# Demonizing Dungeons & Dragons

An episode of [Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1484511465), 16 Apr 2021, 37 min.

Audio: https://podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/pdrl.fm/18db03/tracking.swap.fm/track/SxlTEPDY7xDg35RXkASs/traffic.omny.fm/d/clips/e73c998e-6e60-432f-8610-ae210140c5b1/c0ae8c6e-22f0-4e9b-ac1c-ae390037ac53/5f24c91d-27be-4b35-87fd-ae39003be2f7/audio.mp3?utm_source=Podcast&in_playlist=7f5a4714-6b10-4ccf-a424-ae390037ac70

When James Dallas Egbert III was reported missing from his college dorm - one of America's most flamboyant private detectives was summoned to solve the case. "Dallas" had many of the same problems that most teenagers face - but P.I. William Dear stoked fears that he might have fallen under the evil spell of a mysterious and sinister game.... Dungeons & Dragons. The global panic about the dangers the role-playing game posed to impressionable young minds may seem quaint 40 years on - but again and again we show how fearful we are of creative endeavours we don't quite understand. Read more about Tim's work at http://timharford.com/ Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

## Transcript

[0:15] Speaker 1: Pushkin. This episode discusses death by suicide. If you're suffering
[0:26] Speaker 1: emotional distress or having suicidal thoughts. Support is available, for example,
[0:31] Speaker 1: from the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline and Raymond Chandler and
[0:40] Speaker 1: novels and then Humphrey Bogart movies. It often begins with
[0:44] Speaker 1: a telephone call. Strange to say in real life it
[0:48] Speaker 1: often begins yet way too Those are the words of
[0:53] Speaker 1: William Dear. He's going to take us on an adventure
[0:56] Speaker 1: that's full of thrills, surprises and terrors. William Dear is
[1:01] Speaker 1: one of the most famous private detectives in the world. Dashing, mustachioed,
[1:07] Speaker 1: sporting a vast gold ring. He's a star with his
[1:11] Speaker 1: own private play, and this telephone call in August nineteen
[1:16] Speaker 1: seventy nine was going to get him started on one
[1:19] Speaker 1: of his most infamous cases. On the other end of
[1:22] Speaker 1: the telephone was a surgeon from the same part of
[1:25] Speaker 1: North Texas as William Dear. The two men had met
[1:28] Speaker 1: a few times. My nephew has disappeared. He was taking
[1:35] Speaker 1: a summer course at Michigan State University in East Lansing.
[1:38] Speaker 1: What had happened and he didn't just run off he's
[1:41] Speaker 1: not that kind of cute. He loves school. In fact,
[1:45] Speaker 1: he's considered to be a genius. The boy James Dallas
[1:50] Speaker 1: Egbert the Third or Dallas, was just sixteen years old.
[1:56] Speaker 1: He graduated from high school at thirteen, entered college at fourteen.
[2:01] Speaker 1: I'm telling you, Dear, he's not the type to just
[2:03] Speaker 1: go on the road. Well maybe and maybe not. Young
[2:09] Speaker 1: Dallas had been missing for eight days already. William Dear
[2:13] Speaker 1: called Dallas's parents, mister Jeers and God, I'm so desperate
[2:18] Speaker 1: about my son. I don't know if he's committed suicide
[2:22] Speaker 1: and is lying in some ditch or what. Maybe he's
[2:25] Speaker 1: been kidnapped. Deer's team was soon packing for the trip
[2:29] Speaker 1: to East Lansing, Michigan. There was an expert pilot at
[2:34] Speaker 1: a sniper Vietnam vette. They assembled telephoto lenses, bugging devices,
[2:39] Speaker 1: tracking systems, and spy cameras. Deer himself was running through
[2:44] Speaker 1: the possibilities. Most of them were mundane. One of them
[2:49] Speaker 1: would prove to be truly fantastical. I'm Tim Harford, and
[2:55] Speaker 1: you're listening to cautionary tales. The simplest explanation of Dallas's
[3:25] Speaker 1: disappearance was that the young man had killed himself. That
[3:29] Speaker 1: was William Deer's instinct. It was also Anna Egbert's. According
[3:35] Speaker 1: to Deer's account, she blamed herself. Dallas called him me
[3:39] Speaker 1: on August twelfth. He was so happy because he got
[3:43] Speaker 1: a three point five and a computer science course. I
[3:48] Speaker 1: told him it should have been a four point. Though
[3:51] Speaker 1: Deer's team started asking questions around the university. What they
[3:55] Speaker 1: discovered deepened the fear that this was a case of suicide.
[3:59] Speaker 1: Dallas was depressed, but Deer also asked what did Dallas
[4:04] Speaker 1: like to do with his spare time. His classmates said
[4:08] Speaker 1: that he liked computers. At the time, computers were rare
[4:11] Speaker 1: and mysterious, and Dallas did some other mysterious things too.
