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Episode: Demonizing Dungeons & Dragons (Classic)
Author: Pushkin Industries
Duration: 00:37:46
Episode Shownotes
When James Dallas Egbert III was reported missing from his college dorm in 1979, one of America's most flamboyant private detectives was summoned to solve the case. "Dallas" faced the same problems as many teenagers, but P.I. William Dear stoked fears that he might have fallen under the evil spell
of a mysterious and sinister game: Dungeons & Dragons... Tim Harford returns with brand new episodes of Cautionary Tales on January 10th. In the meantime, Merry Christmas from the Cautionary Tales team! For a full list of sources, see the show notes at timharford.com. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Full Transcript
00:00:06 Speaker_03
Pushkin. As all dungeon masters and adventurers know, 2024 is the 50th anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons, the first commercial role-playing game. I'm a huge fan of role-playing games. I've been playing them since the early 1980s.
00:00:26 Speaker_03
And to mark the anniversary, I wanted to give you another chance to hear an old favourite. A quick word of warning, this episode discusses death by suicide. If you're suffering emotional distress or having suicidal thoughts, support is available.
00:00:43 Speaker_03
For example, from 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline in the US, and from the Samaritans if you're in the UK. Cautionary Tales will return with new episodes on the 10th of January. In the meantime... I give you Demonizing Dungeons and Dragons.
00:01:12 Speaker_07
In Raymond Chandler novels and in Humphrey Bogart movies, it often begins with a telephone call. Strange to say, in real life, it often begins that way too.
00:01:24 Speaker_03
Those are the words of William Deere. He's going to take us on an adventure that's full of thrills, surprises and terrors. William Deere is one of the most famous private detectives in the world, dashing, moustachioed, sporting a vast gold ring.
00:01:43 Speaker_03
He's a star with his own private plane. And this telephone call in August 1979 was going to get him started on one of his most infamous cases. On the other end of the telephone was a surgeon from the same part of North Texas as William Deere.
00:02:01 Speaker_03
The two men had met a few times.
00:02:06 Speaker_06
My nephew has disappeared. He was taking a summer course at Michigan State University in East Lansing when it happened.
00:02:12 Speaker_07
And he didn't just run off?
00:02:14 Speaker_06
He's not that kind of kid. He loves school. In fact, he's considered to be a genius.
00:02:21 Speaker_03
The boy, James Dallas Egbert III, or Dallas, was just 16 years old.
00:02:29 Speaker_06
He graduated from high school at 13, entered college at 14. I'm telling you, dear, he's not the type to just go on the road.
00:02:38 Speaker_03
Well, maybe. And maybe not. Young Dallas had been missing for eight days already. William Dear called Dallas's parents.
00:02:48 Speaker_05
Mr Dear, thank God you called. I'm so desperate about my son. I don't know if he's committed suicide and is lying in some ditch or what. Maybe he's been kidnapped.
00:03:00 Speaker_03
Deer's team was soon packing for the trip to East Lansing, Michigan. There was an expert pilot and a sniper Vietnam vet. They assembled telephoto lenses, bugging devices, tracking systems and spy cameras.
00:03:15 Speaker_03
Deere himself was running through the possibilities. Most of them were mundane, but one of them would prove to be truly fantastical. I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to Cautionary Tales.
00:03:56 Speaker_03
The simplest explanation of Dallas's disappearance was that the young man had killed himself. That was William Deer's instinct. It was also Anna Egbert's. According to Deer's account, she blamed herself.
00:04:11 Speaker_05
Dallas called me on August 12th. He was so happy because he got a 3.5 and a computer science course. I told him it should have been a 4.0.
00:04:24 Speaker_03
Deer's team started asking questions around the university. What they discovered deepened the fear that this was a case of suicide. Dallas was depressed. But Deer also asked what did Dallas like to do with his spare time.
00:04:40 Speaker_03
His classmates said that he liked computers. At the time, computers were rare and mysterious. And Dallas did some other mysterious things too. But then So did William Deere.
00:04:53 Speaker_03
For example, when he received an anonymous tip that Dallas used to risk a kind of thrill-seeking dare, lying down on the railroad tracks and letting the trains pass over him, Deere decided that he really needed to put himself in Dallas's position.
