Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford - Demonizing Dungeons & Dragons (Classic)

Episode Date: December 20, 2024

When James Dallas Egbert III was reported missing from his college dorm in 1979, one of America's most flamboyant private detectives was summoned to solve the case. "Dallas" faced the same problems as many teenagers, but P.I. William Dear stoked fears that he might have fallen under the evil spell of a mysterious and sinister game: Dungeons & Dragons... Tim Harford returns with brand new episodes of Cautionary Tales on January 10th. In the meantime, Merry Christmas from the Cautionary Tales team! For a full list of sources, see the show notes at timharford.com. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

As all Dungeon Masters and adventurers know, 2024 is the 50th anniversary of Dungeons and Dragons, the first commercial role-playing game. I'm a huge fan of role-playing games. I've been playing them since the early 1980s. And to mark the anniversary, I wanted to give you another chance to hear an old favourite. A quick word of warning, this episode discusses death by suicide. If you're suffering emotional distress or having suicidal thoughts, support is available. For example from 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline in the US and from the Samaritans if you're in the UK. Cautionary Tales will return with new episodes on the 10th of January. In the meantime, I

give you Demonising Dungeons and dragons. In Raymond Chandler novels and in Humphrey Bogart movies, it often begins with a telephone call. Strange to say, in real life, it often begins that way too. But those are the words of William Dear. He's going to take us on an adventure that's full of thrills, surprises and terrors. William Dear is one of the most famous private detectives in the world, dashing, mustachioed, sporting a vast gold ring. He's a star with his own private plane.

And this telephone call in August 1979 was going to get him started on one of his most infamous cases. On the other end of the telephone was a surgeon from the same part of North Texas as William Dear. The two men had met a few times. My nephew has disappeared. He was taking a summer course at Michigan State University in East Lansing when it happened. And he didn't just run off?

He's not that kind of kid. He loves school. In fact, he's considered to be a genius. The boy, James Dallas Egbert III, or Dallas, was just 16 years old. He graduated from high school at 13, entered college at 14. I'm telling you dear, he's not the type to just go on the road. Well, maybe, and maybe not. Young Dallas had been missing for eight days already. and maybe not. Young Dallas had been missing for eight days already. William Deer called Dallas' parents. Mr Deer, thank God you called. I'm so desperate about my son.

I don't know if he's committed suicide and is lying in some ditch or what. Maybe he's been kidnapped. Deer's team was soon packing for the trip to East Lansing, Michigan. There was an expert pilot and a sniper, Vietnam Vet. Deer's team was soon packing for the trip to East Lansing, Michigan. There was an expert pilot and a sniper Vietnam vet. They assembled telephoto lenses, bugging devices, tracking systems and spy cameras. Deer himself was running through the possibilities. Most of them were mundane.

One of them would prove to be truly fantastical. I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to Cautionary Tales. The simplest explanation of Dallas' disappearance was that the young man had killed himself. That was William Deer's instinct. It was also Anna Egberts. According to Deer's account, she blamed herself. Deer's team started asking questions around the university. What they discovered deepened the fear that this was a case of suicide. Dallas was depressed. But Dear also asked what did Dallas like to do with his spare time? His classmates said that he liked computers. At the time, computers were rare and mysterious. And Dallas did some other mysterious things too.

But then, so did William Deer. For example, when he received an anonymous tip that Dallas used to risk a kind of thrill-seeking dare, lying down on the railroad tracks and letting the trains pass over him, Deer decided that he really needed to put himself in Dallas' position. Literally. I laid down on the railroad ties and tried to imagine myself as Dallas. Was this how Dallas felt? His colleagues screamed a warning. The oncoming train had a cattle catcher. William Deer scrambled off the tracks just in time. No. Couldn't have been a train. If Dallas had been hit by a train, surely his body would

have been found soon enough. It did seem likely that Dallas was dead, but if he was dead, where was the body? William Dear couldn't rid himself of the suspicion that there was something rather different behind Dallas' disappearance. Something fantastically strange. A game. A game that, reportedly, hundreds of students were playing in dark, humid tunnels beneath the campus. A game called Dungeons and Dragons. Now William Dear didn't know what Dungeons and Dragons was. Neither did Dallas' friends. I don't know how to play it, but I do know that you can't play if you're a dumbass.

