In Defense of Imagination: Canadian Youth Culture and the Dungeons & Dragons Panic in Canada,1980–1995

Abstract

Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), the iconic tabletop role-playing game released in 1974, sparked controversy from its early inception. This article examines the emergence of moral panic around D&D, particularly in the United States and Canada during the early 1980s. It explores how concerned groups, such as Bothered Against Dungeons & Dragons, portrayed the game as a corrupting influence on American youth. Focusing on the spread of panic into Canada, this article investigates the role of American media in shaping Canadian perceptions. This study highlights questions about transnational cultural influence and the impact of media on societal norms. Was the moral panic primarily a result of American cultural influence, or was there tangible evidence linking D&D to real-world violence in Canada? Through analysis of media representation and cultural discourse, this article seeks to shed light on these complex dynamics and to highlight moments of youth resistance to narratives of moral panic.

On November 4th, 1984, fear gripped the modest township of Orangeville, Ontario after the devastating discovery of 11-year-old Daniel Babineau and his 9-year-old sister Monique Babineau, behind St. Peter Separate School (Keller, 2009; Stefaniuk, 1984; Strauss, 1984). The Babineau children had been tragically murdered and news spread quickly throughout the town of 14,000 and beyond, across Canada, making national headlines. Understandably, the Township of Orangeville ground to a halt as Ontario Provincial Police (OPP), local Orangeville deputies, and eager volunteers undertook an exhaustive investigation to find evidence and to identify the perpetrator. The investigation yielded results quickly as the perpetrator's identity was discovered on November 12th; however, when the perpetrator was identified as a 13-year-old acquaintance of Daniel Babineau, there was little to no relief within the small community (Strauss, 1984; “Young Offender Acts”, 1984). Instead, police, community members, and the Babineau family demanded answers: what could have possibly driven a 13-year-old child to act in such a calculated and violent manner? After two extensive police interviews and a psychological evaluation, the motive behind the attacks began to take shape (Stefaniuk, 1985). Indeed, the police and parents focused on one aspect of the teen's confession. On the morning of the day in question, he had spent time trying to carve a sword for his involvement in the fantasy role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons (D&D), but he accidentally broke his creation, which threw him into a fit of rage (Claridge, 1985).

In response to this discovery, a media storm ensued and engulfed the town. Orangeville found itself at the center of an international news story warning of the dangers of D&D for Canadian youth. An array of major Canadian newspapers and television stations across the nation warned the Canadian public of the possible dangers posed by D&D, leading Canadian officials to ban the game in schools and libraries across the province of Ontario. In most of these news reports, D&D was portrayed as a violent game which promoted the practices of witchcraft and Satan worship to young Canadians. Leading the charge against the tabletop role-playing game were American psychiatrists and advocacy groups acting as the pre-eminent experts and reliable authorities on the dangers of the game. These American experts and advocates offered their testimony in nearly every major Canadian news story and emphasized the link between the tragic double homicide and D&D. Despite the forceful media attack on D&D, groups of young Canadians did not sit idly by and watch as their precious hobby was banned. Instead, Canadian youth banded together and fought for the freedom to enjoy their hobby by taking their complaints to district school boards, local Canadian newspapers, and gaming magazines.

This article is split into three sections which will analyze the Canadian Orangeville tragedy as part of a far-reaching moral panic in response to the popularization of the fantasy role-playing game, D&D. By way of context, the article will begin by tracing the initial anxiety concerning D&D to the United States in 1982 with the suicide of Irving “Bink” Pulling—which drove concerned parents, teachers, and police authorities to decry D&D as a morally corrupt activity. This article will then argue that the fear and apprehension surrounding D&D in Canada was fueled by American advocacy groups, such as Bothered Against Dungeons and Dragons (BADD), who used their media connections and platforms to educate and warn Canadians of the occult nature of the game. Following the Orangeville tragedy, the Canadian media capitalized on the public's latent fears of the rising threat of witchcraft, demonic activity, and teen violence that had trickled into Canada from the United States and provided a new target for American moral reformers to spread awareness of what they perceived as a threat to North American youth.

The third section of this article analyzes how Canadian youth utilized newspapers, official gaming magazines, and fan magazines to refute and resist the growing narrative of D&D as a deviant hobby. In the pages of these newspapers and magazines, young Canadians not only forged a community of letters across Canada defending their game, but they also found a chorus of support from fans in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia through a shared commiseration over the vilification of their treasured hobby. Consequently, Canadian youth became meaningful contributors to these international communities, offering strategies and approaches to reconfigure the image of D&D through the creation of their own advocacy groups. The spread of the Dungeons & Dragons panic from the United States to Canada raises important questions as to how American media influences Canadian popular culture and the flow of ideas in North America, and how Americans influence Canada's moral order. Ultimately, the response to fears and anxieties surrounding risk to Canadian youth reveals a double-edged use of media—both as a tool used by moral entrepreneurs to shape moral order and a tool used by Canadian youth to resist, shape, and safeguard burgeoning narratives concerning their beloved hobby.

