by Lizzie Stark
Knight Realms reignited my joy in philosophy. My personal opinions about free will weren’t on trial. Rather, the beliefs of Portia, who felt the direct influence of a knowable god on her life, were under discussion. I had to rethink myself through philosophical hoops I’d jumped through as a real person years before. The context of the game made that rethinking fun, and as I sussed out Portia’s philosophical positions, she grew as a character to resemble something closer to a complete person.
Time in the hookah tent wasn’t always serious—on the contrary, we spent most of our time laughing. Periodically invading goblins and woodland creatures provided amusing interludes, particularly since most of them lacked the opposable thumbs or intelligence necessary to figure out the befuddling “zipping” mechanism. When he was in town the ridiculous Malyc Weavewarden, one frizzy-haired Jeramy Merritt, would lounge in the hookah tent—he and Brendan and Chris were all friends out-of-game—and make foppish comments in his British accent. One evening, very late, around stupid o’clock, he hovered his gloved hand just out of sight behind one of my ears and said in a low, creepy whisper, “It’s the tickle monster, Portia. It’s got five limbs, and they’re all hungry.” I turned to see what he was referring to, and the closeness of his hand to my head surprised the heck out of me. We all laughed for some time.
Little by little, as I got to know people in-game, I began to know them out-of-game as well. At the beginning and end of events, it became difficult to walk too far without running into someone, a fellow actor, someone I’d shared a scene with, who wanted a hug, to exchange a quip, or to say hello. At events, before lay-on, I began to have a queer feeling that reminded me of attending church with my mother as a little girl. Everyone knew one another, and most everyone was friendly, even to people who dressed or seemed odd at first. They tried to help one another out. When one player lost almost everything she owned in a house fire, there was a drive on Facebook to get her garb and gear so that she could come to the game and unwind after all that stress. This game was a community, one that prided itself on being welcoming and fair. People I knew only slightly called me by name—well, my game name at least. When I returned to Knight Realms after a brief hiatus, I walked into the inn right before lay-on to cries of “It’s Portia!” That simple reception, the recognition of who I was, warmed me, especially since as a telecommuting writer, I didn’t get out all that much—my idea of a social exchange with officemates was buying a cup of coffee from the taciturn cashier at my local shop.
It wasn’t easy to pry myself away from the community. For one thing, my character never died. I tried to die—I wanted to know how it would feel. At Knight Realms, of course, there’s a mechanic for death. Once your hit points drop below zero, you fall to the ground. It’s advisable to fall loudly, to let out a gasp or a cry—that way someone is sure to notice you—and on the ground, you begin your death count. There are two rounds to the death count, each of which lasts five minutes, counted off silently. During the first round, called negatives, any simple healing spell or prayer can bring you out of unconsciousness. During the second round, one of four higher-level spells must be used, and you can only benefit from each of those spells once during the weekend. After ten minutes have passed, you rise and tie a blue headband around your head to signify that you’re now a spirit. From that point, you have three hours to find a physician to reanimate you or a priest or healer to bring you back through the healing focus, which, depending on the healer and how many people she—for it is usually a she—is raising at one time, you either get a scene of phenomenally powerful role-play or something quick. During these processes, it is possible to get an insanity, which you must role-play for a certain amount of time at every subsequent event.