But what kind of game is it? William Dear received phone calls. There were rumours. He tried to piece together clues. It was difficult to understand. You might find this bafflement odd. Dungeons & Dragons is pretty mainstream these days. You might well have played a game yourself. But in 1979? In 1979, Dungeons & Dragons was pretty much unknown. Dallas' disappearance was going to change all that. As William Dear explained in his subsequent book titled The Dungeon Master, he wanted to get into those mysterious tunnels to search for Dallas' body. In order to pressure Michigan State University into giving access to a celebrity detective

from Texas, Deer frequently spoke to the press about his Dungeons and Dragons hypothesis. The newspapers lapped it up. Tunnels are search for missing student, reported the New York Times, explaining that Dallas might have become lost in the tunnels which carry heat to campus buildings while playing an elaborate version of a bizarre intellectual game called Dungeons and Dragons. If you've noticed there's a lot of vague talk about this game, how it's intellectual and bizarre and you can't play if you're a dumbass, but no specifics. You're right. Dungeons and Dragons was a blank canvas onto which parents, media critics and celebrity

detectives could project any anxiety. In the informational vacuum, rumours grew. Apparently people wore costumes. Apparently a dungeon master would lead quests around the tunnels in the scalding heat and the darkness and the stench. You'd have to put your hand into crevices and there might be rotting calf's liver in there or spaghetti to represent an orc's brain. Or it might be treasure. Apparently there were more than 100 dungeons in the East Lansing area. And if you don't know what that means, don't worry. William Dear didn't either. But he had a theory. Whatever this strange game was, whether it involved dungeons or rotten liver or all sorts of other

things that William Dear didn't understand, it might have something to do with Dallas's disappearance. And since William Deer was an investigator, heck, he was going to investigate. He called a hobby store, got the contact details of one of these so-called Dungeon Masters and offered him 50 bucks to drop everything and initiate deer in the mysteries of Dungeons and Dragons. 60 bucks if it was good. Back in 1979 that was a lot of money. I didn't know what to expect from my Dungeon Master. Would he show up in a Merlin costume When the young man knocked on the door, he and his friend were both wearing jeans, sweaters and sneakers. And rather than leading deer into the tunnels to mine for calf's liver,

he pulled out a pencil and paper, some books and some dice. The adventure was about to begin. Cautionary Tales will be back in a moment. William Dear didn't wear a pointy hat. He didn't have to dip his hand into dark crevices in the tunnels under Michigan State University. He just got have to dip his hand into dark crevices in the tunnels under Michigan State University. He just got into character, pretending to be a wizard named Tor. He was accompanied by a sneak thief named Dan. Nor did Deer visit any tunnels. He just sat at a table, describing what Tor was doing. In his vivid imagination, Tor and Dan got into various

scrapes around a medieval town, scrambling through an escape tunnel pursued by some guards, being attacked by giant rats, being taken prisoner by orcs and finally triumphing, thanks to a combination of bluff and cunning. All this took place in the theatre of the mind, with the dungeon master simply describing what they saw and with the aid of a few dice rolls, whether their schemes succeeded or failed. In fact, the game wasn't nearly as odd as all the rumours suggested. Yes, the stuff about wizards and orcs is a bit strange, but then Star Wars with its Jedi Knights and dark powers and the mysterious force had just been

a smash hit. The animated film of the Lord of the Rings had just been released too. Nothing's more culturally mainstream than wizards and heroes. Dice, pencils, sitting around a table playing let's pretend was all very tame. But William Dear had fun. In fact, he worried that this game of the imagination might just be too much fun. Maybe, for a troubled mind, it could be dangerous. Dallas might actually have begun to live the game, not just to play it. Dungeons and Dragons could have absorbed him so much that his mind had slipped through the fragile barrier between reality and fantasy. If there is a time and a place that the fragile barrier between reality and fantasy first broke down, perhaps it was St Paul, Minnesota

in 1969. Behind this breakdown was a young physics graduate named David Wesley. Wesley was a founder of the Twin Cities Military Miniatures Group, a wargaming club. War games are more realistic descendants of chess, allowing players to re-enact battles from history with model soldiers on a realistic miniature battlefield. Robert Louis Stevenson, the author of Treasure Island was a wargamer, so was HG Wells. War games can be used for serious military training. David Wesley, who was in the Army Reserves himself, was interested in these training exercises where making decisions over a tabletop battlefield might prepare a young officer for the real thing over in