00:05:10 Speaker_03
Literally.
00:05:11 Speaker_08
I laid down on the railroad ties and tried to imagine myself as Dallas.
00:05:19 Speaker_03
Was this how Dallas felt? His colleagues screamed a warning. The oncoming train had a cattle catcher. William Deere scrambled off the tracks just in time. No. It couldn't have been a train.
00:05:39 Speaker_03
If Dallas had been hit by a train, surely his body would have been found soon enough. It did seem likely that Dallas was dead, but if he was dead, where was the body?
00:05:53 Speaker_03
William Deere couldn't rid himself of the suspicion that there was something rather different behind Dallas's disappearance. Something fantastically strange. A game.
00:06:05 Speaker_03
A game that, reportedly, hundreds of students were playing in dark, humid tunnels beneath the campus. A game called Dungeons & Dragons. Now, William Deere didn't know what Dungeons & Dragons was. Neither did Dallas's friends.
00:06:29 Speaker_00
I don't know how to play it, but I do know that you can't play if you're a dumbass.
00:06:36 Speaker_03
But what kind of game is it? William Deere received phone calls. There were rumours. He tried to piece together clues. It was difficult to understand. You might find this bafflement odd. Dungeons and Dragons is pretty mainstream these days.
00:06:55 Speaker_03
You might well have played a game yourself. But in 1979? 1979 Dungeons and Dragons was pretty much unknown. Dallas's disappearance was going to change all that.
00:07:08 Speaker_03
As William Deere explained in his subsequent book titled The Dungeon Master, he wanted to get into those mysterious tunnels to search for Dallas's body.
00:07:20 Speaker_03
In order to pressure Michigan State University into giving access to a celebrity detective from Texas, Deere frequently spoke to the press about his Dungeons and Dragons hypothesis. The newspapers lapped it up.
00:07:34 Speaker_03
Tunnels are searched for missing student.
00:07:37 Speaker_03
reported the New York Times, explaining that Dallas might have become lost in the tunnels which carry heat to campus buildings while playing an elaborate version of a bizarre intellectual game called Dungeons and Dragons.
00:07:53 Speaker_03
If you've noticed there's a lot of vague talk about this game, how it's intellectual and bizarre and you can't play if you're a dumbass, but no specifics, you're right.
00:08:06 Speaker_03
Dungeons & Dragons was a blank canvas onto which parents, media critics and celebrity detectives could project any anxiety. In the informational vacuum, rumours grew. Apparently, people wore costumes.
00:08:23 Speaker_03
Apparently, a dungeon master would lead quests around the tunnels in the scalding heat and the darkness and the stench.
00:08:32 Speaker_03
You'd have to put your hand into crevices and there might be rotting calf's liver in there or spaghetti to represent an orc's brain. Or it might be treasure. Apparently there were more than 100 dungeons in the East Lansing area.
00:08:49 Speaker_03
And if you don't know what that means, don't worry, William Deere didn't either. But he had a theory.
00:08:56 Speaker_03
Whatever this strange game was, whether it involved dungeons or rotten liver or all sorts of other things that William Deere didn't understand, it might have something to do with Dallas's disappearance.
00:09:10 Speaker_03
And since William Deere was an investigator, heck, he was going to investigate.
00:09:16 Speaker_03
He called a hobby store, got the contact details of one of these so-called dungeon masters, and offered him 50 bucks to drop everything and initiate Deere in the mysteries of Dungeons and Dragons. 60 bucks if it was good.
00:09:33 Speaker_03
Back in 1979, that was a lot of money.
00:09:37 Speaker_08
I didn't know what to expect from my Dungeon Master. Would he show up in a Merlin costume with a funny pointed cap? I knew he would have complete control over the circumstances of the fantasy adventure on which I was about to embark.
00:10:03 Speaker_03
When the young man knocked on the door, he and his friend were both wearing jeans, sweaters and sneakers. And rather than leading Deer into the tunnels to mine for calf's liver, he pulled out a pencil and paper, some books and some dice.
