likewise be a game of imagination” (pg. 24-25). These evangelicals worked with others in the New Christian Right, law enforcement, and parents groups to act as moral entrepreneurs in the panic. Laycock writes of intergenerational differences, “Fantasy role-playing games were linked to fears of a generation that would rise up and kill its parents. While the imagined forces corrupting young people changed from decade to decade, the subversion narratives were always closely tied to fears of the religious and moral other. In this sense, the history of the panic over fantasy role-playing games is really a history of far darker fantasies that haunted the American psyche” (pg. 6).

Addressing the historical context, Laycock writes, “The panic over cults in the 1970s combined religious fears of the heretical other with medicalized notions of brainwashing and mental illness. This constellation of anxieties formed the context through which critics understood ‘D&D’” (pg. 77). later, “In the 1980s, moral entrepreneurs continued to frame their attack on role-playing games in both religious terms as a ‘cult’ and in medicalized terms as a form of brainwashing. But a new claim came to dominate discourse about fantasy role-playing games: that these games were actually designed to promote criminal behavior and suicide because they had been crated by an invisible network of criminal Satanists” (pg. 102). These linked role-playing games with the ongoing Satanic Panic. Groups like Bothered About “Dungeons & Dragons” (BADD) furthered the connection of ‘D&D’ with murder and suicide (pg. 119).

Examining the Satanic Panic, Laycock writes, “[David] Bromley attempts to make sense of the panic by suggesting that claims about Satanists abducting and abusing children were an attempt to articulate social concerns and frustrations that could not be expressed otherwise. The real threat, he argues, was that a changing economy in which both parents frequently worked required Americans to rely increasingly on strangers to care for and raise their children. The covenantal sphere of family life was being compromised by the contractual sphere of the market, and parents felt helpless to halt this process” (pgs. 106-107). Laycock argues that darker, edgier content from the late 1980s and 1990s sought to provide outlets targeted to Generation X just as <i>D&D</i> had for Baby Boomers. He writes, “For Generation X, dark, atmosphere-heavy role-playing games were not just an escape into a fantasy world: they were a medium through which players and storytellers could explore their doubts and frustrations by creating stories that articulated the world’s flaws by casting them into relief” (pg. 140). This darker context added further fuel to moral entrepreneurs’ fire. Amid fears of superpredators and newspaper articles about privileged, white killers, moral entrepreneurs seized on the tropes of role-playing games to “frame white murders as ‘goths’ or otherwise part of some strange subculture that made them fundamentally different from their white, suburban peers” (pg. 163).

Laycock links the focus on the imaginary with its perceived threat to cultural hegemony. He writes, “In this sense, fantasy role-playing games, along with novels, film, and other imaginary worlds, provide mental agency. Moral entrepreneurs interpreted this agency as subversion and a deliberate attempt to undermine traditional values” (pg. 215). He continues, “To regard the demonic as fantasy casts doubt on all religious truth claims, at least where the supernatural is concerned… This fear, [he argues], is the primary reason why some Christians found fantasy role-playing games so intolerable. If players can construct a shared fantasy complete with gods and demons, what assurance is there that Christianity is not itself a kind of game?” (pg. 233)

Laycock concludes, “Censorship allows authorities to restrict what we say, but controlling the frames of metacommunication allows authorities to restrict the kind of meanings we convey. The panic over fantasy role-playing games and the imagination reflects an attempt to secure hegemony by reordering these frames of meaning” (pgs. 279-280).

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Patrick

Must read for RPGers who grew up in the 80s

Reviewed in the United States on July 8, 2018

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Excellent book! I highly recommend it if you remember all nonsense hysteria around D&D and wonderful what was going on. Its well researched and covers the clamour around Role Playing games in the 1980s and 90s. There is a lot to unpack in this book and honestly I will have to probably read it twice. Mr. Laycock lays out both the history around Dungeon and Dragon and the groups like BADD that claimed games such at it , were going to corrupt the young.

One person found this helpful

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Scott Slemmons

The Panics over Games

Reviewed in the United States on March 14, 2017

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Long, long ago, back in the ancient junior-high days, I played Dungeons & Dragons. This was back in the old boxed set era — what I still think of as the glory days of D&D — and I’ll freely admit it was a weird game. Most game sessions involved exploring underground dungeons populated by nothing by seemingly random collections of monsters living in squalor but surrounded by treasure. Wizards weren’t allowed to wear armor or carry weapons more significant than a dagger, and their spells disappeared from their minds as soon as they were cast — unless they’d memorized the same spell more than once. And there was some sort of armadillo that had somehow evolved the ability to cause metal to rust.

But the weirdest thing of all was how many people believed that playing a game of pretend could cause you to worship the devil.