Vietnam. To be useful, a training war game couldn't be restricted to a limited set of moves as in chess. Players should be able to dream up all sorts of tricks and tactics, which meant the game needed a referee to use his or her judgement when a player tried something unusual. The game of war was open ended and unpredictable, just like war itself. In a war game set in 1806 in the fictional Prussian town of Braunstein, David Wesley took this open-endedness to the next level. As with a normal wargame, he put players in charge of Napoleon's French army and the Prussian resistance. But then he assigned rather more

unusual roles. Bonplayer, for example, was given the role of the Chancellor of Braunstein's University. What could he do? Well, anything. He didn't command any troops, but he could rally the students and urge them to join the resistance, or he could challenge another player to a duel, perhaps over the affections of a lady. Another player's character started in jail. Any of these players could attempt anything. Wesley, as referee, had to improvise. The experimental game was a chaotic series of whispered conferences between the players and Wesley the referee. It took ages and the French and the Prussians never even fired a shot. Not so much a war game as a phony war game. Wesley felt like

it had been a flop, but then the players told him they loved it. One of those players was Dave Arneson, who seized Westlis' idea with both hands. In a follow up game set in a banana republic, Arneson started as a student revolutionary but managed to convince the other players he was working for the CIA. He ran rings around them not by rolling dice or pushing pieces around the map, but by acting the part and bluffing his way to success. What Wesley and Arneson and the group had invented together was a strange combination of a classical war game, a military training exercise and an improvised acting class. It came to be known as a role playing game.

The first commercial role playing game, designed in part by Dave Arneson, could have been about Napoleonic battles or pretending to be in the CIA, but it wasn't. It was about heroes and wizards exploring the tunnels beneath a medieval castle. It was called, you guessed it, Dungeons and Dragons. And it was Dungeons and Dragons that William Dear feared had driven Dallas Egbert into some kind of delusional state where he imagined he was a wizard. So does the barrier between reality and fantasy break down in a role playing game? Well, maybe a bit. But the same is true for novels or movies. I don't watch horror movies, I don't like the way they scare me. I cried uncontrollably

at the end of Cinema Paradiso. Did the barrier between reality and fantasy break down at that moment? I suppose it did, but there's nothing shameful or dangerous about that. And yet, there was something different about these role-playing games. Something that drove America into a state of moral panic. Maybe it was the fact that, as I suppose I've just demonstrated, they are quite hard to describe. But for many people, it must have been the context in which they first heard of the game. Dungeons and Dragons. Isn't that the game that poor kid was playing when he died? Newspapers

such as the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner tried to get their heads around what the game actually was and how people played it. Words such as cult and bizarre were often used. But the publicity fuelled demand. The game briefly appears in ET, which was released in 1982, and at the same time, but less favourably, in Mazes and Monsters, a TV movie inspired by the giddy media reports about Dallas Egbert's disappearance. Tom Hanks and his friends get caught up in a deadly game of fantasy until they take it too far. In Mazes and Monsters, a young Tom Hanks plays a teenager who completely loses his grip on reality while playing the

game. The other thing that happened in 1982 was that a young man named Irving Pulling killed himself. His mother, Patricia Pulling, was convinced that Dungeons and Dragons was involved. Indeed, she sued Irving's school principal, claiming that Irving's suicide was a response to having a curse put on his character. Patricia Pulling even appeared on 60 Minutes. The creators of Dungeons and Dragons complained that 60 Minutes had misrepresented two other teenage suicides as being connected to the game despite letters from the bereaved mothers

saying otherwise. In her grief, Patricia Pulling described Dungeons and Dragons as a fantasy role-playing game which uses demonology, witchcraft, voodoo, murder, rape, blasphemy, suicide, assassination, insanity, sex perversion, homosexuality, prostitution, satanic-type rituals, gambling, barbarism, cannibalism, sadism, desecration, demon summoning, necromantics, divination and other teachings. Now a roleplaying game can describe all sorts of activities, just like a novel or movie. But Harry Potter uses witchcraft and not many people lose sleep over Harry Potter. On the other hand, people seemed willing to believe anything about this mysterious game. There are sixes involved in the pieces of the game, explained one religious critic of

Dungeons and Dragons, the number of the beast and all that, but I think he was referring to dice. But it wasn't just the hardline evangelicals who worried about Dungeons and Dragons. In 1984, a baffled police chief blamed a teenage suicide on the game. My understanding is that once you reach a certain point where you are the master, your only way out is death. This claim is analogous to saying that once you become a tennis umpire, the only way to quit is to kill yourself. It makes no sense. But if you know nothing at all about the game, you don't realise that it makes

no sense. In 1988, Tipa Gore, then wife of Al Gore, claimed that Dungeons and Dragons had been linked to nearly 50 teenage suicides and homicides. But there are thousands of teenage suicides each year. Tens of thousands over the course of the 1980s as a whole. Dungeons and Dragons was becoming a popular game, of course. Some of those suicide victims would have played the game, just as others would have listened to heavy metal or been vegetarians. But people who should have known better took role-playing games all too seriously. In 1990, the US Secret Service took the panic to the next level. They raided the headquarters of one role-playing games publisher and confiscated their computers. The Secret Service had

