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Dangerous Games: What the Moral Panic over Role-Playing Games Says about Play, Religion, and Imagined Worlds
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Review
"Dangerous Games presents a detailed and multi-layered history of the social realities surrounding Role Playing Games (RPGs), analyzing a complex legacy of cultural and religious epistemologies, in order to argue that the corresponding moral panic over such games is itself a form of dangerous corrupted play. ... Overall, Dangerous Games is an important read for students and scholars of contemporary history, religion, popular culture, and mythology." (Nova Religio)
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From the Inside Flap
"Joseph P. Laycock's book delves into the minds of both avid gamers and evangelical Christians and returns with surprising and unsettling conclusions. Gaming, Laycock shows, teaches social and psychological strategies to resist cultural authority and to view reality from radically new perspectives. This book affirms the transformational power that motivates this increasingly popular activity, and thus it is essential reading for scholars of both contemporary popular culture and American religions."―Bill Ellis, Professor Emeritus, English and American Studies, Pennsylvania State University “Laycock’s book brings a robust, theoretically informed eye to a topic that has been understudied by sociologists. His case is presented in such a way that other scholars could apply his method and understanding of moral panic to other aspects of popular culture. This is a crucial aspect of scholarship. Laycock writes engagingly, tells a deft story, and advances our understanding.â€â€•Doug Cowan, Professor of Religious Studies and Social Development Studies, Renison University College “Laycock provides an in-depth, theoretically informed analysis of fantasy role-playing games that will both help scholars interpretively and further allow instructors to provide students with a more sophisticated view of their culture. This book more broadly examines the social construction of reality, particularly religion. Laycock's approach makes a much-needed contribution to the understanding of the human need and capacity for creating and inhabiting multiple realities. A truly novel interpretation.â€â€•David G. Bromley, Professor of Religious Studies and Director of the World Religions and Spirituality Project, Virginia Commonwealth University Â
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Product details
Paperback: 368 pages
Publisher: University of California Press; First edition (February 12, 2015)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0520284925
ISBN-13: 978-0520284920
Product Dimensions:
6 x 0.8 x 9 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
4.7 out of 5 stars
8 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#846,016 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Long, long ago, back in the ancient junior-high days, I played Dungeons & Dragons. This was back in the old boxed set era — what I still think of as the glory days of D&D — and I’ll freely admit it was a weird game. Most game sessions involved exploring underground dungeons populated by nothing by seemingly random collections of monsters living in squalor but surrounded by treasure. Wizards weren’t allowed to wear armor or carry weapons more significant than a dagger, and their spells disappeared from their minds as soon as they were cast — unless they’d memorized the same spell more than once. And there was some sort of armadillo that had somehow evolved the ability to cause metal to rust.But the weirdest thing of all was how many people believed that playing a game of pretend could cause you to worship the devil.I was lucky, because while my parents surely thought D&D was weird, they never believed it was evil, and they never told me I wasn’t allowed to play. But there were lots of people who bought into that ridiculous story. But why did people believe it? Why did people push it? What were they getting out of pushing something so utterly deranged?That’s what this book is about — why was there a huge moral panic about D&D (and roleplaying games in general), why were people so eager to believe that bookish teenagers were devil worshipers, who were the people helping to fan the flames, and what benefits did they gain from inventing conspiracy theories that made no rational sense?Laycock’s book is exhaustively detailed, detailing the history of the game and the panic from the beginning, setting down the names of a vast number of conspiracy theorists, and analyzing not just the motives of the theorists, but the many ways they were actually very similar to the teenagers they were targeting.Let’s start out with this, though — this isn’t an easy, two-nights-to-finish pop-psych skimmer. This is a pretty serious academic work. There are hefty chunks of the book devoted to professorial discussions of play, religion, and the imagination. Those may sound easy and fun, but when you’re analyzing the research into these academic areas, they can be a bit of a slog to get through. There are pages of this book you may have to force yourself to get through, particularly if you’re not well-versed in these academic areas.This may sound like a bad thing, but it ain’t really. You learn stuff going through these sections, and learning this stuff helps you appreciate Laycock’s analysis later in the book. This is the nature of academic works, and it don’t make it bad just ’cause it ain’t easy.What are some of the things we learn in Laycock’s analysis? One of the key discussions is about play and imagination — particularly when it’s healthy and when it’s unhealthy, and what happens when people can’t tell the difference between their imaginations and reality. I don’t think it’ll come as a great surprise to anyone who’s followed this phenomenon before, but there are some serious similarities between D&D players and the conspiracy theorists who persecuted them. D&D players played at being brave heroes battling against monstrous horrors to save the innocent. And the conspiracy theorists like Patricia Pulling, William Dear, and Jack Chick also played at being brave heroes battling against monstrous horrors to save the innocent. Now which ones do you think knew they were playing a game, and which ones do you think had mistaken their game for reality?Even then, there are some items in here that still surprised me. I never really imagined there were people who were actually opposed to anyone using their imagination — but there are, because imagining things means thinking of things that God didn’t create. And this distrust of the imagination actually extends back centuries — some Greek philosophers didn’t trust fiction or the arts at all, and even Thomas Jefferson hated novels because he thought books should only convey things that were true, not falsities and fictions.There’s a lot of excellent stuff to learn in this book. If you’re an old-school gamer with a taste for the hobby’s history, if you’ve got an interest in moral panics, if you love learning new things about how humans use and abuse play and religion, you’ll probably really enjoy this book.
This book is a mix of RPG industry history, and sociology/religious studies text. The sociology parts are presented as an academic view of the various moral panics that have been associated with role playing games. The religious studies aspect includes an analysis of how RPGs are and are not similar to religion, and why this comparison was so often made in society at large. You may or may not agree with the author's conclusions but I feel it these are mostly a fair analysis and not merely a cheap shot at religion generally.The book is well written and the author keeps the subject matter interesting. For RPG fans, the history of TSR and White Wolf is worth the price of admission alone.
Excellent book! I highly recommend it if you remember all nonsense hysteria around D&D and wonderful what was going on. Its well researched and covers the clamour around Role Playing games in the 1980s and 90s. There is a lot to unpack in this book and honestly I will have to probably read it twice. Mr. Laycock lays out both the history around Dungeon and Dragon and the groups like BADD that claimed games such at it , were going to corrupt the young.
When I first saw this book I thought it was going to simply present the connection between the satanic panic and rpgs (with a focus on d&d). Having heard that story many times before, I was reluctant to read this book.But it actually has a lot of interesting insights, a unique methodology, and compelling argument that can be read profitability by scholars who are not gamers, and by gamers who think they already know the full story.Surprisingly, most gamers I know who have read the better known popular history books on gaming (like playing at the world) haven’t heard of this book.
Very insightful look into the root causes of the "Satanic panic" of the '70s-'90s, as well as the birth of TSR and White Wolf games. Yes, it's written with sociologists and religious studies majors in mind, but this is one of the few academic books on gaming that deserves a wider audience. The most enjoyable book on gaming culture I've read since I, Avatar by Mark Stephen Meadows.
Superb, thoughtful, well-researched. If you're interested in the history and culture of role-playing games, the nature of moral panics, or the sociology of religion, this is a fascinating read. Makes a good companion piece with one of my other favourite books about RPGs, Daniel Mackay's The Fantasy Role-Playing Game: A New Performing Art.
Excellent book, explored why people are afraid of such RPGs
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