[4:17] Speaker 1: But then so did William Dear. For example, when he
[4:22] Speaker 1: received an anonymous tip that Dallas used to risk a
[4:25] Speaker 1: kind of thrill seeking dare lying down on the railroad
[4:29] Speaker 1: tracks and letting the trains pass over him, Deer decided
[4:32] Speaker 1: that he really needed to put himself in Dallas's position. Literally,
[4:38] Speaker 1: I laid down on railroad ties and tried to imagine
[4:42] Speaker 1: myself as Dallas. Was this how Dallas felt. His colleague
[4:50] Speaker 1: screamed a warning the oncoming train had a cattle catcher.
[4:54] Speaker 1: William Dear scrambled off the tracks just in time. No,
[5:04] Speaker 1: couldn't have been a train. If Dallas had been hit
[5:07] Speaker 1: by a train, surely his body would have been found
[5:10] Speaker 1: soon enough. It did seem likely that Dallas was dead.
[5:14] Speaker 1: But if he was dead, where was the body? William
[5:20] Speaker 1: Deer couldn't rid himself of the suspicion that there was
[5:23] Speaker 1: something rather different behind Dallas's disappearance, something fantastically strange. A game,
[5:32] Speaker 1: a game that reportedly hundreds of students were playing in dark,
[5:38] Speaker 1: humid tunnels beneath the campus, a game called Dungeons and Dragons. Now,
[5:50] Speaker 1: William Dear didn't know what Dungeons and Dragons was. Neither
[5:54] Speaker 1: did Dallas's friends. I don't know how to play it,
[5:58] Speaker 1: but I do know that you can't play if you're
[6:01] Speaker 1: a dumbass. But what kind of game is it? William
[6:07] Speaker 1: Deer received phone calls, There were rumors. He tried to
[6:11] Speaker 1: piece together clues. It was difficult to understand. You might
[6:16] Speaker 1: find this bafflement odd. Dungeons and Dragons is pretty mainstream
[6:21] Speaker 1: these days. You might well have played a game yourself.
[6:24] Speaker 1: But in nineteen seventy nine. In nineteen seventy nine, Dungeons
[6:29] Speaker 1: and Dragons was pretty much unknown. Dallas's disappearance was going
[6:34] Speaker 1: to change all that. As William Dear explained in his
[6:37] Speaker 1: subsequent book titled The Dungeon Master, he wanted to get
[6:42] Speaker 1: into those mysterious tunnels to search for Dallas's body in
[6:47] Speaker 1: order to pressure Michigan State University into giving access to
[6:51] Speaker 1: a celebrity detective from Texas. Deer frequently spoke to the
[6:56] Speaker 1: press about his Dungeons and Dragons hypothesis. The newspapers lapped
[7:00] Speaker 1: it up. Tunnels are searched for missing student, reported The
[7:05] Speaker 1: New York Times, explaining that Dallas might have become lost
[7:09] Speaker 1: in the tunnels, which carry heat to campus buildings, while
[7:13] Speaker 1: playing an elaborate version of a bizarre, intellectual game called
[7:17] Speaker 1: Dungeons and Dragons. If you've noticed there's a lot of
[7:22] Speaker 1: vague talk about this game, how it's intellectual and bizarre
[7:26] Speaker 1: and you can't play if you're a dumbass, but no specifics,
[7:32] Speaker 1: You're right. Dungeons and Dragons was a blank canvas onto
[7:37] Speaker 1: which parents, media critics, and celebrity detectives could project any
[7:42] Speaker 1: anxiety in the informational vacuum rumors grew. Apparently people wore costumes.
[7:50] Speaker 1: Apparently a dungeon master would lead quests around the tunnels.
[7:55] Speaker 1: In the scalding heat and the darkness and the stench.
[7:59] Speaker 1: You'd have to put your hand into crevices and there
[8:02] Speaker 1: might be rotting calfs liver in there, or spaghetti to
[8:05] Speaker 1: represent an orc's brain, or in my treasure. Apparently there
[8:11] Speaker 1: were more than one hundred dungeons in the East Lansing area.
[8:16] Speaker 1: And if you don't know what that means, don't worry.