become convinced that a role-playing game about futuristic cyborgs and hackers was in fact a practical guide for computer crime. This was beyond odd. The game included rules for hacking computers by plugging your brain directly into the net and uploading your consciousness. It is a technique that seems unlikely to bear fruit for any aspiring hacker, the US Secret Service were unmoved, right up to the point at which they were successfully sued. Remind me, who exactly is confused about the boundary between reality and fantasy? From the vantage point of today, it's easy to laugh. But perhaps we shouldn't feel

quite so smug. Back in February 2019, parents were anxiously warning each other about a new threat to their children. That tweet received tens of thousands of retweets, as did other similar warnings. But as with the Dungeons and Dragons panic, the details were a bit vague. There was an unsettling picture of a creepy puppet. One claim was that somehow this puppet, Momo, would use WhatsApp messages to deliver its deadly instructions. Another was that children's television programmes had been hacked, although what exactly that meant wasn't clear. Schools sent out messages of warning. So did some police forces. So

did newspapers. Even the BBC. In each case, the evidence that there was a problem was simply that others were reporting that there was a problem. Except that schools even gathered children together to warn them about Momo, which was predictably absolutely terrifying for the children. You can see where this is going. There is no Momo puppet. That creepy image is from a Tokyo art gallery's exhibition about ghosts. There were no hacked television programs. There have been no credible reports of any Momo related suicides. I'm tempted to add there is no Momo challenge. But that wouldn't be quite right. The Momo challenge is very real. But it exists not as a deadly game shared among children, but as a panicky myth shared

among their parents. What we're really talking about here is the anxiety of parents who don't really understand what their kids are into and feel bad about it. That's just as true today as it was a generation ago, when the panic was not about WhatsApp, but about wizards. Courtianary Tales will return shortly. In 1985, the cultural critic Neil Postman published an influential book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, in which he lamented the effect of television on the intellectual, cultural and political life of the United States.

Adapting an idea from his teacher, Marshall McLuhan, Postman argued that the medium is the metaphor, that any communications medium from the spoken word to the written word to primetime TV subtly influenced the kind of ideas that could be communicated. Fifty years ago, movies and TV favoured good looks and strong, simple stories, and a former cowboy actor, Ronald Reagan, was the perfect fit for the time. It's easy to read postman as a profit of inevitable cultural decline, with each new medium stupider than the last. But decline is not inevitable. Consider how TV drama has been changed by the availability first of affordable box sets and then on-demand streaming.

TV producers would have to assume that people would miss episodes and so would make simple predictable episodic comedies and soap operas. Now, writers and directors can reasonably expect that people will catch up on any episodes they missed, or even binge watch an entire season in a weekend. The result? Longer, more complex story arcs and characters who grow over time. This isn't the result of some sudden cultural hunger for more sophisticated storytelling. A subtle difference to the medium also changes the metaphor. Movies invite us to value beauty and classic story arcs. Streaming TV drama valorises complex plots and character development, and reality TV thrives on attention seeking and treachery.

So then what is the underlying metaphor of a role playing game? The games demand imagination. They're collaborative, you can't really play by yourself. They're active rather than passive. If you sit back and watch, nothing happens. You need to create, not just observe the creativity of others. A collaborative, imaginative and actively creative pastime doesn't sound so bad to me. After all, we're constantly being told of the importance of creativity, the creative class, the creative economy, or simply the need for every child to be creative in school. And yet, when we actually see some creativity, we can't quite comprehend what we're looking at. Back in 1979, Dungeons and Dragons seemed to be a bit too creative for William Deer

and the journalists and commentators who were intrigued by his theory. The story became bigger than Dallas Egbert himself, and the question of what happened to Dallas was forgotten, long after the panic remained. Mazes and Monsters for example, the movie in which Tom Hanks' character becomes utterly delusional, stabbing someone, hallucinating monsters and trying to leap from the top of the World Trade Centre, is often thought to be loosely based on Dallas' disappearance. Did you want to like do it here? Kate, why can't I remember? Let's just say that in this case, the fantasy and the reality are a very long way apart.

Reading William Deer's breathless book, The Dungeon Master, it's easy to be carried away with the tales of gadgets and stakeouts and lying down in front of trains, but when you have time to stop and read carefully, the story becomes a lot more mundane. When I first heard about this steam tunnels beneath Michigan State University, I imagined students exploring inside huge steam-filled pipes. But when I looked up steam tunnels on Wikipedia, I was redirected to an entry on Utility Corridors, which is a rather more prosaic name. The corridors contain hot pipes, but nobody gets inside the pipes themselves.