Literature Review and Methodology

The fear mongering and media maelstrom that followed D&D over this period is best categorized as what sociologist Stanley Cohen termed a moral panic. Broadly defined, a moral panic is a “condition, episode, person or group of persons [which] become defined as a threat to societal values and interests; its nature is presented in a stylized and stereotypical fashion by the mass media” (Cohen, 1972). Cohen argues that moral panics are often spurred on by “moral entrepreneurs” or “rule creators” who launch moral crusades which, sometimes, develop into moral panics. Cohen continues by stating that moral panics disproportionately portray a social threat as much more dangerous than reality and are often volatile and short-lived. The theory of moral panics has since been expounded upon by many scholars. For example, the work of Erich Goode and Nachman Ben-Yehuda (1994) analyze the origins of moral panics to illustrate how many different social actors—such as members of the media, religious leaders, police, and government officials—all partake in the creation and escalation of a moral panic. Goode and Ben-Yehuda argue that it is difficult, if not impossible, to determine the motivations behind a moral crusader's actions, and though “activists may sincerely believe that their efforts will advance a noble cause…[this] almost inevitably entails advancing the status and material interests of the group who believes in it” (Goode & Ben-Yehuda, 1994). In the case of the D&D panic, it is clear that the perceptions of religious advocacy groups spawned from a legitimate fear for the safety of Christian families and the well-being of youth; however, these groups worked to protect their own view of morality and reality and to foist their perceived safety measures on society at large.

More recently, the scholarship of moral panics has examined the relationship between youth and media as the two central engines driving panic. Specifically, sociologists Angela McRobbie and Sarah Thornton (1995) argue that in the 1980s and 1990s, media became more fragmented and splintered into many different communities. As mass media became more diverse in its reach and as new systems of media consumption, such as newspapers, magazines, television shows, and radio shows, began to offer more diverse media options to audiences and subcultures, moral panics became more fluid, having almost no “definite beginnings and ends” as the mass media's message became more disjointed. Scholars contend that with the proliferation of new media and entertainment platforms, there emerged a pressing need among police officers, teachers, and concerned citizens for enhanced educational resources to safeguard children and adolescents from exposure to potentially mature content prevalent in these mediums. In this way, mass media heightened the vulnerability of youth (Holloway & Valentine, 2003; Krinsky, 2008). At the same time, Thornton and McRobbie argued that “unlike outcasts of the past, who had to define themselves mostly in reaction to overwhelming mass media attacks,” Canadian youth could now turn to niche forms of media to maintain, retain, and protect their social identities and hobbies from attacks made by moral entrepreneurs using mass media.

Therefore, this article examines moral panic surrounding D&D in North American discourse from 1982 to 1985. This analysis links an American movement concerning D&D that began in 1982 to an episode of moral panic in Canada which occurred in the Fall of 1984 and disappeared from the press cycle by the Summer of 1985. This approach will provide a better understanding of the international reach of moralizing movements and illustrate the direct involvement of American moral entrepreneurs in curating an episode of moral panic in Canada. Therefore, the moral panic paradigm is an analytical device focused on the movement of social discourse and mechanics of power in society. As sociologist Chas Critcher states, moral panics deal with the production of power, “specifically who has the capacity to define a social problem and prescribe appropriate action” (Critcher, 2006). American moral entrepreneurs used their platforms and position as accredited experts to fuel this fear through Canadian newspapers, on Canadian talk shows, and in Canadian courtrooms. However, the influence of American experts in Canada was not absolute. Many Canadians who were affected most by this panic, teenagers and young adults who were dedicated fans of D&D, retaliated through the mainstream press, and published in niche hobby magazines to protect their social identity and to push back against the narrative of panic. In these moments of resistance, we catch a glimpse of young people challenging the label of “deviant” and working to educate Canadians on the collaborative, co-operative, and positive nature of D&D's recreational creativity. As a case study, this paper illuminates the transnational movement of media in the curation of moral panics. Building upon the work of Thornton and McRobbie, the dual nature of media is revealed. In this case, media is a tool used by moral entrepreneurs to shape the moral order of Canadians and simultaneously, a tool used in niche media by teenagers and young adults to shield themselves from the moral label of “deviant” and ultimately, to fight for the right to curate their own social identity.

To illustrate the scale of the media response to the Orangeville tragedy and the subsequent D&D panic in Canada, this article will consult major newspapers from across Canada. It should be noted that some of these newspapers only printed one or two articles on the panic, while influential provincial newspapers, such as The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star, The Ottawa Citizen, The Calgary Herald, and The Montreal Gazette provided a sustained analysis of both the Orangeville court case and reactions from Canadians across the nation to the D&D panic. In the same vein, Canadian radio shows and television shows, such as the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's (CBC) The Journal and Canadian Television Network's (CTV) The Shirley Show were consulted to explore the impact of the panic on the average Canadian. Moving beyond Canadian sources, this article will also consult American newspapers to chart the origins of the D&D panic and pamphlet literature and statistics compiled by the American D&D censorship group, BADD, which were published and often reprinted in Canadian newspapers and integrated into Canadian news stories on the potential threat of D&D.