00:10:21 Speaker_03
The adventure was about to begin. Cautionary Tales will be back in a moment. William Deere didn't wear a pointy hat. He didn't have to dip his hand into dark crevices in the tunnels under Michigan State University.
00:10:46 Speaker_03
He just got into character, pretending to be a wizard named Tor, who was accompanied by a sneak thief named Dan. nor did Deer visit any tunnels. He just sat at a table, describing what Tor was doing.
00:11:02 Speaker_03
In his vivid imagination, Tor and Dan got into various scrapes around a medieval town, scrambling through an escape tunnel pursued by some guards, being attacked by giant rats, being taken prisoner by orcs, and finally triumphing, thanks to a combination of bluff and cunning.
00:11:24 Speaker_03
All this took place in the theatre of the mind, with the dungeon master simply describing what they saw, and with the aid of a few dice rolls, whether their schemes succeeded or failed. In fact,
00:11:37 Speaker_03
the game wasn't nearly as odd as all the rumours suggested. Yes, the stuff about wizards and orcs is a bit strange, but then Star Wars with it's Jedi knights and dark powers and the mysterious force had just been a smash hit.
00:11:54 Speaker_03
The animated film of the Lord of the Rings had just been released too. Nothing's more culturally mainstream than wizards and heroes. Dice, pencils, sitting around a table playing let's pretend, it was all very tame. But William Deere had fun.
00:12:14 Speaker_03
In fact, he worried that this game of the imagination might just be too much fun. Maybe, for a troubled mind, it could be dangerous. Dallas might actually have begun to live the game, not just to play it.
00:12:33 Speaker_08
Dungeons and Dragons could have absorbed him so much that his mind had slipped through the fragile barrier between reality and fantasy.
00:12:49 Speaker_03
If there is a time and a place that the fragile barrier between reality and fantasy first broke down, perhaps it was St Paul, Minnesota in 1969. Behind this breakdown was a young physics graduate named David Wesley.
00:13:06 Speaker_03
Wesley was a founder of the Twin Cities Military Miniatures Group, a wargaming club. Wargames are more realistic descendants of chess, allowing players to re-enact battles from history with model soldiers on a realistic miniature battlefield.
00:13:22 Speaker_03
Robert Louis Stevenson, the author of Treasure Island, was a wargamer. So was H.G. Wells. War games can be used for serious military training.
00:13:33 Speaker_03
David Wesley, who was in the Army Reserves himself, was interested in these training exercises, where making decisions over a tabletop battlefield might prepare a young officer for the real thing over in Vietnam.
00:13:48 Speaker_03
To be useful, a training war game couldn't be restricted to a limited set of moves as in chess.
00:13:54 Speaker_03
Players should be able to dream up all sorts of tricks and tactics, which meant the game needed a referee to use his or her judgement when a player tried something unusual. The game of war was open-ended and unpredictable, just like war itself.
00:14:12 Speaker_03
In a war game set in 1806 in the fictional Prussian town of Braunstein, David Wesley took this open-endedness to the next level. As with a normal war game, he put players in charge of Napoleon's French army and the Prussian resistance.
00:14:29 Speaker_03
but then he assigned rather more unusual roles. One player, for example, was given the role of the Chancellor of Braunstein's University. What could he do? Well, anything.
00:14:42 Speaker_03
He didn't command any troops, but he could rally the students and urge them to join the resistance, or he could challenge another player to a duel, perhaps over the affections of a lady. Another player's character started in jail.
00:14:56 Speaker_03
Any of these players could attempt anything. Wesley, as referee, had to improvise. The experimental game was a chaotic series of whispered conferences between the players and Wesley the referee.
00:15:09 Speaker_03
It took ages, and the French and the Prussians never even fired a shot. not so much a war game as a phony war game. Wesley felt like it had been a flop. But then the players told him they loved it.
00:15:25 Speaker_03
One of those players was Dave Arneson, who seized Wesley's idea with both hands. In a follow-up game set in a banana republic, Arneson started as a student revolutionary, but managed to convince the other players he was working for the CIA.