[8:19] Speaker 1: William Deer didn't either, but he had a theory. Whatever
[8:23] Speaker 1: this strange game was, whether it involved dungeons or rotten liver,
[8:28] Speaker 1: or all sorts of other things that William Dear didn't understand,
[8:33] Speaker 1: it might have something to do with Dallas's disappearance. And
[8:38] Speaker 1: since William Deer was an investigator, heck he was going
[8:41] Speaker 1: to investigate. He called a hobby store, got the contact
[8:45] Speaker 1: details of one of these so called dungeon masters and
[8:49] Speaker 1: offered him fifty bucks to drop everything and initiate Deer
[8:53] Speaker 1: in the Mysteries of Dungeons and Dragons sixty bucks if
[8:59] Speaker 1: it was good. Back in nineteen seventy nine, that was
[9:02] Speaker 1: a lot of money. I didn't know what to expect
[9:06] Speaker 1: from my dungeon master. Would he show up in a
[9:10] Speaker 1: Merland castle with a funny pointed cap. I knew he
[9:15] Speaker 1: would have complete control over the circumstances of the fantasy
[9:20] Speaker 1: adventure on which I was about to embark when the
[9:30] Speaker 1: young man knocked on the door. He and his friend
[9:33] Speaker 1: were both wearing jeans, sweaters and sneakers, and rather than
[9:38] Speaker 1: leading deer into the tunnels to mine for Calf's liver,
[9:42] Speaker 1: he pulled out a pencil and paper, some books, and
[9:46] Speaker 1: some dice. The adventure was about to begin. Cautionary tails
[9:56] Speaker 1: will be back in a moment. William Dear didn't wear
[10:06] Speaker 1: a pointy hat. He didn't have to dip his hand
[10:09] Speaker 1: into dark crevices in the tunnels under Michigan State University.
[10:13] Speaker 1: He just got into character, pretending to be a wizard
[10:17] Speaker 1: named Tor who was accompanied by a sneak thief named Dan.
[10:22] Speaker 1: Nor did Dear visit any tunnels. He just sat at
[10:26] Speaker 1: a table describing what Tor was doing in his vivid
[10:30] Speaker 1: imagination tour, and Dan got into various scrapes around a
[10:35] Speaker 1: medieval town, scrambling through an escape tunnel pursued by some guards,
[10:39] Speaker 1: being attacked by giant rats, being taken prisoner by orcs,
[10:43] Speaker 1: and finally triumphing thanks to a combination of bluff and cunning.
[10:51] Speaker 1: All this took place in the Theater of the Mind,
[10:54] Speaker 1: with the dungeon master simply describing what they saw and
[10:58] Speaker 1: with the aid of a few dice rolls, whether their
[11:00] Speaker 1: schemes succeeded or failed. In fact, the game wasn't nearly
[11:06] Speaker 1: as odd as all the rumors suggested. Yes, the stuff
[11:10] Speaker 1: about wizards and orcs is a bit strange, but then
[11:14] Speaker 1: Star Wars, with its Jedy nights and dark powers and
[11:17] Speaker 1: the mysterious Force, had just been a smash hit. The
[11:21] Speaker 1: animated film of The Lord of the Rings had just
[11:24] Speaker 1: been released, too. Nothing's more culturally mainstream than wizards and
[11:28] Speaker 1: heroes dice pencils sitting around a table playing Let's Pretend
[11:36] Speaker 1: was all very tame, But William Dear had fun. In fact,
[11:43] Speaker 1: he worried that this game of the imagination might just
[11:46] Speaker 1: be too much fun. Maybe for a troubled mind it
[11:52] Speaker 1: could be dangerous. Dallas might actually have begun to live
[11:57] Speaker 1: the game, not just to play it. Dungeons and Dragons
[12:01] Speaker 1: could have absorbed him so much that his mind had
[12:06] Speaker 1: slipped through the fragile barrier. But in reality and fantasy,
[12:16] Speaker 1: if there is a time and a place that the
[12:18] Speaker 1: fragile barrier between reality and fantasy first broke down, perhaps
[12:23] Speaker 1: it was Saint Paul, Minnesota in nineteen sixty nine. Behind
[12:28] Speaker 1: this breakdown was a young physics graduate named David Wesley.
[12:33] Speaker 1: Wesley was a founder of the Twin Cities Military Miniatures Group,
[12:37] Speaker 1: a wargaming club. Wargames are more realistic descendants of chess,
[12:43] Speaker 1: allowing players to re enact battles from history with model
[12:46] Speaker 1: soldiers on a realistic miniature battlefield. Robert Lewis Stevenson, the
[12:51] Speaker 1: author of Treasure Island, was a war gamer, so was HG. Wells.
[12:56] Speaker 1: Wargames can be used for serious military training. David Westley,
[13:00] Speaker 1: who was in the Army Reserves himself, was interested in
[13:04] Speaker 1: these training exercises, where making decisions over a tabletop battlefield
[13:09] Speaker 1: might prepare a young officer for the real thing over
[13:12] Speaker 1: in Vietnam. To be useful, a training war game couldn't
[13:17] Speaker 1: be restricted to a limited set of moves as in chess.
[13:21] Speaker 1: Players should be able to dream up all sorts of tricks,
[13:24] Speaker 1: and tactics, which meant the game needed a referee to
[13:28] Speaker 1: use his or her judgment when a player tried something unusual.