To gauge the reception of individual Canadian's opinions on the public denigration of D&D, fan-based letters to the editor's sections of Canadian newspapers, such as The Calgary Herald, The Ottawa Citizen, and The Toronto Star will be closely analyzed. In these sections, there are dozens of young Canadians valiantly defending D&D game as being fun, co-operative, and educational. Importantly, letters to the editors of popular companion magazines to D&D will also be consulted; specifically, Dragon magazine and Dungeon magazine. These official companion magazines offer a unique space for ardent proponents of the game to vent their reactions to the growing D&D panic. In these pages, D&D table-top gamers wrote letters recounting growing feelings of isolation, ostracization, and social stigmatization as their love for the game was characterized as deviant by American moral entrepreneurs. Supplementing popular companion magazine sources will be fan-made magazines—referred to as fanzines—which were formatted, edited, and written purely by fans of science fiction, fantasy, and D&D. These fanzines, such as Polyhedron, Shadis, and Torus were circulated throughout the United States and Canada and functioned as a “pulp-and-ink world wide web to circulate ideas, make connections, and forge…conceptual ‘scapes’ where people of like minds can become affiliated” (Pine, 2006). In the pages of these fanzines, Canadian fans of D&D offered their raw and oftentimes uncensored defense of their beloved hobby.

Historical Background of the D&D Panic in the United States

D&D is a fantasy-based role-playing game created by Gary Gygax and David Arnelson, two avid tabletop gamers hailing from Wisconsin who brought together their two independent projects, Chainmail and Blackmoor, to create D&D (Riggs, 2017). In 1973, Gygax independently founded Tactical Studies Rules (TSR) to self-publish their new game, as he was unable to find any publishers willing to publish the first edition of D&D. One year later, in 1974, Gygax would publish over 1000 copies of the first edition rulebooks for D&D out of his headquarters located in the basement of his Wisconsin home. In the first few years of printing, Gygax struggled to keep up with demands for his rulebooks—which were needed to understand and play the game. In terms of rules and environment of play, D&D is a role-playing game that consists of two or more players sitting at a table and contributing to creating a co-operative narrative. The rules can be complex, but most actions are ultimately determined by rolling a 20-sided dice and narrating the results to develop an imagined group experience. One player of the group is appointed as the Dungeon Master (DM), who curates the narrative by placing monsters and mapping out plot points that are tailored to the interests of the players. Given this, it is difficult to understand how such a benign game with a tedious system of rules generated an international panic centered around witchcraft and Satanism.

To better understand how this game became vilified, we must first turn to larger cultural reactions to new patterns of leisure and recreation of the 1980s that engaged a young audience. The 1980s were marked by moral panics and the creation of advocacy groups geared towards informing children about the implicit dangers and satanic undercurrents of heavy metal music to inform the public of violence in television programs and media. It is with this backdrop that Irving “Bink” Pulling took his own life in 1982—which drove his mother, Patricia Pulling, to find other parents whose children had been negatively affected by D&D. Pulling became very close with Pat and Mary Dempsey who had lost their son to suicide in 1981 and who firmly believed that his death was a result of his deep obsession with D&D (Laycock, 2015). Pulling and the Dempsey's also found an ally in Dr. Thomas Edward Radecki, a psychiatrist and founding member of the National Coalition on Television Violence (NCTV). Radecki founded NCTV in 1980 and released publications that tallied the violent behavior of television characters and offered ratings of violence to television shows (Zimmer, 1985). The NCTV newsletters were widely distributed and shared between many newsrooms and outlets; ideally, they were intended to be used by parents to ensure their children avoided violent television programs (Zimmer, 1985).

In the early 1980s, Pulling, the Dempsey's and Radecki came together and formed BADD—a public advocacy group that began to disseminate information on the dangers of D&D throughout the United States. BADD's objectives and agenda were clearly stated through newspaper interviews and in their pamphlet, “Dungeons and Dragons: Witchcraft, Suicide, Violence” (Dempsey et al., 1985) which circulated throughout the United States in the 1980s. As detailed in the introduction of this pamphlet, BADD's aim was to illustrate “the negative aspects and direction of the [D&D] books” (Dempsey et al., 1985). According to BADD, the rulebooks were religious guidebooks which functioned to slowly inculcate youth with “occult forms of religion” and provided children with instructions to cast dangerous spells, which encouraged them to abandon traditional religious pursuits (Dempsey et al., 1985). The pamphlets instructed that they were designed to be read by authority figures, such as pastors, police, parents and “to save educators and librarians hours of research and for them to reach a commonsense decision” (Dempsey et al., 1985). That is, to ban the play of D&D on the premises of school and libraries. Most problematic was BADD's reckless use of statistics and figures to demonstrate the severity of the D&D epidemic that gripped America. The distortion of reality using fake facts was a common practice among moral entrepreneurs who attempted to drum up sympathy for their cause by overblowing the negative side effects (Best, 1987). For instance, the pamphlet included lists of children who had lost their lives and attributed their deaths to D&D, stating that they had been “forced” to take their own lives through curses or spells and published many statistics of teen suicides throughout the United States without providing any identifiable sources. The pamphlet concludes with BADD's overarching agenda, which purported to bring the public's attention to the advent of “the teen suicide era…The healthy growth and development of our children is being hindered by violent fantasy role-playing games, rock music, pornographic literature, violent movies and lastly—violent videos” (Dempsey et al., 1985).

