Date: Sun, 25 Aug 96 18:37 EDT
From: [ab 966] at [freenet.toronto.on.ca] (Pierre Savoie)
To: [n s pace] at [cts.com]
Subject: TV movies against D&D
Here is a file I could dredge up, which was my complaint to the
Global TV network in Canada about their broadcasting "Honor Thy Mother"
twice. You might want to put it up as a Web-page. The representative in
question NEVER got back to me on the issue:
---------------------
Mr. Pierre Savoie, M.Sc.
22-B Harris Ave.
Toronto, ON
M4C 1P4
CANADA
tel. (416)690-6985
InterNet: [ab 966] at [torfree.net]
Jan. 28, 1996
Mr. David Hamilton
FAX (416)446-5543
Dear Mr. Hamilton:
I had difficulty reaching you directly by phone 2 weeks ago so I
will send a simple FAX outlining my complaint. I was referred to you
after phoning the number 1-800-387-8001 for a commercial on Global
[the Global Television Network, Canada] advertising the Canadian
Broadcast Standards Council.
My complaint concerns the broadcast Global did on Sunday January
7th late at night at 2 a.m., where they showed the movie "Honor Thy
Mother" (first broadcast by CBS April 26th, 1992). This was based on
the book BLOOD GAMES by Jerry Bledsoe, and was ostensibly a docudrama
about an actual inheritance-murder in the town of Washington, North
Carolina. But there was the heavy suggestion that the three young men
involved were influenced into doing the act because of their partici-
pation in the hobby of the DUNGEONS & DRAGONS fantasy-fiction role-
playing game (hereafter called D&D).
Many deprecating and physically false images of the game and its
fans were presented. What is worse, the film was the first time the
television medium has physically misrepresented a best-selling book
in content and form. In the pivotal scene where two policemen are
poring over the D&D "Handbook", they read from it a passage about a
mission "to slay the evil Overlord" which they link to the commission
of a real-life murder.
There is no such quotation in any D&D book. In fact, the cover
of the book was peeking over the car dashboard and was represented as
having fluffy clouds on the cover with big red letters that say
"HANDBOOK". There is no such D&D book that begins with the word
HANDBOOK.
A similar misrepresentation occurred in the 4-hour miniseries
"Cruel Doubt", based on a book by Joe McGinniss, simultaneously aired
by NBC and the Canadian network CTV May 17&19, 1992, and Aug. 8-9,
1993, and which dramatizes exactly the same murder.
In this program, even more amazingly, the actual first edition
of the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Players Handbook was shown -- but
with a falsified page of artwork not actually present in the book, in
an attempt to link the game with details of the actual murder. But
such is the preconceived mind-set against the hobby that an entire
mini-series could be produced and aired without any qualms about
falsifying a book in this way.
Bigotry against the fans of the Dungeons & Dragons game has a
long and interesting history stretching back to 1979, only five years
after the game was invented. Here are a few highlights:
--in 1979, a young student named James Dallas Egbert III, a minor,
disappeared from the campus of Michigan State University. There was
ample speculation that he had gotten lost in the "steam tunnels" under
the campus from playing a "live", costumed version of the Dungeons &
Dragons game. He was later found under mysterious circumstances, but
committed suicide nine months later.
In actuality, a private detective on the case, William Dear, was
contacted by the boy and asked to retrieve him. In Dear's book THE
DUNGEON MASTER (1984), he makes clear that the boy ran away because of
personal and social pressures, and in fact he got mixed up in a
homosexual prostitution ring involving minors. The embarrassment and
the fear of being revealed as homosexual led to his suicide, not
Dungeons & Dragons. Dear kept quiet about it for five years before
publishing his book to protect the boy's memory, but in the meantime,
D&D received unwarranted blame.
--in 1980, a number of preachers such as the Rev. James R. Cotter and
John S. Torrell decided to add D&D to their pantheon of "teen
problems". They used the romantic image picked up from the well-
publicized Dallas case of a young teen who is so obsessed with the game
that he begins to confuse fantasy with reality. But in addition they
mixed in notions that the firm fantasy-fiction basis of the game was
in fact REAL occultism and Satanism. This idea spread rapidly among
religious circles, but a rather clear trail of copying and borrowing
exists in all anti-D&D religious tracts which can be traced to
these two gentlemen.
--In 1983 the television movie "Mazes & Monsters" aired, based on the
book by Rona Jaffe and starring Tom Hanks. It did not mention D&D
by name but further spread the romantic but psychologically unsuppor-
ted notion of confusion of fantasy with reality as a result of playing
role-playing games.