I wanted to die, and Portia, being naturally curious about the last great adventure, wanted to die too. I didn’t realize how hard it would be. Portia has only four health points, which means that one hit from pretty much anything drops her into unconsciousness. During battles, I learned to stay behind the main lines, and so I almost never got hit. I couldn’t run out and invite a skull bash because, first, that wasn’t in Portia’s character to do, but second, in group battles there are a dozen healers around, and I would have simply been healed back to consciousness. The best way to die, I concluded, is by skulking around in the forest by oneself. Surely some goblin or other NPC might find Portia and then gank her. By the time I’d figured this out, I’d gained a number of friends in-game who kept me buffed with valence armor, which bolsters a person’s armor points for the weekend (armor points are used up before health points in combat), with displacements, which allow a player to ignore the next attack that lands on her by saying “displacement,” and with other spells. On a more practical note, I’m a sort of paranoid person. In college, my dorm played Assassin once, a game in which each player gets an assassination assignment carried out by putting a Post-It note on his or her target. I spent that week glancing over my shoulder, taking alternate routes home, and walking around my dorm in my bathrobe because it was off limits to kill someone going to the shower. When my assassin finally chased me down in the Boston snow, I felt a sense of profound relief. I’d known who he was before he killed me, but the jumpiness at seeing him lingered for days. To put it another way: as Portia, yeah, not as Lizzie, but as Portia, I didn’t want to walk through the creepy woods alone in the dark. The idea that things were lurking to possibly kill me freaked me out. I usually walked with a party, so I never got killed. What can I say? My Chronicle didn’t even generate enough ill will to warrant assassination.
I would have preferred some martyred death, but instead I simply stopped coming after a year and a half of regular game play. At first I felt a profound sense of loss. I missed seeing those friendly faces and engaging in some first-rate banter. I also had to walk away from Portia’s many projects, from the Chronicle to her post as Drega’Mire’s minister of information. I’d wanted to purchase an altar to better cater to the growing number of Chroniclerites in town and had persuaded a secretive family of witch hunters to let me station it on their land. I’d gotten engaged to one of the Chronicle’s advertisers as part of a ruse to draw out his undead ex-wife. At Knight Realms, the story seldom ends tidily or poetically because it seldom ends—there is always another phase spider to kill or article to write or business venture to embark on. Like a junkie searching for my next fix, after the first event I missed, I cruised the bulletin boards reading the highlights of other players. I read the postings on the in-game boards and sighed at missing a weekend plot that intimately involved members of Chronicler’s church. As the months wore on, the game’s hold on me weakened, and although I rarely missed the game itself, I missed the people.
My husband had missed me, away so many weekends, spending our precious income on skill points for the imaginary version of myself. He was glad to have me back.
6
Closeted Gamers and
the Satanic Panic
We all “know” what the stereotypical gamer looks like. He is a white male between the ages of fourteen and forty-five, either comically skinny or egregiously fat, an inveterate mouth breather with bad skin who never leaves his parents’ basement, where he lives, and who is constantly geeking out, if not to Dungeons & Dragons, then to Halo or World of Warcraft. He’s forgotten more about Captain Kirk than we will ever know, and when he’s not doing 2d6 damage to an orc while eating Cheetos and drinking Mountain Dew, he’s dreaming that one day a real live woman will talk to him. While it’s cool, or at least acceptable, to wear sports jerseys to the big game, American popular culture does not regard adults who dress up like Superman in the same light. And then, of course, there’s the insane idea that role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons are a gateway not to drugs and alcohol but to real-life witchcraft and Satan worship.
Given the stigma surrounding gaming in general and larp in particular, it’s understandable that some larpers don’t want the world to know about their heroic alter egos.
&n
bsp; The stereotype about gamers tries to have it both ways. On one hand, there’s the powerless buffoon of a man, good at math but a social failure, and on the other hand, there’s the satanic priest who is covertly trying to recruit children into his coven. Before writing this book, I’d never encountered the idea that role-playing games are recruiting tools for the devil, but many gamers, typically those in their thirties and forties, took great pains to assure me that they were not, in fact, Satan-worshippers, a testament to the intensity of the Satanic panic of the 1980s.
While larp’s geeky image derives, in part, from the geek culture of the sci-fi conventions that helped create Dungeons & Dragons and other role-playing games, its image as a tool of the devil and cause of teen suicide derives from a small handful of events that took place in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
The most famous case is that of James Dallas Egbert III, a kid genius with an IQ of over 140. He finished high school at age fourteen and went straight to Michigan State University afterward. That’s where the trouble began. On August 15, 1979, the sixteen-year-old boy went missing from the university campus in a case that quickly excited national attention. His parents hired the flamboyant private detective William Dear, who related the story of Dallas’s disappearance and discovery in his book The Dungeon Master. Among the peculiar clues that Dallas left behind were a note that read: “To whom it may concern: should my body be found, I wish it to be cremated,” and a cork bulletin board that held a strange arrangement of pushpins.