[13:32] Speaker 1: The game of war was open ended and unpredictable, just
[13:36] Speaker 1: like war itself. In a war game set in eighteen
[13:41] Speaker 1: o six in the fictional Prussian town of Braunstein, David
[13:45] Speaker 1: Wesley took this open endedness to the next level. As
[13:49] Speaker 1: with a normal war game, he put players in charge
[13:52] Speaker 1: of Napoleon's French army and the Prussian resistance, but then
[13:57] Speaker 1: he assigned rather more unusual roles. One player, for example,
[14:01] Speaker 1: was given the role of the chancellor of Braunstein's university.
[14:06] Speaker 1: What could he do well anything. He didn't command any troops,
[14:10] Speaker 1: but he could rally the students and urge them to
[14:13] Speaker 1: join the resistance. Or he could challenge another player to
[14:16] Speaker 1: a duel, perhaps over the affections of a lady. Another
[14:20] Speaker 1: player's character started in jail. Any of these players could
[14:24] Speaker 1: attempt anything Wesley, as referee, had to improvise. The experimental
[14:29] Speaker 1: game was a chaotic series of whispered conferences between the
[14:33] Speaker 1: players and Wesley, the referee. It took ages, and the
[14:38] Speaker 1: French and the Prussians never even fired a shot not
[14:42] Speaker 1: so much a war game as a phony war game.
[14:45] Speaker 1: Wesley felt like it had been a flop. Then the
[14:49] Speaker 1: players told him they loved it. One of those players
[14:53] Speaker 1: was Dave Arnisson, who seized Westley's idea with both hands
[14:58] Speaker 1: in a follow up game set in a Banana Republic.
[15:01] Speaker 1: Arnson started as a student revolutionary, but managed to convince
[15:05] Speaker 1: the other players he was working for the CIA. He
[15:08] Speaker 1: ran things around them, not by rolling dice or pushing
[15:11] Speaker 1: pieces around the map, but by acting the part and
[15:15] Speaker 1: bluffing his way to success. What Wesley and Arnison and
[15:19] Speaker 1: the group had invented together was a strange combination of
[15:23] Speaker 1: a classical war game, a military training exercise, and an
[15:27] Speaker 1: improvised acting class. It came to be known as a
[15:31] Speaker 1: role playing game, the first commercial role playing game, designed
[15:36] Speaker 1: in part by Dave Arnison. Could have been about Napoleonic
[15:39] Speaker 1: battles or pretending to be in the CIA, but it wasn't.
[15:43] Speaker 1: It was about heroes and wizards exploring the tunnels beneath
[15:47] Speaker 1: the medieval castle. It was called you guessed it, Dungeons
[15:52] Speaker 1: and Dragons, And it was dungeons and dragons that William
[15:57] Speaker 1: Deer Feared had driven Dallas Egbert into some kind of
[16:01] Speaker 1: delusional state, but he imagined he was a wizard. So
[16:06] Speaker 1: does the barrier between reality and fan I see breakdown
[16:10] Speaker 1: in a role playing game? Well, maybe a bit, But
[16:14] Speaker 1: the same is true for novels or movies. I don't
[16:18] Speaker 1: watch horror movies. I don't like the way they scare me.
[16:21] Speaker 1: I cried uncontrollably at the end of Cinema Paradiso. Did
[16:26] Speaker 1: the barrier between reality and fantasy break down at that moment?
[16:31] Speaker 1: I suppose it did, But there's nothing shameful or dangerous
[16:35] Speaker 1: about that. And yet there was something different about these
[16:39] Speaker 1: role playing games, something that drove America into a state
[16:43] Speaker 1: of moral panic. Maybe it was the fact that, as
[16:46] Speaker 1: I suppose I've just demonstrated, they are quite hard to describe.
[16:51] Speaker 1: But for many people it must have been the context
[16:54] Speaker 1: in which they first heard of the game Dungeons and Dragons.