The secondary objective of BADD was to pressure TSR—the company that published D&D rulebooks and miniatures—to affix warning labels to their gaming products. Members of BADD felt this approach to censorship was generous, stating that they “never asked for the game to be banned from the market…we [only] want warning labels” (Bowles, 1985). BADD pushed this agenda through guest appearances on radio stations and, with the psychiatric accreditation and credibility supplied by Dr. Radecki, BADD began to find larger media platforms and more public support. For example, Pulling and Dr. Radecki made television appearances on many popular talk shows, such as The Gil Gross Show, Geraldo, Sally Jesse Raphael, and Donahue representing themselves as experts on the rising threat of youth violence and Satanism. These television appearances culminated in a special episode on 60 Minutes in 1985 which addressed the potential dangers of D&D. During this special, Pulling and Dr. Radecki maintained that playing D&D was an evil practice that incited delusions and could ultimately be fatal. These media appearances not only cemented BADD's status as a moral and psychiatric authority on the dangers of D&D, but they also helped grow the group's membership as BADD was granted tax-exempt status in 1985 and had a list of over 500 subscribers for their newsletters.

BADD's media campaign to villainize Dungeons & Dragons was successful on several fronts. Throughout the early 1980s, BADD convinced many parents and school boards to impose bans on D&D on school premises throughout the United States (”Putnam High School Drops Dungeons and Dragons”, 1985). Ultimately, schools in Connecticut, Vermont, Pennsylvania, New York, Virginia, Colorado, Wisconsin, California, Ohio, Texas, and New Mexico banned D&D on their premises between 1980 and 1985 (Dragons Ban Sought by Parents, 1985; “Dungeons and Dragons Ban”, 1985; Hamilton, 1985; Latimer, 1983; Putnam High School Drops Dungeons and Dragons Game, 1985). In the same vein, TSR also felt the pressure of BADD's campaign. This is reflected through TSR's adoption of an in-house code of ethics in 1984. Specifically, TSR's code of ethics stressed that, “evil shall never be portrayed in an attractive light” and should only be a characteristic of an enemy to the players in the game (Laycock, 2015). To distance themselves even further from accusations of Satanism being present in their game's resources, TSR removed all instances of the word “demon” from the second edition of D&D released in 1989. Similarly, in editions of Dragon magazine and Dungeon magazine—the companion magazines to D&D rulebooks—TSR writers stated that they would no longer publish or distribute campaigns in which the players played evil-aligned characters because they do not foster “cooperation and good role-playing” (“Forum”, 1989). Therefore, it is clear from the school bans and TSR's code of ethics and omission of terms associated with Satanism and the “evil” nature of D&D that BADD had an influence on the popular reception and public perception of the game.

Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, BADD's influence also extended into the courtroom. There were more than a dozen instances of D&D being employed as part of the legal counsel's defense—in both the United States and Canada (Missouri v. Molitor, 1987; Sellers v. State, 1991). In these cases, the defendant, often a young adult accused of a violent crime, had a tenuous connection to D&D. Following this discovery, legal counsel would utilize members of BADD as expert witnesses to speak to the insidious dangers and corrupting nature of D&D. While these legal defenses often culminated in failure for their clients, the presence of D&D in the courtroom, and Pulling and Dr. Radecki's role as expert witnesses in these trials, indicate that BADD was a powerful advocacy group. However, the most substantial measure of BADD's success as a moralizing advocacy group was the sheer reach of their media influence. BADD's media campaign was an international project with reverberations felt in the United Kingdom, Australia, and most immediately in Canada. Their influence extended through various forms of media, demonstrating the breadth of their reach as a moralizing advocacy group.

A BADD Influence on Canadian Society?