As William Dear investigated, he discovered that Dallas had been involved in the local gay community, that he reportedly synthesized PCP in his dorm room, and that he was an avid player of Dungeons & Dragons.1 According to The Dungeon Master, when Dear investigated Dallas’s Dungeons & Dragons group, he discovered that the community physically acted out their dungeon crawls in the vast maze of steam tunnels beneath the university in what sounds like a primitive larp. The group’s GM would hide treasures for her players in niches in the steam tunnels, utility tunnels surrounding the campus’s heating pipes. An anonymous member of the gaming group told Dear that Dallas had recently been booted from the group because he was always high and because at age sixteen he wasn’t emotionally mature and the team feared for his safety during their games. The private investigator became convinced that both the cremation note and the pushpins on the corkboard had something to do with Dungeons & Dragons. He pressured the university administration to search the eight miles of steam tunnels.
The media emphasized the incident’s possible connection to Dungeons & Dragons. At the time, D&D was relatively new, popular mainly among college kids, and not very well understood. A September 8, 1979, New York Times article by Nathaniel Sheppard Jr. said officials believed Dallas might have gotten lost in the steam tunnels “while playing an elaborate version of a bizarre intellectual game called Dungeons & Dragons,” while a September 14, 1979, Associated Press article chronicling Dallas’s discovery noted he was “feared to have been an accidental victim of an intellectual fantasy game.”
The real story was far more banal. According to Dear’s book, Dallas had grown depressed due to pressure from his family to succeed in school and his young age, which isolated him socially. He ran away into the steam tunnels to commit suicide and meant the mysterious cork board as a map to the location of his body. In the tunnels, Dallas attempted to overdose on quaaludes and then spent a few nights at friends’ houses before taking the bus as far as his money would get him, to Morgan City, Louisiana, where he worked in the oil fields for a few days before calling the private investigator. A month after Dallas disappeared, Dear flew a plane to Louisiana and retrieved the boy.
Unfortunately for Dungeons & Dragons fans, Dallas asked Dear to keep the details of his disappearance “our secret,” partly because he was embarrassed about the incident and also because, as Dear wrote, “he did not want [his younger brother] Doug to endure cruel asides from his classmates and friends about his ‘faggot brother, the dope addict.’”2 Dear kept his promise, telling media outlets that the boy’s disappearance had nothing to do with Dungeons & Dragons but declining to give further details. The damage to the game’s image was already done. The troubled Dallas shot himself a year after his first disappearance and was declared brain dead several days later. After Dallas’s brother Doug graduated from high school, the private detective wrote his book, but the connection between Dungeons & Dragons and teen suicide remained.
Dallas’s disappearance excited the popular imagination, inspiring Rona Jaffe’s 1981 novel Mazes and Monsters about four college students obsessed with a fantasy game, which was turned into a made-for-TV movie of the same title starring a young Tom Hanks in 1982.
Three years after Dallas’s disappearance, another teen boy, Irving “Bink” Pulling Jr., killed himself in Virginia. Bink had been in the gifted and talented program at his high school and was a huge fan of Dungeons & Dragons—his room was full of paraphernalia. At school, his teacher served as a GM for a whole group of kids; sometimes they played in school as part of the gifted and talented program. Bink was also troubled. One classmate remembered him writing “Life is a Joke” on the blackboard in one of his classes, while another said that he had “a lot of problems anyway that weren’t associated with the game,” according to a Washington Post article on Bink written by reporter Michael Isikoff. On June 9, 1982, Bink went home and shot himself in the chest.