00:15:41 Speaker_03
He ran rings around them, not by rolling dice or pushing pieces around the map, but by acting the part and bluffing his way to success.
00:15:51 Speaker_03
What Wesley and Arneson and the group had invented together was a strange combination of a classical war game, a military training exercise and an improvised acting class. It came to be known as a role-playing game.
00:16:06 Speaker_03
The first commercial role-playing game, designed in part by Dave Arneson, could have been about Napoleonic battles or pretending to be in the CIA. But it wasn't. It was about heroes and wizards exploring the tunnels beneath a medieval castle.
00:16:22 Speaker_03
It was called, you guessed it, Dungeons & Dragons. And it was dungeons and dragons that William Deere feared had driven Dallas Egbert into some kind of delusional state where he imagined he was a wizard.
00:16:38 Speaker_03
So, does the barrier between reality and fantasy break down in a role-playing game? Well, maybe a bit. But the same is true for novels or movies. I don't watch horror movies, I don't like the way they scare me.
00:16:54 Speaker_03
I cried uncontrollably at the end of Cinema Paradiso. Did the barrier between reality and fantasy break down at that moment? I suppose it did, but there's nothing shameful or dangerous about that.
00:17:09 Speaker_03
And yet, there was something different about these role-playing games. something that drove America into a state of moral panic. Maybe it was the fact that, as I suppose I've just demonstrated, they are quite hard to describe.
00:17:24 Speaker_03
But for many people, it must have been the context in which they first heard of the game. Dungeons and Dragons? Isn't that the game that poor kid was playing when he died?
00:17:37 Speaker_03
Newspapers such as the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner tried to get their heads around what the game actually was and how people played it. Words such as cult and bizarre were often used. but the publicity fuelled demand.
00:17:55 Speaker_03
The game briefly appears in E.T., which was released in 1982, and at the same time, but less favourably, in Mazes and Monsters, a TV movie inspired by the giddy media reports about Dallas Egbert's disappearance.
00:18:10 Speaker_04
Tom Hanks and his friends get caught up in a deadly game of fantasy until they take it too far.
00:18:18 Speaker_03
In Mazes and Monsters, a young Tom Hanks plays a teenager who completely loses his grip on reality while playing the game.
00:18:27 Speaker_08
The other thing that happened in 1982 was that a young man named Irving Pulling killed himself.
00:18:45 Speaker_03
His mother, Patricia Pulling, was convinced that Dungeons & Dragons was involved. Indeed, she sued Irving's school principal, claiming that Irving's suicide was a response to having a curse put on his character.
00:19:01 Speaker_03
Patricia Pulling even appeared on 60 Minutes. The creators of Dungeons & Dragons complained that 60 Minutes had misrepresented two other teenage suicides as being connected to the game, despite letters from the bereaved mothers saying otherwise.
00:19:18 Speaker_03
In her grief, Patricia Pulling described Dungeons and Dragons as a fantasy role-playing game which uses demonology, witchcraft, voodoo, murder, rape, blasphemy, suicide, assassination, insanity, sex perversion, homosexuality, prostitution, satanic-type rituals, gambling, barbarism, cannibalism, sadism, desecration, demon-summoning, necromantics, divination, and other teachings.
00:19:45 Speaker_03
Now, a role-playing game can describe all sorts of activities, just like a novel or a movie. But Harry Potter uses witchcraft and not many people lose sleep over Harry Potter.
00:19:59 Speaker_03
On the other hand, people seemed willing to believe anything about this mysterious game. There are sixes involved in the pieces of the game, explained one religious critic of Dungeons and Dragons.
00:20:14 Speaker_03
The number of the beast and all that, but I think he was referring to dice. But it wasn't just the hardline evangelicals who worried about Dungeons & Dragons. In 1984, a baffled police chief blamed a teenage suicide on the game.
00:20:30 Speaker_06
My understanding is that once you reach a certain point where you are the master, your only way out is death.
00:20:37 Speaker_03
This claim is analogous to saying that once you become a tennis umpire, the only way to quit is to kill yourself. It makes no sense. But if you know nothing at all about the game, you don't realise that it makes no sense.