William Deer describes the tunnels as stinking, hellish and deadly. Lieutenant Bill Wardell of the MSU Campus Police told the Washington Post, They're hot and dirty, but not as bad as he portrays them. Utility corridors have existed in various universities since the 1920s, and students have been messing around in them long before Dungeons and Dragons existed. A team of men, including William Deer, explored the tunnels thoroughly. Dallas wasn't down there, but he had been missing for weeks. And it was increasingly hard to see what rolling dice around a gaming table had to do with that.

Dallas Egbert's parents seemed to publicly accept William Deer's media-friendly theory about a Dungeons and Dragons game gone wrong, but Deer's investigations brought more straightforward possibilities to light. Dallas had a drug habit, so perhaps a drug deal had gone awry, and Dallas was also a member of the Campus Organization for Gay Students. William Dear mused about how what he called the gays might somehow have been involved in Dallas' disappearance. More likely, Dallas' sexuality simply compounded his risk of self-harm. Even today, in our more enlightened times, gay teenagers are at substantially greater risk of suicide. But William Dear made the Dungeons and Dragons

theory seem so compelling. The case ended as it began, with a phone call. Mr. Deer, this is Dallas. And then Dallas burst into tears. Soon enough he was reunited with his parents and William Deer was fending off a pack of news hounds desperate for the scoop. It was simple enough. Dallas had indeed been severely depressed and he had indeed tried to kill himself. Fortunately, he'd not succeeded. But he had run away. When he called William Deer it was from all the way down in Louisiana, leading Deer and his crew of elite operatives to fly over in his private plane. They affect what Deer describes as a tense rescue, but which, on a second reading, is simply two grown men knocking on the door of a rented room to find a tearful teenage

boy ready to go home. Later, Dallas told De Dear the story over a hamburger. Apparently he did like to hang out in the steam tunnels. I could go down there and nobody would bother me. And he also enjoyed playing Dungeons and Dragons. When I played a character, I was that character. I didn't bring along all my personal problems with me. It's a terrific way to escape. And while the media clung on to the tale of a boy who'd been lost to a world of mazes and monsters, and evangelical campaigners warned of satanic rituals, and Tipa Gore feared an epidemic of D&D related suicide, the truth was simpler and harder to bear. Dallas disappeared because he ran away, he ran away because he

was suicidally unhappy. Some young people are. And I'm sorry to tell you that Dallas did not recover from his depression. He took his own life a year later. But the narrative had moved on. An isolated and depressed young man had been largely forgotten. I have a confession to make. I too am a role player. I can't imagine you're terribly shocked. But I love these games. To me, there is important a creative outlet as writing my books or this podcast. And not everyone gets to publish a book or present a podcast with respected actors and its own composer. But anyone can be creative in a game. I learned to play in the middle of the satanic panic of the 1980s.

I remember having to have a long conversation with a senior teacher at my school who was concerned that the game might open me up to evil influences. To his credit, he listened and changed his mind. And I'm still playing games, sometimes with the same people I went to school with, some of my oldest and closest friends. My hobby is a pastime that's as creative as drawing, writing or drama, that's as collaborative as a team sport, that involves no drinks stronger than coffee, no mind-altering chemicals more potent than whatever it is they use to flavour Doritos, and alas, no sex at all. The kids tell me that these days, Dungeons and Dragons is cool. Maybe.

I'm just thankful that despite everything, a hobby has survived and flourished. William Dear has survived and flourished too, penning works such as OJ is Innocent and I Can Prove It and appearing in the TV documentary Alien Autopsy, Fact or Fiction. He was interested in the entertainment business back in the 1980s too. He had been urging Dallas and his family to work with him on a movie about the case. But as Dallas's mother, Anna, said, It was never all that exciting. He just got on a bus and went as far as his money would take him.

Yet when William Dear told the story, it was an unforgettable tale. The fragile barrier between reality and fantasy indeed. The key sources for this episode are Of Dyson Men by David Ewalt and Playing at the World by John Peterson and of course, The Dungeon Master by William Deer. For a full list of references, see timharford.com. Cautionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Ryan Dilley and Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music are the work of Pascal Wise. Julia Barton edited the scripts. Starring in this series of cautionary tales are Helena Bonham Carter and Jeffrey Wright, alongside Nazar Aldarazi, Ed Gochen, Melanie Guthridge, Rachel Hanshaw, Cobner Holbrook-Smith, Greg Lockett, Naseya Munro and Rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't

have been possible without the work of Mia LeBelle, Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fane, John Schnarz, Carly Migliori, Eric Sandler, Emily Rostock, Maggie Taylor, Daniela LeCarn and Maya Koenig. Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review. Music