[17:00] Speaker 1: Isn't that the game that poor kid was playing when
[17:02] Speaker 1: he died? Newspapers such as The New York Times and
[17:06] Speaker 1: the San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner try to get their
[17:09] Speaker 1: heads around what the game actually was and how people
[17:13] Speaker 1: played it. Words such as cult and bizarre were often used,
[17:19] Speaker 1: but the publicity fueled demand. The game briefly appears in Et,
[17:25] Speaker 1: which was released in nineteen eighty two, and at the
[17:27] Speaker 1: same time but less favorably, in Mazes and Monsters, a
[17:31] Speaker 1: TV movie inspired by the giddy media reports about Dallas
[17:36] Speaker 1: Egbert's disappearance. Tom Hanks and his friends get caught up
[17:40] Speaker 1: in a deadly game of fantasy until they take it
[17:42] Speaker 1: too far. In Mazes and Monsters, a young Tom Hanks
[17:49] Speaker 1: plays a teenager who completely loses his grip on reality
[17:53] Speaker 1: while playing the game. This is only a game. Mazes
[17:59] Speaker 1: and Monsters seventy three, UZTV, seventeen. The other thing that
[18:05] Speaker 1: happened in nineteen eighty two was that a young man
[18:08] Speaker 1: named Irving Pulling killed himself. His mother, Patricia Pulling, was
[18:14] Speaker 1: convinced that Dungeons and Dragons was involved. Indeed, she sued
[18:19] Speaker 1: Irving's school principle, claiming that Irving's suicide was a response
[18:24] Speaker 1: to having a curse put on his character. Patricia Pulling
[18:28] Speaker 1: even appeared on sixty Minutes. The creators of Dungeons and
[18:33] Speaker 1: Dragons complained that sixty Minutes had misrepresented two other teenage
[18:38] Speaker 1: suicides as being connected to the game, Despite letters from
[18:41] Speaker 1: the bereaved mothers saying otherwise. In her grief, Patricia Pulling
[18:47] Speaker 1: described Dungeons and Dragons as a fantasy role playing game
[18:51] Speaker 1: which uses demonology, witchcraft, voodoo, murder, rape, blasphemy, suicide, assassination, insanity, sex, perversion, homosexuality, prostitution,
[19:01] Speaker 1: satanic type rituals, gambling, barbarism, cannibalism, sadism, desecration, demons, summoning, necromantics, divination,
[19:08] Speaker 1: and other teachings. Now, a role playing game can describe
[19:13] Speaker 1: all sorts of activities, just like a novel or a movie.
[19:18] Speaker 1: But Harry Potter uses witchcraft, and not many people lose
[19:23] Speaker 1: sleep over Harry Potter. On the other hand, people seemed
[19:27] Speaker 1: willing to believe anything about this mysterious game. There are
[19:33] Speaker 1: sixes involved in the pieces of the game, explained one
[19:37] Speaker 1: religious critic of Dungeons and Dragons. The number of the
[19:40] Speaker 1: beast and all that. But I think he was referring
[19:43] Speaker 1: to dice. But it wasn't just the hardline evangelicals who
[19:48] Speaker 1: worried about Dungeons and Dragons. In nineteen eighty four, a
[19:52] Speaker 1: baffled police chief blamed a teenage suicide on the game.
[19:56] Speaker 1: My understanding is that once you reach a certain point
[19:59] Speaker 1: where you are the master, your only way out is death.
[20:03] Speaker 1: This claim is analogous to saying that once you become
[20:07] Speaker 1: a tennis umpire, only way to quit is to kill yourself.
[20:11] Speaker 1: It makes no sense, but if you know nothing at
[20:15] Speaker 1: all about the game, you don't realize that it makes
[20:18] Speaker 1: no sense. In nineteen eighty eight, Tippa Goore, then wife
[20:23] Speaker 1: of Algore, claimed that Dungeons and Dragons had been linked
[20:27] Speaker 1: to nearly fifty teenage suicides and homicides, but there are
[20:32] Speaker 1: thousands of teenage suicides each year, tens of thousands over
[20:37] Speaker 1: the course of the nineteen eighties. As a whole, Dungeons
[20:40] Speaker 1: and Dragons was becoming a popular game. Of course, some
[20:44] Speaker 1: of those suicide victims would have played the game, just
[20:47] Speaker 1: as others would have listened to heavy metal law been vegetarians.
[20:52] Speaker 1: But people who should have known better took role playing
[20:55] Speaker 1: games all too seriously. In nineteen ninety, the US Secret
[21:00] Speaker 1: Service took the panic to the next level. They raided
[21:04] Speaker 1: the headquarters of one role playing games publisher and confiscated
[21:08] Speaker 1: their compute. The Secret Service had become convinced that a
[21:12] Speaker 1: role playing game about futuristic cyborgs and Hackers was in
[21:17] Speaker 1: fact a practical guide for computer crime. This was beyond odd.
[21:23] Speaker 1: The game included rules for hacking computers by plugging your
[21:27] Speaker 1: brain directly into the net and uploading your consciousness. It
[21:32] Speaker 1: is a technique that seems unlikely to bear fruit for
[21:35] Speaker 1: any aspiring hacker. The US Secret Service were unmoved right
[21:41] Speaker 1: up to the point at which they were successfully sued.
[21:45] Speaker 1: Remind me who exactly is confused about the boundary between
[21:49] Speaker 1: reality and fantasy. From the Vantini point of today, it's
[21:58] Speaker 1: easy to laugh, but perhaps we shouldn't feel quite so smug.