00:20:53 Speaker_03
In 1988, Tipa Gore, then wife of Al Gore, claimed that Dungeons & Dragons had been linked to nearly 50 teenage suicides and homicides. But there are thousands of teenage suicides each year. tens of thousands over the course of the 1980s as a whole.
00:21:14 Speaker_03
Dungeons & Dragons was becoming a popular game, of course. Some of those suicide victims would have played the game, just as others would have listened to heavy metal or been vegetarians.
00:21:26 Speaker_03
But people who should have known better took role-playing games all too seriously. In 1990, the US Secret Service took the panic to the next level. They raided the headquarters of one role-playing games publisher and confiscated their computers.
00:21:44 Speaker_03
The Secret Service had become convinced that a role-playing game about futuristic cyborgs and hackers was, in fact, a practical guide for computer crime. This was beyond odd.
00:21:57 Speaker_03
The game included rules for hacking computers by plugging your brain directly into the net and uploading your consciousness. it is a technique that seems unlikely to bear fruit for any aspiring hacker, the US Secret Service were unmoved.
00:22:14 Speaker_03
Right up to the point at which they were successfully sued. Remind me, who exactly is confused about the boundary between reality and fantasy? From the vantage point of today, it's easy to laugh. But perhaps we shouldn't feel quite so smug.
00:22:37 Speaker_03
Back in February 2019, parents were anxiously warning each other about a new threat to their children. Please read. This is real. There is this thing called Momo that's instructing kids to kill themselves. Inform everyone you can.
00:22:55 Speaker_03
That tweet received tens of thousands of retweets, as did other similar warnings. But as with the Dungeons and Dragons panic, the details were a bit vague. There was an unsettling picture of a creepy puppet.
00:23:11 Speaker_03
One claim was that somehow this puppet, Momo, would use WhatsApp messages to deliver its deadly instructions, Another was that children's television programmes had been hacked, although what exactly that meant wasn't clear.
00:23:26 Speaker_03
Schools sent out messages of warning, so did some police forces, so did newspapers, even the BBC. In each case, the evidence that there was a problem was simply that others were reporting that there was a problem, and you can't be too careful.
00:23:44 Speaker_03
except that schools even gathered children together to warn them about Momo, which was, predictably, absolutely terrifying for the children. You can see where this is going. There is no Momo puppet.
00:23:58 Speaker_03
That creepy image is from a Tokyo art gallery's exhibition about ghosts. There were no hacked television programmes. There have been no credible reports of any Momo-related suicides.
00:24:11 Speaker_03
I'm tempted to add, there is no Momo challenge, but that wouldn't be quite right. The Momo challenge is very real, but it exists not as a deadly game shared among children, but as a panicky myth shared among their parents.
00:24:30 Speaker_03
What we're really talking about here is the anxiety of parents who don't really understand what their kids are into, and they feel bad about it.
00:24:39 Speaker_03
That's just as true today as it was a generation ago, when the panic was not about WhatsApp, but about wizards.
00:24:52 Speaker_02
Cautionary Tales will return shortly.
00:25:01 Speaker_03
In 1985, the cultural critic Neil Postman published an influential book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, in which he lamented the effect of television on the intellectual, cultural and political life of the United States.
00:25:16 Speaker_03
Adapting an idea from his teacher Marshall McLuhan, Postman argued that the medium is the metaphor, that any communications medium, from the spoken word to the written word to primetime TV, subtly influenced the kind of ideas that could be communicated.
00:25:34 Speaker_03
Fifty years ago, movies and TV favoured good looks and strong, simple stories, and a former cowboy actor, Ronald Reagan, was the perfect fit for the time.
00:25:46 Speaker_03
It's easy to read Postman as a prophet of inevitable cultural decline, with each new medium stupider than the last. but decline is not inevitable.
00:25:57 Speaker_03
Consider how TV drama has been changed by the availability first of affordable box sets and then on-demand streaming.
00:26:05 Speaker_03
TV producers would have to assume that people would miss episodes, and so would make simple, predictable episodic comedies and soap operas.
