This Slenderman stuff in the news is giving me 80s-era Dungeons and Dragons deja vu...

BLOT: (04 Jun 2014 - 08:54:40 PM)

This Slenderman stuff in the news is giving me 80s-era Dungeons and Dragons deja vu...

If you were a roleplayer in the 80s and early 90s, you probably heard crap about how Dungeons & Dragons causes you to confuse reality and fiction, how you are driven by your dungeon master to seek out rank and fame no matter what, how there were these kids that went on a murderous rampage because they wanted power from a demon and the more they stabbed {their mom|their friend|some stranger} they more they would get, and—most repetitively—how the whole thing would send you to Hell. Most of the RPers I knew were Christian, most were fairly stable, were kind, were smart, tended to have no issues with intelligent judgement. Yet, I had a classmate once turn me into a teacher just for having some roleplaying books at school (the teacher was confused why he should care) and had to endure people citing movies like Mazes and Monsters at me.

By the late 90s, few cared, and in the past decade or so, RPGs have entered into something like the edge of mainstream. It was a joy to give a report in college, my first big research assignment, about how RPGers had lower suicide rates, how they tended to handle emotional stress better, had better support groups in their friends, and showed great creativity. Not all of RPers are perfect, sure, and some do have some pretty wide emotional problems, but that's just true of everyone.

That's why reading about how some pre-teen girls blame Slenderman for them trying to kill a friend, it brings on deja vu. Stuff like the way the article refers to him as a demonic, mythological creature. The way they cite stuff like the girls calling him the leader of the Creepypasta, like that means any damned thing. The way they give a sense of credence to their claims that they could become proxies by killing their friend. How they ignore, mostly, the origin of the character. While many reporters seem to be reasonable here—see another article that goes into actual research—it just brings back some memories of the good old days of talking about fighting dragons as a force of Good (capital-G), and having people wonder what that might mean about the state of my soul...

Ah, good times.

OTHER BLOTS THIS MONTH: June 2014