[22:03] Speaker 1: Back in February twenty nineteen, parents were anxiously warning each
[22:08] Speaker 1: other about a new threat to their children. Please read
[22:11] Speaker 1: this is real. There is this thing called Momo that's
[22:15] Speaker 1: instructing kids to kill themselves. Inform everyone you can. That
[22:21] Speaker 1: tweet received tens of thousands of retweets, as did other
[22:26] Speaker 1: similar warnings, but as with the Dungeons and Dragons panic,
[22:31] Speaker 1: the details were a bit vague. There was an unsettling
[22:34] Speaker 1: picture of a creepy puppet. One claim was that somehow
[22:39] Speaker 1: this puppet Momo, would use WhatsApp messages to deliver its
[22:43] Speaker 1: deadly instructions. Another was that children's television programs had been hacked,
[22:49] Speaker 1: although what exactly that meant wasn't clear. Schools sent out
[22:53] Speaker 1: messages of warning, so did some police forces, so did newspapers,
[22:58] Speaker 1: even the BBC. In each case, the evidence that there
[23:02] Speaker 1: was a problem was simply that others were reporting that
[23:06] Speaker 1: there was a problem, and you can't be too careful,
[23:09] Speaker 1: except that schools even gathered children together to warn them
[23:13] Speaker 1: about Momo, which was predictably, absolutely terrifying for the children.
[23:20] Speaker 1: You can see where this is going. There is no
[23:22] Speaker 1: Momo puppet that creepy images from a Tokyo art gallery's
[23:27] Speaker 1: exhibition about ghosts. There were no hacked television programs. There
[23:32] Speaker 1: have been no credible reports of any Momo related suicides.
[23:37] Speaker 1: I'm tempted to add there is no Momo challenge, but
[23:41] Speaker 1: that wouldn't be quite right. The Momo challenge is very real,
[23:47] Speaker 1: but it exists not as a deadly game shared among children,
[23:51] Speaker 1: but as a panicky myth shared among their parents. What
[23:56] Speaker 1: we're really talking about here is the anxiety of parents
[24:00] Speaker 1: who don't really understand what their kids are into, and
[24:04] Speaker 1: they feel bad about it. That's just as true today
[24:07] Speaker 1: as it was a generation when the panic was not
[24:11] Speaker 1: about WhatsApp but about wizards. Cautionary tales will return shortly.
[24:27] Speaker 1: In nineteen eighty five, the cultural critic Neil Postman published
[24:32] Speaker 1: an influential book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, in which he
[24:36] Speaker 1: lamented the effect of television on the intellectual, cultural, and
[24:40] Speaker 1: political life of the United States. Adapting an idea from
[24:44] Speaker 1: his teacher Marshall McLuhan, Postman argued that the medium is
[24:48] Speaker 1: the metaphor that any communications medium, from the spoken word
[24:53] Speaker 1: to the written word to primetime TV, subtly influenced the
[24:57] Speaker 1: kind of ideas that could be communicated. Fifty years ago,
[25:01] Speaker 1: movies and TV favored good looks and strong, simple stories,
[25:06] Speaker 1: and a former Cowboy actor, Ronald Reagan, was the perfect
[25:11] Speaker 1: fit for the time. It's easy to read Postman as
[25:14] Speaker 1: a profit of inevitable cultural decline, with each new medium
[25:19] Speaker 1: stupider than the last. But decline is not inevitable. Consider
[25:24] Speaker 1: how TV drama has been changed by the availability first
[25:27] Speaker 1: of affordable box sets and then on demand streaming. TV
[25:32] Speaker 1: producers would have to assume that people would miss episodes
[25:35] Speaker 1: and so would make simple, predictable episodic comedies and soap operas.
[25:40] Speaker 1: Now writers and directors can reasonably expect that people will
[25:44] Speaker 1: catch up on any episodes they missed, or even binge
[25:47] Speaker 1: watch an entire season in a weekend. The result longer,
[25:51] Speaker 1: more complex story arcs and characters who grow over time.
[25:56] Speaker 1: This isn't the result of some sudden cultural hunger for
[25:59] Speaker 1: more sophisticated storytelling. A subtle difference to the medium also
[26:04] Speaker 1: changes the metaphor. Movies invite us to value beauty and
[26:09] Speaker 1: classic story arcs. Streaming TV drama valorizes complex plots and
[26:14] Speaker 1: character development, and reality TV thrives on attention seeking and treachery.
[26:20] Speaker 1: So then, what is the underlying metaphor of a role
[26:23] Speaker 1: playing game? The game's demand imagination. They're collaborative. You can't
[26:29] Speaker 1: really play by yourself. They're active, rather than passive. If
[26:34] Speaker 1: you sit back and watch, nothing happens. You need to create,
[26:39] Speaker 1: not just observe the creativity of others. A collaborative, imaginative,
[26:44] Speaker 1: and actively creative pastime doesn't sound so bad to me.
[26:49] Speaker 1: After all, we're constantly being told of the importance of creativity,
[26:53] Speaker 1: the creative class, the creative economy, or simply the need
[26:57] Speaker 1: for every child to be creative in school. And yet,
[27:01] Speaker 1: and we actually see some creativity. We can't quite comprehend
[27:06] Speaker 1: what we're looking at. Back in nineteen seventy nine, Dungeons
[27:12] Speaker 1: and Dragons seemed to be a bit too creative for
[27:16] Speaker 1: William Dear and the journalists and commentators who were intrigued
[27:20] Speaker 1: by his theory. The story became bigger than Dallas Egbert himself,
[27:25] Speaker 1: and the question of what happened to Dallas was forgotten.