00:26:14 Speaker_03
Now, writers and directors can reasonably expect that people will catch up on any episodes they missed, or even binge-watch an entire season in a weekend. The result? Longer, more complex story arcs and characters who grow over time.
00:26:30 Speaker_03
This isn't the result of some sudden cultural hunger for more sophisticated storytelling. A subtle difference to the medium also changes the metaphor. Movies invite us to value beauty and classic story arcs.
00:26:44 Speaker_03
Streaming TV drama valorises complex plots and character development. And reality TV thrives on attention-seeking and treachery. So then what is the underlying metaphor of a role-playing game? The games demand imagination. They're collaborative.
00:27:03 Speaker_03
You can't really play by yourself. They're active rather than passive. If you sit back and watch, nothing happens. You need to create, not just observe the creativity of others.
00:27:16 Speaker_03
A collaborative, imaginative and actively creative pastime doesn't sound so bad to me.
00:27:22 Speaker_03
After all, we're constantly being told of the importance of creativity, the creative class, the creative economy, or simply the need for every child to be creative in school.
00:27:35 Speaker_03
And yet, when we actually see some creativity, we can't quite comprehend what we're looking at. Back in 1979, Dungeons & Dragons seemed to be a bit too creative for William Deere and the journalists and commentators who were intrigued by his theory.
00:27:55 Speaker_03
The story became bigger than Dallas Egbert himself, and the question of what happened to Dallas was forgotten long after the panic remained.
00:28:05 Speaker_03
Mazes and Monsters, for example, the movie in which Tom Hanks' character becomes utterly delusional, stabbing someone, hallucinating monsters, and trying to leap from the top of the World Trade Center... Robbie!
00:28:19 Speaker_08
What are you doing? I'm going to fly.
00:28:20 Speaker_03
...is often thought to be loosely based on Dallas' disappearance.
00:28:25 Speaker_08
JJ, what am I doing here? Jade, why can't I remember?
00:28:30 Speaker_03
Let's just say that in this case, the fantasy and the reality are a very long way apart.
00:28:38 Speaker_03
Reading William Dear's breathless book, The Dungeon Master, it's easy to be carried away with the tales of gadgets and stakeouts and lying down in front of trains.
00:28:49 Speaker_03
But when you have time to stop and read carefully, the story becomes a lot more mundane. When I first heard about the steam tunnels beneath Michigan State University, I imagined students exploring inside huge steam-filled pipes.
00:29:06 Speaker_03
But when I looked up steam tunnels on Wikipedia, I was redirected to an entry on Utility Corridors, which is a rather more prosaic name. The corridors contain hot pipes, but nobody gets inside the pipes themselves.
00:29:22 Speaker_03
William Deere describes the tunnels as stinking, hellish and deadly. Lieutenant Bill Wardell of the MSU campus police told the Washington Post, They're hot and dirty, but not as bad as he portrays them.
00:29:36 Speaker_03
Utility corridors have existed in various universities since the 1920s, and students had been messing around in them long before Dungeons and Dragons existed. A team of men, including William Deere, explored the tunnels thoroughly.
00:29:52 Speaker_03
Dallas wasn't down there. But he had been missing for weeks, and it was increasingly hard to see what rolling dice around a gaming table had to do with that.
00:30:04 Speaker_03
Dallas Egbert's parents seemed to publicly accept William Deere's media-friendly theory about a Dungeons & Dragons game gone wrong. But Deere's investigations brought more straightforward possibilities to light.
00:30:18 Speaker_03
Dallas had a drug habit, so perhaps a drug deal had gone awry. And Dallas was also a member of the campus organization for gay students. William Deer mused about how what he called the gays might somehow have been involved in Dallas's disappearance.
00:30:36 Speaker_03
More likely, Dallas's sexuality simply compounded his risk of self-harm. Even today, in our more enlightened times, gay teenagers are at substantially greater risk of suicide. But William Deere made the Dungeons and Dragons theory seem so compelling.
00:30:56 Speaker_03
The case ended, as it began, with a phone call.
00:31:01 Speaker_06
And then Dallas burst into tears.