I was lucky, because while my parents surely thought D&D was weird, they never believed it was evil, and they never told me I wasn’t allowed to play. But there were lots of people who bought into that ridiculous story. But why did people believe it? Why did people push it? What were they getting out of pushing something so utterly deranged?

That’s what this book is about — why was there a huge moral panic about D&D (and roleplaying games in general), why were people so eager to believe that bookish teenagers were devil worshipers, who were the people helping to fan the flames, and what benefits did they gain from inventing conspiracy theories that made no rational sense?

Laycock’s book is exhaustively detailed, detailing the history of the game and the panic from the beginning, setting down the names of a vast number of conspiracy theorists, and analyzing not just the motives of the theorists, but the many ways they were actually very similar to the teenagers they were targeting.

Let’s start out with this, though — this isn’t an easy, two-nights-to-finish pop-psych skimmer. This is a pretty serious academic work. There are hefty chunks of the book devoted to professorial discussions of play, religion, and the imagination. Those may sound easy and fun, but when you’re analyzing the research into these academic areas, they can be a bit of a slog to get through. There are pages of this book you may have to force yourself to get through, particularly if you’re not well-versed in these academic areas.

This may sound like a bad thing, but it ain’t really. You learn stuff going through these sections, and learning this stuff helps you appreciate Laycock’s analysis later in the book. This is the nature of academic works, and it don’t make it bad just ’cause it ain’t easy.

What are some of the things we learn in Laycock’s analysis? One of the key discussions is about play and imagination — particularly when it’s healthy and when it’s unhealthy, and what happens when people can’t tell the difference between their imaginations and reality. I don’t think it’ll come as a great surprise to anyone who’s followed this phenomenon before, but there are some serious similarities between D&D players and the conspiracy theorists who persecuted them. D&D players played at being brave heroes battling against monstrous horrors to save the innocent. And the conspiracy theorists like Patricia Pulling, William Dear, and Jack Chick also played at being brave heroes battling against monstrous horrors to save the innocent. Now which ones do you think knew they were playing a game, and which ones do you think had mistaken their game for reality?

Even then, there are some items in here that still surprised me. I never really imagined there were people who were actually opposed to anyone using their imagination — but there are, because imagining things means thinking of things that God didn’t create. And this distrust of the imagination actually extends back centuries — some Greek philosophers didn’t trust fiction or the arts at all, and even Thomas Jefferson hated novels because he thought books should only convey things that were true, not falsities and fictions.

There’s a lot of excellent stuff to learn in this book. If you’re an old-school gamer with a taste for the hobby’s history, if you’ve got an interest in moral panics, if you love learning new things about how humans use and abuse play and religion, you’ll probably really enjoy this book.

22 people found this helpful

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J. P. DuQuette

Essential look at the disingenuous "moral entrepreneurs" who fear D&D and what they are actually afraid of.

Reviewed in the United States on June 18, 2017

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Very insightful look into the root causes of the "Satanic panic" of the '70s-'90s, as well as the birth of TSR and White Wolf games. Yes, it's written with sociologists and religious studies majors in mind, but this is one of the few academic books on gaming that deserves a wider audience. The most enjoyable book on gaming culture I've read since I, Avatar by Mark Stephen Meadows.

3 people found this helpful

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Adam V Steele

Dangerous Games = Role-playing : History + Sociology thereof + Comparisons with Religion

Reviewed in the United States on March 30, 2016

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This book is a mix of RPG industry history, and sociology/religious studies text. The sociology parts are presented as an academic view of the various moral panics that have been associated with role playing games. The religious studies aspect includes an analysis of how RPGs are and are not similar to religion, and why this comparison was so often made in society at large. You may or may not agree with the author's conclusions but I feel it these are mostly a fair analysis and not merely a cheap shot at religion generally.

The book is well written and the author keeps the subject matter interesting. For RPG fans, the history of TSR and White Wolf is worth the price of admission alone.

7 people found this helpful

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Guerric Haché

Detailed history & insightful sociological study

Reviewed in Canada on September 23, 2017

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I was first alerted to this book through an episode of Geek's Guide to the Galaxy, and from that discussion I knew this book would be a fairly detailed look at the history of the moral panic and outrage directed at Dungeons & Dragons in the late 20th century. In that regard, I was not disappointed - Laycock lays out an exhaustive and detailed history of the panic that is educational and informative in its own right.

What I wasn't expecting was the detailed and thoroughly academic look at the intersections of religion, fantasy, play, and human meaning. While the author's focus remains mostly fixed on tabletop fantasy role-playing games, his unpacking of the fraught relationship between religious and cultural hegemony on the one hand and fantasy and imagination on the other is rooted in an articulation of the nature and purpose of fantasy itself as a genre. Some of the lessons and insights here could be expanded to understand other cultural flashpoints, and through clear discussion and reinforcement Laycock provides readers with a fascinating sociological perspective on these issues that's understandable and approachable.

One person found this helpful