[27:29] Speaker 1: Mazes and monsters, For example, the movie in which Tom Hanks,
[27:33] Speaker 1: his character becomes utterly delusional, stabbing someone, hallucinating monsters and
[27:38] Speaker 1: trying to leap from the top of the World Trade Center. Robbie,
[27:42] Speaker 1: what are you doing? I'm going to fly is often
[27:45] Speaker 1: thought to be loosely based on Dallas's disappearance. Don't you
[27:49] Speaker 1: want to mind here? Jadwigat I remember, Let's just say
[27:55] Speaker 1: that in this case, the fantasy and the reality were
[27:59] Speaker 1: a very long way apart. Reading William Deer's breathless book
[28:04] Speaker 1: The Dungeon Master, it's easy to be carried away with
[28:08] Speaker 1: the tales of chits and steakouts and lying down in
[28:11] Speaker 1: front of trains. But when you have time to stop
[28:14] Speaker 1: and read carefully, the story becomes a lot more mundane.
[28:19] Speaker 1: When I first heard about the steam tunnels beneath Michigan
[28:23] Speaker 1: State University, I imagine students exploring inside huge steam filled pipes.
[28:30] Speaker 1: But when I looked up steam tunnels on Wikipedia, I
[28:33] Speaker 1: was redirected to an entry on utility corridors, which is
[28:38] Speaker 1: a rather more prosaic name. The corridors contain hot pipes,
[28:42] Speaker 1: but nobody gets inside the pipes themselves. William Dear describes
[28:47] Speaker 1: the tunnels as stinking, hellish, and deadly. Lieutenant Bill Wardell
[28:53] Speaker 1: of the MSU Campus Police told The Washington Post they're
[28:57] Speaker 1: hot and dirty, but not as bad as he portrays them.
[29:00] Speaker 1: Utility corridors have existed in various universities since the nineteen twenties,
[29:05] Speaker 1: and students have been messing around in them long before
[29:08] Speaker 1: Dungeons and Dragons existed. A team of men, including William Deer,
[29:13] Speaker 1: explored the tunnels thoroughly. Dallas wasn't down there, but he
[29:18] Speaker 1: had been missing for weeks, and it was increasingly hard
[29:21] Speaker 1: to see what rolling dice around a gaming table had
[29:25] Speaker 1: to do with that. Dallas Egbert's parents seemed to publicly
[29:30] Speaker 1: accept William Deer's media friendly theory about a Dungeons and
[29:34] Speaker 1: Dragon's game gone wrong, but Deer's investigations brought more straightforward
[29:39] Speaker 1: possibilities to light. Dallas had a drug habit, so perhaps
[29:44] Speaker 1: a drug deal had gone awry, and Dallas was also
[29:47] Speaker 1: a member of the campus organization for gay students. William
[29:51] Speaker 1: Deer mused about how what he called the gays might
[29:56] Speaker 1: somehow have been involved in Dallas's disappearance. More likely, Dallas's
[30:01] Speaker 1: sexuality simply compounded his risk of self harm. Even today,
[30:05] Speaker 1: in our more enlightened times, gay teenagers are substantially greater
[30:10] Speaker 1: risk of suicide. But William Deer made the dungeons and
[30:15] Speaker 1: dragons theory seem so compelling. The case ended as it began,
[30:22] Speaker 1: with a phone call, mister Dear, this is Dallas, and
[30:27] Speaker 1: then Dallas burst into tears. Soon enough, he was reunited
[30:41] Speaker 1: with his parents, and William Dear was fending off a
[30:44] Speaker 1: pack of newshounds desperate for the scoop. It was simple enough.
[30:50] Speaker 1: Dallas had indeed been severely depressed, and he had indeed
[30:54] Speaker 1: tried to kill himself. Fortunately it not succeeded, but he
[30:59] Speaker 1: had run away When he called William Deer. It was
[31:02] Speaker 1: from all the way down in Louisiana, leading Deer and
[31:06] Speaker 1: his crew of elite operatives to fly over his private plane.
[31:10] Speaker 1: They affect what Deer describes as the tense rescue, but
[31:14] Speaker 1: which on a second reading, is simply two grown men
[31:17] Speaker 1: knocking on the door of a rented room to find
[31:20] Speaker 1: a tearful teenage boy ready to go home. Later, Dallas
[31:26] Speaker 1: told Deer the story over a hamburger. Apparently he did
[31:30] Speaker 1: like to hang out in the steam tunnels. I could
[31:33] Speaker 1: go down there and nobody would bother me. And he
[31:35] Speaker 1: also enjoyed playing dungeons and dragons. When I played a character,
[31:40] Speaker 1: I was that character. I didn't bring along all my
[31:43] Speaker 1: personal problems with me. It's a terrific way to escape.