--By 1984-1985, a woman named Patricia Pulling had let herself be
convinced by a policeman who had been reading religious tracts that
her son's playing of D&D led to his suicide. She crusaded massively
against the game and hit all the known talk-shows. She formed a
group called Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons, and also joined the
directorship of the National Coalition on Television Violence founded
by Dr. Thomas Radecki, a man who variously claimed that snowball
fights, Donald Duck cartoons, tickling, and the Christian Broad-
casting Network were bad for mental health.
The NCTV from 1984-1989 openly listed Professor Philippe Rushton
on the masthead of every newsletter, in a listing called "partial list
of endorsers". Prof. Rushton is, of course, the man who has published
racist research claiming there is a hierarchy of different degrees of
intelligence and law-abidedness, with Blacks at the bottom.
--In March 1985, the trial of the first minor tried for murder under
Canada's new Young Offenders Act concluded with the claim that his
D&D-playing was involved. The trial had been meandering for months,
but only a few days after this revelation in February, both prosecu-
tion and defense quickly agreed on an insanity-plea. In actuality,
the unnameable boy who murdered two young children in Orangeville did
so because he was a schizophrenic, and a friend had dared him to stop
taking his medication.
--On June 20, 1985, responding to general bad press against the game,
the Metropolitan Separate School Board of Toronto banned the game of
D&D. Concern had been expressed about a club set up to play this and
other games at Neil McNeil High School, and an internal report was
commissioned which had nothing to say against the game. However,
during two hours of emotional presentations by 7 demonstrators, the
board banned the game as "involving the occult".
It turns out, however, that the only Catholic literature opposing
D&D, the tract "Games Unsuspecting People Play: Dungeons & Dragons"
by Louise Shanahan and published by the Daughters of St.Paul, had to
be pulled out of circulation when it was found that they were citing
two openly ANTI-Catholic groups as their sources of information. One
of these was the aforementioned Rev. John S. Torrell, whose radio
program was kicked off one station for anti-Catholic remarks. The
other was Albert James Dager, who even compared the "evil" of D&D to
the "evil" of the Catholic religion in the very article cited unthink-
ingly by the Catholic tract!
--On Sept. 15, 1985, the CBS program "60 Minutes" had a segment on
"Dungeons & Dragons" which was filled with claims of suicides caused
as the result of a game. One case featured an interview with the
sheriff of Lafayette, Colorado, commenting on the death of the two
Erwin brothers. A suicide note was cited with the quote "A man with-
out his freedom is not a man at all, and so this man is targeted for
termination."
The parents of the boys were curiously not interviewed, and the
next day it became clear why. The parents were furious at "60
Minutes" and said that the older brother was facing sentencing in
an auto-theft case, hence the note, and the younger brother joined
the suicide out of attachment to the older. They complained long and
loud about this misrepresentation, but it was only reported in the
local media. "60 Minutes" has never apologized for this misrepresen-
tation.
It became increasingly clear that the cited cases of suicides
caused by the D&D game were fabrications claimed not by evidence but
by prior ideas absorbed from religious tracts, which the media often
transposed uncritically and unthinkingly into secular claims of
psychological problems. This despite clear evidence from psychological
testing that D&D-players evidence no difference in their psychological
make-up from the main population no matter how many years they
indulge in D&D play (1). Attempts to incite panic against D&D by
citing 30 or 40 cases of suicide amongst the millions of game fans
was even cited as an example of mathematical illiteracy (2). A few
books have begun to expose the claims against D&D as part of a gener-
alized "Satanic Panic" of the 1980's (3,4).
In 1991 the CBC even examined the issue of D&D and concluded that
there has never actually been a court-case which concluded that D&D had
been responsible for any crime (5). Presumably this also includes the
case of the Leith von Stein murder portrayed in the film in question,
dating from 1988, which would represent another area of falsification.
It also turns out that both the books BLOOD GAMES by Jerry
Bledsoe and CRUEL DOUBT by Joe McGinniss, speaking of the same murder
case, were influenced by PAINTED BLACK by Carl Raschke, a professor
of divinity in Denver whose book made claims about widespread
Satanism in society. This man made many inferences about a sample
adventure text found in the "basic" version of D&D, claiming it
encouraged players to view evil as good. Distorted versions of
these musings found their way into both books -- and both books were
made into television movies without anyone bothering to check the
contents of the actual D&D books.
I therefore ask the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council to
examine the issue of images in the media which deprecate fans of D&D.