While the anxiety concerning D&D had been mounting in the United States since 1982, there was very little discussion of the fantasy role-playing game by Canadians and Canadian media until the Orangeville tragedy in 1984. Most representations of D&D in Canadian newspapers from 1980 until 1984 were simply reprints of events from the United States. For example, Canadian papers reprinted news of the 1982 suicide of Irving Pulling as BADD's media campaign began to pick up steam in the United States (“Suicide Blamed on Game Curse”, 1983). Some Canadian newspapers provided a bit more of a discussion surrounding the spike in suicides and violence associated with D&D before 1984. For instance, an article from a Saskatchewan-based newspaper, The Leader-post, published a full-page feature asking why D&D was receiving bad press and printed responses from various commentators from across the province (“Dungeons and Demons?”, 1983). While there were some mentions in Canadian media discussing the danger that D&D posed to society, in Canadian media, negative influence of D&D was mostly conceived of as an American problem. There were no organized efforts by Canadian parents, community leaders, or advocacy groups which galvanized to ban the tabletop games, nor was there any tangible correlation between suicide, satanism, and D&D printed in Canadian newspapers before 1984.

Following the 1984 Orangeville tragedy, however, a press explosion occurred which swelled throughout 1985 in multiple Canadian newspapers and even spawned a long-running press series curated by the Toronto Star which gave monthly updates on the Orangeville court case. Fanning the flames of the media panic that followed the Orangeville murders were American moral entrepreneurs, self-proclaimed experts, and anti-D&D advocacy groups. While it was clear from initial newspaper reports that there may have been a connection between D&D and the adolescent killers’ motives, BADD and the NCTV pushed the threat that D&D posed to society beyond this individual case. For example, in articles which debated the negative mental health effects of D&D, Dr. Thomas Radecki, a prominent member of BADD, acted as the figure of psychiatric authority on the harmful effects of D&D (“Children's Deaths Add Painful Reality”, 1985; May, 1985; “The Dungeons Debate”, 1985). Nearly every newspaper article that reported on the Orangeville murders stated that these Canadian murders formed part of a larger pattern of teen violence and suicide induced by D&D sweeping across North America. To substantiate this claim, Canadian newspapers not only cited BADD as an authority on the dangers of D&D, but also reprinted suicide statistics published in early BADD pamphlet literature (“Children's Deaths Add Painful Reality”, 1985; Fantasy Game Linked to Deaths, 1985; The Dungeons Debate, 1985; Willett, 1985). In the eyes of popular Canadian commentators and Canadian media, BADD and their affiliated psychiatrists were authorities of information on the moral dangers constructed by D&D.

While American anti-D&D advocacy groups were referenced in print by Canadian journalists, these American moral entrepreneurs and self-proclaimed experts also appeared in televised platforms of Canadian media to disseminate the dangers of D&D. Perhaps the most telling strategy of BADD's active participation in the Canadian D&D panic was their direct involvement in the Orangeville court case, with Dr. Thomas Radecki acting as an expert witness during the Orangeville murder trial. According to court reporters, Dr. Radecki was called upon as an expert witness because he possessed an extensive history of providing psychiatric advice concerning D&D, having previously testified in nine murder cases in the United States (Keller, 2009). During the Orangeville murder trial, Dr. Radecki argued that these murder cases often followed a pattern, “in each case, an adolescent or young adult, who had become heavily immersed in violent fantasies from their intense diet of violent entertainment, had gone out and committed one or more gruesome murders, often with likeminded accomplices” (Keller, 2009). On the other hand, the Canadian expert witness, in the Orangeville trial, Clive Chamberlain, the clinical director of the Thistletown Regional Centre in Oakville, stated that “the boy has a rigid tightly controlled personality with “extreme separation” between feeling and thinking” (“Boy, 14, Couldn’t Understand,” 1985). Chamberlain was convinced that the teenager was obsessed with controlling himself and others and that this urge to control the world around him may have led to his fascination with D&D. With that said, Chamberlain seemed more hesitant to place the blame on D&D; instead, he pointed to undiagnosed schizophrenia as the sole cause for the teenager's motives (“Boy, 14, Couldn’t Understand,” 1985). It is impossible to determine how much sway Dr. Radecki's testimony had in the Orangeville murder trial—especially as it did not directly align with the testimony of Canadian psychiatrists. However, the very presence of Dr. Radecki as an expert witness in a prominent Canadian murder trial speaks to the success of BADD's media campaign against D&D and, more importantly, illustrates BADD's ability to build enough credibility to successfully posture as a moral compass in both the United States and Canada.

Members of BADD made guest appearances in many different forums of Canadian media, offering their pseudo-expert testimony concerning D&D on several Canadian television shows. The most prominent and popular of these shows was the CBC's The Journal—a news broadcast that presented in-depth interviews and documentaries on often controversial national affairs (MacKinnon, 1982). In 1985, The Journal aired a thirteen-minute mini-documentary entitled, “Is Dungeons and Dragons dangerous?” (Mansbridge & Medina, 1985). The documentary presented D&D in an unbiased light beginning with a group of young boys and teenagers defending the creative and collaborative tabletop roleplaying game. The second segment of the documentary introduced Patricia Pulling of BADD as she warned that players do not just play the game, but “become the game” (Mansbridge & Medina, 1985). Pulling argued that this attachment to a fantasy world would inevitably lead to children living out the violent behavior of their characters. However, Pulling's warnings were interspliced with testimony of the young D&D players themselves, who stated that they could easily distinguish fantasy from reality.