Bink’s suicide created a powerful anti-gaming activist in his mother, Patricia Pulling. Pat claimed that her son had been normal before he started playing the game and blamed it for his death because during a session hours before he killed himself, another player put a death curse on Bink’s character. According to the Washington Post, in 1983 Pat sued the school district for $1 million in damages and legal expenses on the grounds that the death-curse placed on Bink was “intended to inflict emotional distress” on a boy who was under “extreme psychological stress and emotional pressure” thanks to the game. The Pulling family lost its suit in 1984, although by then Pat Pulling had formed Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons, or BADD, an advocacy group dedicated to getting the game out of schools.
Interestingly, Isikoff’s article on the lawsuit mentions that Dungeons & Dragons “has received publicity in connection with several bizarre incidents and deaths in recent years,” and alludes to Egbert’s disappearance and suicide. It goes on to quote Robert Landa, a lawyer for an anti-gaming group named SALT (Sending America Light and Truth), who calls Dungeons & Dragons “a lifestyle that uses witchcraft and black magic.”
As for BADD, it became the go-to anti-gaming organization for media outlets. Patricia Pulling’s 1997 obituary in the Richmond Times-Dispatch mentions that she appeared on Geraldo, 60 Minutes, and Larry King Live to talk about teens and Satanism. Pulling believed that Dungeons & Dragons was a gateway to evil. As she told the Associated Press in 1988, “The majority of teenagers involved, people say, ‘They’re just dabblers.’ I say, ‘My God, the dabblers are the ones committing the crimes. They’re kids, and they’re killing people.”3 In a Phi Delta Kappan article on Satanism and adolescents, Patricia Pulling’s out-of-print book, The Devil’s Web: Who Is Stalking Your Children for Satan? is quoted as saying:
Law enforcement officials and mental health professionals now recognize the fact that adolescent occult involvement is progressive. The child who is obsessed with occult entertainment may not stop there, but he often moves onto satanic graffiti and cemetery vandalism. From that point, he easily moves into grave robbing for items needed for occult rituals, and he is just a step away from blood-letting. Blood-letting begins with animal killings and mutilations and progresses to murder if intervention does not take place.4
Even Tipper Gore was not immune to BADD’s dubious claims. In her book, Raising PG Kids in an X-Rated Society, she calls Dungeons & Dragons an “occult fad” and states:
According to Mrs. Pat Pulling, founder of the organization Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons, the game has been li
nked to nearly fifty teenage suicides and homicides. Pulling’s own son killed himself in 1982 after becoming deeply involved in the game…. A fellow-player threatened him with a ‘death curse,’ and he killed himself in response.5
While Dungeons & Dragons had many opponents in the 1980s, both small-scale and national, BADD and Patricia Pulling were among its most vocal adversaries.
At core, the game’s opponents made two different claims: that Dungeons & Dragons was an occult activity that could lead children into witchcraft and that Dungeons & Dragons created an immersive fantasy that could lead children to dissociate themselves from reality, a fantasy that could be used to manipulate children into performing abhorrent acts.
The claim that Dungeons & Dragons promotes witchcraft rests on several assumptions, namely that witchcraft truly exists and that it can be caught like a cold from a game. These beliefs seem silly; most adults discard the belief that magic is real along with delusions of Santa. Even if one believes that magic exists, it’s not the sort of thing people learn in a larp. Sure, my character card says I have “learned” to speak High Elven, to heal people with my hands, and to fight with a staff. But that doesn’t make it true. This is not to say that larps can’t help promote learning, but in my experience, players tend to pick up general life skills, such as problem-solving techniques or leadership skills, not topical knowledge. After all, most conversations at, for example, Knight Realms, pertain to the imaginary world of the game—I might become an expert on the inverted tower or Kormyrian court etiquette, but that doesn’t get me very far in real life (although Kormyrian court etiquette might bear some similarities to good dinner party behavior). Suffice to say, though I spent three years on the role-playing scene, I was never once invited to a ritual sacrifice.
