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 D&D 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). ( )