Since the manufacturer of the game, TSR Inc. of Lake Geneva, Wisconsin,
has estimated that there are about nine million people worldwide who
have played the game, such images take on the nature of biased
presentations and even hate-promoting images of a large identifiable
group. However, because of a kind of widespread "follow the leader"
syndrome, many people have picked up extreme examples of bias and
misinformation about the game fans which would not be permissible if
the subject had been Blacks or Jews. This has created great fears in
the community of fans of D&D, and their decentralized nature makes it
difficult for any single one to speak out against what is going on.
I am prepared to present a detailed analysis of the deprecatory
nature of scenes in "Honour Thy Mother", as well as a parallel expla-
nation of the true nature of the hobby of role-playing games and how,
for example, costumes are not actually worn to play as depicted in
such lowbrow films. The fans of D&D, of all ages, recognize it as
a great cultural activity in self-entertainment and storytelling.
The self-entertainment aspect may have influenced television
media to vilify it every chance they got, in a fit of pique, since the
more able game-fans know they can write better "scripts" or "screen-
plays" than the thin-blooded nonsense served up by the major networks,
although their audience is limited to only about 5 or 6 friends.
In fact, D&D has inspired approximately one-third of all computer
games in existence, these being the more complex "role-playing" or
"adventure" games. Originally inspired by fantasy-fiction, D&D has
in turn inspired fantasy literature of its own, such as the widespread
"Dragonlance" series of books by several different authors. D&D has
sparked interest in fantasy fiction among millions, so that the
production of fantasy films such as THE PRINCESS BRIDE, WILLOW, or
JUMANJI would not have been possible without this D&D audience.
Seeing as the original, (non-computer) pencil-and-paper game of
Dungeons & Dragons has created some cultural benefit, it should not be
mindlessly attacked in media portrayals.
Yours truly,
--Pierre Savoie (by FAX/modem)
REFERENCES:
(1) "Emotional Stability Pertaining to the Game of Dungeons &
Dragons" by Armando Simon; PSYCHOLOGY IN THE SCHOOLS, vol. 24 (Oct.
1987), pp. 329-333.
(2) INNUMERACY: Mathematical Illiteracy and its Consequences, by
John Allen Paulos; 1988; Hill & Wang; New York; p. 125.
(3) SATANISM IN AMERICA: How the Devil Got Much More Than His Due,
by Shawn Carlson and Gerald Larue; 1989; Gaia Press.
(4) IN PURSUIT OF SATAN: The Police and the Occult, by Robert
Hicks; 1991; Prometheus Press.
(5) "Dungeons and Dragons"; CBC Radio "Ideas" programme of May 29,
1991. #ID 9190. Transcripts are still available from the CBC for
$5.00.
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<end FAX>
--Other facts: The Reverend John S. Torrell and his cronies are far
from respectable, it turns out. Torrell founded the Christian Life
Ministries of Sacramento, California, then renamed it European-American
Evangelistic Crusades. In his religious quarterly newsletter, THE DOVE,
he has claimed that Ronald Reagan secretly surrendered the U.S. to the
Soviet Union at the Iceland Summit of October 1986. He has also claimed
that the symbol of the Seoul Olympics, a swirling pattern, is a Satanic
"666" pattern. Every issue of THE DOVE consists of religious articles
and a heavy inclusion of nonsensical political polemics.
Most recently, THE DOVE of Winter 1995 featured guest articles authored
by Ken Anderson claiming that modern man is in ill health because he is
"oxygen-starved", that the oxygen content of the atmosphere 200 years ago
was 38% of the total (and carbon dioxide was 1%), and today there is 19.6%
oxygen and 5% carbon dioxide! His figures, then and now, clash with even
the earliest measurements of atmospheric content. Furthermore, 5% carbon
dioxide content is fatal. But such is the lack of science education that
Anderson can write this nonsense and Rev. Torrell publishes it.
Anderson's solution: ozone-producing machines, and yet ozone in any but
small concentrations causes lung-irritations.
Rev. Torrell's ministry and the address for THE DOVE is still
European-American Evangelistic Crusades
P.O. Box 41001
Sacramento, CA
95841.
They no longer publish any articles against Dungeons & Dragons, although
mention of D&D may be incorporated in some of their cassette offerings
about "Satanism" or the occult.
--The film "Honor Thy Mother", in the infamous "police poring over an
AD&D manual" also had them mouthing the words "Extra points for multiple
hits!" as if it were part of the game-rules. Even a beginning D&D-player
knows that the number of experience points for defeating a monster, in
any fashion, is a fixed value. And yet, the movie attempted to link
this nonexistent game-rule to the fact that Lieth von Stein died, and his
wife nearly died, from repeated blows with a blunt object.
There is simply no way television networks should be permitted to
falsify the contents of best-selling books, in order to attempt to link
them to the random details of a specific crime.
--
---Pierre Savoie ([ab 966] at [torfree.net])