While this mini documentary did shine light on both sides of the controversy surrounding the game, the tone was overly cautious. Indeed, the documentary made it clear that the media may have been a bit overblown concerning the dangers of the tabletop game; however, there was still some hesitation concerning the rise of D&D as a healthy leisure activity for youth. This ambivalence is palpable in the documentary's closing remark, “how [do] we deal with the undeniable love of violence of our species? [Dungeons & Dragons] has taken it a step beyond even TV and movies, and books, into the inner mind. Millions enjoy that voyage, but we don’t really know how many others find unexpected dragons in their psychic dungeons” (Mansbridge & Medina, 1985). Therefore, while much of the documentary provided a fair representation of D&D, the closing remarks pronounced the tabletop game an activity still shrouded in mystery which may adversely affect some segments of youth most vulnerable to the influences of violence and imaginative roleplay gaming.

The Journal walked a fine line by portraying D&D as both a possible danger to society and an imaginative exercise with friends. Other television stations were completely caught up in the media frenzy to censor D&D. For example, The Shirley Show, a Canadian daytime talk show which aired on CTV, also invited individuals to debate on a variety of issues, such as teenage suicide, euthanasia, and adultery, and devoted an entire episode to the dangers of D&D. The episode aired on January 25, 1985 (“Forum”, 1989). According to a disgruntled D&D club leader and University of Toronto student—Pierre Savoie—who submitted a letter to Dragon magazine recounting his interview with a producer from The Shirley Show, the producers found the reality of D&D too mundane. In fact, after listening to an in-depth discussion of the game, they decided to only book two guests for the episode: Pat Pulling and Dr. Thomas Radecki. Savoie stated that Pulling and Radecki were given “free rein to spout incredible nonsense about D&D games, and as an audience member I could not do much to discount them” (“Forum”, 1989). After the show, the producers were discussing the episode with the audience and mentioned that they “wanted to get away from the style of American talk shows.” Savoie responded, “then why do you import American-style lunatics?” (“Forum”, 1989). Given this exchange, even though many Canadian commentators supported expert advice and propaganda of American advocacy groups to identify perceptions of a growing moral problem, fans, club leaders, and members of the D&D community perceived the media maelstrom as a case of unmistakable overreach American overreach into Canadian society.

The Impact of the Dungeons & Dragon Panic in Canada

In many ways, the media fallout from the Orangeville murders mirrored the development of BADD's media campaign in the United States. In the aftermath of the Orangeville murders and the loss of the Babineau children, the Dufferin County School Board banned D&D from all affiliated schools (Kim Zarzour, 1985). Around the same time, the Naismith school in Almonte, Ontario and Caldwell Street school in Carleton Place, Ontario also banned the game on their premises. These school bans continued to cascade through schools across Ontario as large district school boards began to ban D&D throughout all their affiliated schools, such as Lanark County School Board in Perth, Ontario and the Lakehead District Roman Catholic Separate School Board in Thunder Bay, Ontario (Judith Banville, 1984; Violent Society, 1985). The most widespread bans came from the York Region School Board and the Metropolitan Separate School Board in Toronto, Ontario which banned D&D throughout their affiliated schools as well. The reasoning was simple, parents had been reading and watching the coverage on Dungeons & Dragons and school administrators believed it best to, “quietly drop it” (Susan Fisher, 1985). The principal of Naismith school in Almonte, Ontario, Bill Tweedie, offered a bit more of an explanation by stating that there needed to be more research on the effects of D&D and that he did not “want to take a chance” with his students’ lives (Susan Fisher, 1985). Clearly, American influence and Canadian ambivalence precipitated the censoring of D&D gaming in Canadian schools.

Many Canadian students felt wronged by these school bans. In the eyes of Canadian students, the D&D panic was overblown, and, specifically, it was overblown by American media (“Students Win Right to Play”, 1985). Following the York Region School Board banning of D&D, students from Newmarket Secondary School attended a York Region School Board meeting and argued that the game was safe and that club members understood a clear boundary between fantasy and reality. In the words of one of the students, “we leave the game and go on with our regular lives and forget about it until we meet again…we don’t go out and commit acts of violence” (“Students Win Right to Play”, 1985). After hearing the students’ defense of the game, the York Region School Board agreed to lift the ban on D&D—which allowed the students to reform their club and play the game on school premises as an extra-curricular activity. However, the School Board's executive council were not fully convinced that D&D was safe and stipulated that a teacher must be present during club hours “to monitor the group” (Students Win Right to Play, 1985). This event illustrated that while the D&D panic was firmly rooted throughout Canadian society, individual Canadians pushed back and resisted the narrative of moral panic and argued that D&D was a beneficial activity—for youth especially.