00:31:15 Speaker_03
Soon enough, he was reunited with his parents and William Deere was fending off a pack of newshounds, desperate for the scoop. It was simple enough. Dallas had indeed been severely depressed, and he had indeed tried to kill himself.
00:31:32 Speaker_03
Fortunately, he had not succeeded. But he had run away. When he called William Deere, it was from all the way down in Louisiana, leading Deere and his crew of elite operatives to fly over in his private plane.
00:31:47 Speaker_03
They affect what Dear describes as a tense rescue, but which, on a second reading, is simply two grown men knocking on the door of a rented room to find a tearful teenage boy ready to go home. Later, Dallas told Deer the story over a hamburger.
00:32:06 Speaker_03
Apparently he did like to hang out in the steam tunnels. I could go down there and nobody would bother me. And he also enjoyed playing Dungeons and Dragons. When I played a character, I was that character.
00:32:18 Speaker_03
I didn't bring along all my personal problems with me. It's a terrific way to escape.
00:32:24 Speaker_03
And while the media clung on to the tale of a boy who had been lost to a world of mazes and monsters, and evangelical campaigners warned of satanic rituals, and Tipper Gore feared an epidemic of D&D-related suicide, the truth was simpler and harder to bear.
00:32:44 Speaker_03
Dallas disappeared because he ran away. He ran away because he was suicidally unhappy. Some young people are. And I'm sorry to tell you that Dallas did not recover from his depression. He took his own life a year later. But the narrative had moved on.
00:33:06 Speaker_03
An isolated and depressed young man had been largely forgotten. I have a confession to make. I too am a role player. I can't imagine you're terribly shocked. But I love these games.
00:33:27 Speaker_03
To me, they're as important a creative outlet as writing my books or this podcast. And not everyone gets to publish a book or present a podcast with respected actors and its own composer. But anyone can be creative in a game.
00:33:44 Speaker_03
I learned to play in the middle of the satanic panic of the 1980s. I remember having to have a long conversation with a senior teacher at my school who was concerned that the game might open me up to evil influences.
00:33:57 Speaker_03
To his credit, he listened and changed his mind. And I'm still playing games, sometimes with the same people I went to school with, some of my oldest and closest friends.
00:34:10 Speaker_03
My hobby is a pastime that's as creative as drawing, writing or drama, that's as collaborative as a team sport, that involves no drinks stronger than coffee, no mind-altering chemicals more potent than whatever it is they use to flavour Doritos and, alas, no sex at all.
00:34:28 Speaker_03
The kids tell me that these days, Dungeons & Dragons is cool. Maybe. I'm just thankful that despite everything, a hobby has survived and flourished.
00:34:41 Speaker_03
William Deere has survived and flourished too, penning works such as OJ is Innocent and I Can Prove It, and appearing in the TV documentary Alien Autopsy, Fact or Fiction. He was interested in the entertainment business back in the 1980s too.
00:34:59 Speaker_03
He had been urging Dallas and his family to work with him on a movie about the case, but as Dallas's mother, Anna, said,
00:35:08 Speaker_01
It was never all that exciting. He just got on a bus and went as far as his money would take him.
00:35:15 Speaker_03
Yet, when William Deere told the story, it was an unforgettable tale. The fragile barrier between reality and fantasy, indeed.
00:35:33 Speaker_03
The key sources for this episode are Of Dice and Men, by David Ewald, and Playing at the World, by John Peterson, and of course, The Dungeon Master, by William Deere. For a full list of references, see timharford.com.
00:36:05 Speaker_03
Cautionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Ryan Dilley and Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music are the work of Pascal Wise. Julia Barton edited the scripts.
00:36:22 Speaker_03
Starring in this series of cautionary tales are Helena Bonham Carter and Geoffrey Wright, alongside Nizar Al-Darrazi, Ed Gochan, Melanie Gutteridge, Rachel Hanshaw, Cobner Holbrook-Smith, Greg Lockett, Masaya Munro, and Rufus Wright.
00:36:41 Speaker_03
The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Mia LaBelle, Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fane, John Schnarz, Carly Migliore, Eric Sandler, Emily Rostock, Maggie Taylor, Daniela Lacan and Maya Koenig.
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Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review.