[31:47] Speaker 1: And while the media clung onto the tale of a
[31:50] Speaker 1: boy who had been lost to a world of mazes
[31:52] Speaker 1: and monsters, and evangelical campaigners warned of satanic rituals and
[31:58] Speaker 1: Tippa Goore feared an epidemic of D and D related suicide,
[32:02] Speaker 1: the truth was simpler and harder to bear. Dallas disappeared
[32:09] Speaker 1: because he ran away. He ran away because he was
[32:13] Speaker 1: suicidely unhappy. Some young people are. And I'm sorry to
[32:19] Speaker 1: tell you that Dallas did not recover from his depression.
[32:24] Speaker 1: He took his own life a year later, but the
[32:27] Speaker 1: narrative had moved on. An isolated and depressed young man
[32:32] Speaker 1: had been largely forgotten. I have a confession to make.
[32:42] Speaker 1: I too, am a role player. I can't imagine you're
[32:46] Speaker 1: terribly shocked, but I love these games. To me, there
[32:52] Speaker 1: is important to creative outlet as writing my books or
[32:55] Speaker 1: this podcast, and not everyone gets to publish a book
[32:59] Speaker 1: or present a podcast with respected actors and its own composer.
[33:03] Speaker 1: But anyone can be creative in a game. I learned
[33:08] Speaker 1: to play in the middle of the Satanic Panic of
[33:10] Speaker 1: the nineteen eighties. I remember having to have a long
[33:13] Speaker 1: conversation with a senior teacher at my school who was
[33:16] Speaker 1: concerned that the game might open me up to evil influences.
[33:21] Speaker 1: To his credit, he listened and changed his mind. And
[33:25] Speaker 1: I'm still playing games sometimes with the same people I
[33:28] Speaker 1: went to school with, some of my oldest and closest friends.
[33:33] Speaker 1: My hobby is a pastime that's as creative as drawing, writing,
[33:37] Speaker 1: or drama, that's as collaborative as a team sport, that
[33:40] Speaker 1: involves no drinks stronger than coffee, no mind altering chemicals
[33:45] Speaker 1: more potent than whatever it is they used to flavor
[33:47] Speaker 1: Derito's and alas no sex at all. The kids tell
[33:52] Speaker 1: me that these days Dungeons and Dragons is cool. Maybe
[33:58] Speaker 1: I'm just thankful that despite everything, the hobby has survived
[34:02] Speaker 1: and flourished. William Dear has survived and flourished two penning
[34:08] Speaker 1: works such as OJ Is Innocent and I Can Prove
[34:11] Speaker 1: It and appearing in the TV documentary Alien Autopsy Fact
[34:17] Speaker 1: or Fiction. He was interested in the entertainment business back
[34:21] Speaker 1: in the nineteen eighties too. He had been urging Dallas
[34:24] Speaker 1: and his family to work with him on a movie
[34:27] Speaker 1: about the case, But as Dallas's mother Anna said, it
[34:31] Speaker 1: was never all that exciting. He just got on a
[34:35] Speaker 1: bus and went as far as his money would take him. Yet,
[34:39] Speaker 1: when William Dear told the story, it was an unforgettable
[34:44] Speaker 1: tale the fragile barrier between reality and fantasy. Indeed, the
[34:57] Speaker 1: key sources for this episode are of Dice and Men
[35:01] Speaker 1: by David Ewalt and Playing at the World by John Peterson,
[35:06] Speaker 1: and of course The Dungeon Master by William Dear. For
[35:11] Speaker 1: a full list of references, see Tim Harford dot com.
[35:29] Speaker 1: Cautionary Tales is written by me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright.
[35:34] Speaker 1: It's produced by Ryan Dilley and Marilyn Rust. The sound
[35:38] Speaker 1: design and original music are the work of Pascal Wise.
[35:42] Speaker 1: Julia Barton edited the scripts. Starring in this series of
[35:47] Speaker 1: Cautionary Tales are Helena Bonham, Carter and Jeffrey Wright, alongside
[35:52] Speaker 1: Nazar Alderazzi, Ed Gochen, Melanie Gutteridge, Rachel Hanshaw, Cobnor Holbrook Smith,
[36:00] Speaker 1: Greg Lockett, Siam Unrowe, and Rufus Wright. The show also
[36:05] Speaker 1: wouldn't have been possible without the work of Mia LaBelle,
[36:08] Speaker 1: Jacob Wisburg, Hell of Fame, John Schnarz, Carlie mcgliori, Eric Sandler,
[36:14] Speaker 1: Emily Rostock, Maggie Taylor, Daniella Lakhan, and Maya Kanig. Cautionary
[36:20] Speaker 1: Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like
[36:25] Speaker 1: the show, please remember to share, rate, and review.

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