Canadian Youth Resistance in the World of Newspapers and Magazines

While some Canadian youth combated the media campaign emboldened by BADD through directly repealing bans in school board meetings, most Canadians took to local newspapers and official D&D magazines to protest the unfair treatment of their favorite hobby. Resistance in the form of letters and opinion columns may seem diffuse and not constitutive of a community, but in the pages of these magazines and newspapers, young Canadians were able to freely express their identity and mount a defense of their hobby amongst an understanding subculture. More importantly, these spaces often allowed more leniency in venting their frustrations—as contributors were among fans and peers. Through an analysis of these materials, it also becomes clear that young Canadian fans were aware of the challenges in creating these sprawling communities of letters, but forged ahead as the need to carve out a space for their treasured hobby and a group identity was important to them. For example, in the independently fan-run magazine Torus, the creator mused about the difficulty of creating fan communities in Canada owing to the diverse regionality and the vast geography of the nation. Despite these challenges, the creator argued that “by now, 1986, Canadian fans are at least in some communication with each other, and usually aware of each other's existence and activities.” He concluded by stating that, “Canadian fandom is about as divided, fractious, and erratically informed as ever—which makes it, I suppose, quintessentially fannish” (Spencer, 1986).

This community of letters took form as individual Canadians took to the “Letters to the Editor” section of their local newspaper to contest the mass media's assault on D&D while others contributed to D&D magazines circulating throughout the United States and Canada. In the letters to local Canadian newspapers, Canadians rejected the narrative that D&D was morally damaging; in fact, commentators wrote about the social benefits of the tabletop role-playing game. However, pushback to letters promoting D&D in Canadian newspapers was not in short supply. Three major Canadian papers, The Calgary Herald, The Toronto Star, and The Ottawa Citizen housed heated debates that raged for months concerning the moral efficacy of D&D. It should be noted that while the “Letters to the Editors” sections of these major daily newspapers received mostly supportive responses to D&D's recreational value, some Canadians expressed unease concerning the popularity of D&D. For example, some contributors felt there needed to be less focus on the psychiatric impact and youth's “superficial addiction” to the tabletop role-playing game and more focus on the occultist and witchcraft elements inherent in D&D roleplay characters. In the words of one concerned Canadian, “what better way for witchcraft to recruit members, than to come up with a ‘harmless’ game aimed at children, with enough real witchcraft content to entice them to find out more” (“Real Danger”, 1985).

Despite ambivalent social perceptions of D&D's popularity, most contributions to the “Letters to the Editor” sections implored the Canadian public to take a step back from media hyperbole and take time to play D&D themselves to ensure that it was not dangerous. Other contributors attempted to defuse the panic surrounding the table-top roleplaying game by describing characteristics of the average player and the role-playing rules which determine how the game is played. For instance, a doctor working at the Toronto Sunny Brook hospital argued that he knew many colleagues and “bright, interesting young people” who played the game and led successful professional careers. The letter concluded by admonishing the Canadian media for publishing statements from “professionals who toss out personal biases as scientific statements, without any cogent facts to back them up” (“Blaming the Game Misses the Point”, 1985). The most common argument against the banning of Dungeons & Dragons, however, were the social and mental benefits of the game. Commentators highlighted how tabletop games forced players to problem solve and employ complex strategies to be victorious in challenging scenarios (“Game Promotes Teamwork”, 1986). More than any other aspect, proponents of the tabletop role-playing game highlighted how playing together created long-lasting friendships through expressions of teamwork necessary to come out on top in various encounters (“Dungeon Game Aided Reading Skills”, 1986). On the topic of school board bans, one commentator argued “we should encourage our children to play [D&D]. Let's give them a fighting chance to develop their imaginations and creativity before they are thrown into our adult work-a-day world” (“Game Promotes Teamwork”, 1986). Therefore, even though the media campaign, fueled by American experts and advocacy groups, penetrated the moral fabric of Canadian society, many Canadians refused to be undercut purported expert opinion. Instead, as they accessed their local newspapers to undercut questionable expert opinion with their lived gaming experience and fondness for D&D.

