Friday, August 20, 2010

Nerd for your thoughts- Mazes, Monsters, and Madness

If anyone has seen the most recent of the Spoony One, he did a review of the 1982 made for TV movie Mazes and Monsters. The movie is a propaganda piece that shows that RPGs like Dungeons and Dragons can in fact affect your sanity and make you believe that your in a fantasy world and you will harm others believing that they are monsters. Now I don’t have to go on how that it is a ridiculous premise, and only was made to fuel the fire of fear that everyone should be afraid of gamers. However I’m going to go into the idea of diving into what filled this hysteria and giving a proper answer to those worries.
I know most people are over the fear but there are still thing in the world that make people worried. Remember Jack Thompson may be disbarred, but he is still alive and working. So he’s probably still working. Then your also have the worrying Christian mothers who ‘try’ to ‘spread’ the ‘good word’ but are just forcing old stereotypes and making their children, well that’s another rant for another time (Watch George Carlin and he’ll say everything I think). So yeah there are still people who believe in these unreasonable fears. However, the question then comes to why? Why do these fears keep coming up? Well lets split these into different parts and see what the fears are.

1. Profiling
Yeah, this may be a bit of a cheat, but when you think about it is probably one of the major reasons why these fears maybe still around. Profiling is when a person, or a group of people look at something and basing that thing on shier appearance. Many people do profile things all the time and base decisions on that profile. Now when a person grabs an old book of Dungeons and Dragons and sees a demon on the cover, well some may sort this sort of thing in with El Diablo and other evil occult practices. This is the biggest load of horseshit in the world. Anybody who’s played a game knows that usually you’re fighting against evil things and are trying to make the world a good place. Plus, anyone who thinks that Dungeons and Dragons leads to Satanism is complete nonsense. Imagine that someone tells you that football (not the associations of football the game itself) is a gateway to the entire world (or Country) to war, you would laugh at them and tell them that complete bullshit. It’s a game, recreation, a pastime if you will, and what happens in the game stays in the game, it doesn’t reflect the real world at all. There are more other reasons for things to happen such as political debates, unease hatred towards a group of people, and dirty underhanded schemes against one another. To round it back to Dungeons and Dragons, its not the game that effects people, it’s the person’s own problems that lead them to do bad things.

2. Reinforcement
This follows more or less that it’s not the person who thinks for themselves if the object is evil, but a group of people who decree without any prerequisite, knowledge of object, or a scientific proof, but just say its evil. Why is it evil? because Oprah said it was, because the talking heads on the television said it was, because your preacher said it was. It’s a sick mob mentality that promotes itself around hating this one thing and mingling with others that hate it as well. As soon as you know it there’s a giant group that has form and only reason that they are together is due to their hatred for something. A bit of an overstatement probably, but when you look at the world there are a bunch of groups that have done that. Bringing to Dungeons and Dragons again, lets look at Patty Pulling. Who’s Patty Pulling? Well she’s the founder of the lovely heart warming group known as Bothered Against Dungeons and Dragons (or BADD). She formed group after the death of her son committed suicide. The son was an avid D&D player and through such logic as most normal people would (meaning dumb asses) She file a wrongful death Lawsuit against both the Principal of the School and TSR (the then owners of D&D). However, smart people prevailed and the lawsuit was dropped. However Mrs. Pulling didn’t take to this and started up BADD, and started publishing works that promoted D&D as (and I’m quoting here) “A fantasy role-playing game which uses Demonology, Wicca, voodoo, murder, rape, blasphemy, child molestation, suicide, assassination, insanity, sexual perversion, sodomy, prostitution, Satanism, gambling, barbarism, cannibalism, Sadomasochism, Desecration of Christianity, Summoning malevolent Spirits, Necromancy, Satanic divination and other strange immoral teachings.” (So what this person is saying is D&D promotes butt sex?) Anyways this is just ridiculous as well. It feels like a bunch of hens Chirping away in a farm field… that may have been to sexist. But anyway the point is that most of these fears are brought up do to stupidity, ignorance, and a mob mentality. As Tommy Lee Jones put it in MIB “Person is smart, people are dumb, panicking, stupid creatures and you know it.” Well said K, well said.

3. (Final reason) Tragedy
Now when you look at the fear and hatred towards anything, there is always some tragedy involved. It’s another dumb human mentality that must lock on an object and say that that’s the only reason why the world sucks and if it dies the world will be a better place. I hate to bring up Batman Forever (gah that movie did suck) but Bruce (why fucking Val Kilmer?) has a point when he said that sadness begets sadness and more suffering. Vengeance is never a good relief method, its great in movies, BUT THAT’S NOT THE REAL WORLD!!! Going back to Patty Pulling on this one, what did start her ‘crusade’ against D&D? Well the death of her son Irvin (I don’t think it helped matters that named him Irvin). So yeah sadness embark many down the path of revenge and madness. Giving another example is the death of James Dallas Egbert. This was in the late seventies. Young Egbert was a sixteen-year-old-prodigy, tried killed himself, but didn’t ran away. The Private Detective in the case was asked by Egbert to not reveal the true reason why he tried to kill himself. Thus the blame was forced onto D&D, Egbert a year killed himself, four years later the Detective release to the public the true story behind Egbert in a book called “The Dungeon Master”. Telling that it wasn’t D&D that brought him to this Demise but due to stress, depression, and the fact that he was a sixteen-year-old genius that was forced into the real world too soon. A depressing tale and depressing after effect, the only thing that this illustrates is that people are way to easy to point the finger at someone else and say that its their fault the world sucks.

So now that we’ve discussed the reasons why the hate keeps following on lets think about how we can stop matters from this. This I’ll keep short and simple due to the fact this is long enough as it is. The first way is knowledge. the only way that you can know that something is evil is if you research it (the way you research it may differ between person). The second way is independent thinking. I always hated the phrase “Go with the Flow” and the incident up here brings up how that’s a bad thing. Last but not least, blame the man who did it. I know this may sound a bit hypocritical in a way, but when you get right down to it it’s usually a person’s fault that the tragedy happened. Did the gun kill him, no the man who pulled the gun did it. Was it D&D that made him commit suicide, no only he is to blame for his suicide and no one else. We were given Free will for a reason (yes I’m catholic get over it) so we can make our own decision and reasonable thoughts. It never is left up to the roll of the dice.

P.S If someone has already said this, I apologize for repeating. However I felt it was necessary.

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