For the most part, these letters worked to rehabilitate the image of D&D in the eyes of the public in simpler terms. However, in the pages of the official Dragon and Dungeon magazines, the threat to their game motivated fans to partake in more complex discussion on the role of players and morality in the face of public scrutiny. For example, a 1990 issue of Dragon, in a section entitled “the problem of morality in fantasy” outlined the possibilities of using D&D as a moralizing device. Larry DiTillio (1980), a reader, and contributor to Dragon magazine, argued that the game should be used to teach younger players “reasonable attitudes toward the very real evils of life” and pointed out that one of the roles reserved for young adults in the game was to function as moral guides to help young gamers navigate life outside of the game. While some fans agreed with this stance, a leading contributor, Douglas P. Bachmann, penned a column in response. In this column, Bachmann argued that a DM and players should not engage in moralizing missions in the game. In the eyes of Bachmann, to use players as moralizing vehicles would be falling into the same behavior as BADD—privileging one view of morality over others and unceremoniously foisting it upon players. For Bachmann, and fans who agreed with him in subsequent issues, the importance of D&D went beyond morality. For many fans, according to Bachmann, “the art of fantasy is not concerned with real-life evil, or science, or quickies, or getting high. It is concerned with the profound mystery behind and within life, nature, and the human soul” (Bachmann, 1980). Therefore, for Bachmann, any attempt to use D&D as a moralizing device, from players’ perspective inside the game or media outside the fame, would “turn a form of art into a form of propaganda” (Bachmann, 1980).

In the pages of fanzines, unfettered by mainstream publishing regulation, fans took a less philosophical approach to the demonization of their hobby. For instance, fans actively mobilized readers of fanzines, such as Shadis to join and combat the misinformation campaign put forward by BADD. To coordinate this response, fans came together to create the Committee for the Advancement of Role-Playing Games (CAR-PGa)—an international non-profit organization determined to disseminate information to expose the misinformation employed by BADD and NCTV. The mission statement of CAR-PGa, as laid out in a full-page advertisement in Shadis, called for fans of D&D to fight against censorship—“no matter where you live…these actions have serious and frightening implications for you. It's not enough anymore to simply believe in your rights. You must defend them” (Blackburn, 1992). Indeed, the CAR-PGa advertisements appeared throughout issues and called for fans to help redefine D&D as “fun, healthy, family entertainment” (Blackburn, 1992).

Shadis was also home to a more inflammatory response to opponents of D&D penned by University of Toronto student, and co-chairman of the CAR-PGa, Pierre Savoie. In a feature spanning ten pages and entitled, “The Full Loon Catalogue,” Savoie identifies and refutes every single pamphlet of BADD's literature and similar organizations. In his article, Savoie not only exposes contradictions and outright falsehoods perpetuated by BADD, but he also engages in questionable behavior by publicly publishing the addresses of individual members of BADD, such as Pat Pulling, to mobilize fans of D&D to possibly harass or threaten her (Savoie, 1992). As a result, in subsequent issues of Shadis, members of the community argued that Savoie and his “smear campaign” had gone too far and, in fact, only exacerbated pain and suffering experienced by D&D fans already caused by BADD and similar groups (Anonymous, 1993). All in all, newspapers, official magazines, and fanzines offered unique spaces for fans of D&D from around the world to critique and resist the media's representation of the game—often leading to conflict among D&D fans themselves as they argued about the best defense for the merits of this role-playing game.

Conclusion

The D&D panic had a short shelf-life in Canada. Once the year-long media frenzy following the Orangeville murders in 1984 began to wind down, there was barely any subsequent mention of the tabletop role-playing game in Canadian media. On the other hand, the United States continued to report on D&D's controversy about connection to violence and satanism—as demonstrated by prolonged media focus and the roleplaying game being used as a defense in court cases well into the late 1990s (Laycock, 2015). However, this glimpse of panic surrounding an imaginative leisure activity for youth culture is important to examine for several reasons. First, by modifying the scope of the study to include Canada, it is abundantly clear that anxiety surrounding D&D was clearly more far-reaching than previously realized. Indeed, the panic concerning the tabletop role-playing game spread internationally and reached as far as the United Kingdom and Australia.

The manifestation of the D&D panic in Canada also functions as a relevant case study which fosters a deeper understanding of how advocacy groups utilize their social power and authority to facilitate the spread of moral panics across national borders, highlighting the importance of media in the rise of moral panics. The Canadian panic surrounding D&D illustrates that geographic proximity to America and a strong American media focus alone were not enough to incite a moral panic in Canada; instead, an event that mirrors the warning signs provided by moral entrepreneurs in the host country is required to legitimize the leap from national to international debate. As demonstrated above, the Canadian populace was inundated with reports of the dangers surrounding D&D, yet there was no public outcry to ban the sale of the game in stores or to ban the game on the premises of schools. Canadians did not completely ignore this trickle of news decrying the roleplaying game. The threat of D&D had been established in the landscape of their minds—even if only as an American problem. However, on November 4, 1984, this distant threat was reified on Canadian soil. The tragic Orangeville murders confirmed the American warnings that BADD had been circulating and emboldened the advocacy group with a new level of authority in Canada—an authority they used to instruct the Canadian public on the moral dangers of D&D. However, this authority was not absolute. As demonstrated through the “Letters to the Editors” section across Canadian newspapers, in official D&D magazines, and in fanzines, die-hard dedicated fans of D&D not only resisted the formulation of a moral panic strengthened by American fervor, but they also presented their own narrative of the tabletop game as being educational, collaborative, and creative and engaged in riveting debates on the place of morality in their game.