The Gaming Advocacy Encyclopedia

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The Gaming Advocacy Encyclopedia

Entries are being added constantly. If you find that a topic you are interested in isn't listed, please let me know.

Cruel Doubt: Made-for-television movie in which a copy of TSR's AD&D Player's Handbook was featured as a prop with altered pages, making the book appear to be more of an inspiration to the crime. According to accounts of the film, the book was embellished with different artwork to feature a picture of a character with clothing that matched that of one of the show's killers, as well as other illustrations that were extremely occultic and sinister in nature.

Dear, William: Private investigator who wrote The Dungeon Master, the story of the life and death of James Dallas Egbert III. It is interesting to note that Dear changed the selling strategy for his book, shifting it's advertising focus from D&D to drugs, as sales of the book began to dwindle.

Egbert III, James Dallas: College student whose story became the first gaming-related urban legend. Egbert, a manic depressive, hid in the steam tunnels beneath his college campus to kill himself with an overdose of drugs, not to play any form of RPG. This act spawned the oft-heard legend that gamers play their games in steam tunnels, sewers, and abandoned mines and caves. One year after the incident, and even longer since he had last played D&D, Egbert killed himself with a handgun. Egbert's story was chronicled in The Dungeon Master, a book by investigator William Dear.

Fairley, Caleb: Pennsylvania youth who, in 1995, took the lives of a young mother and her baby. After a thorough search of his home, police found a collection of AD&D and Vampire books, as well as a collection of Magic cards. The anti-gaming media focus was on Vampire, despite the fact that Fairley's crime had no 'vampiric' elements whatsoever. At the murder trial, a Vampire t-shirt was submitted as evidence, despite the fact that Fairley wasn't wearing it when he committed the crime; newspaper accounts mention a bloody paisley-patterned shirt that was worn during the act.

Ferrell, Rod: Teen who believed he was a vampire, started a "vampire clan," and murdered the parents of Heather Wendorf, one of his "clan members," in November of 1996. The media swarmed over the vampire angle of the story, despite the fact that the Wendorf's bodies showed "no sign of vampiric activity"; both were bludgeoned to death, and neither had been drained of any blood. An "occult marking" found on both of the bodies turned out to be a letter "V" with seven marks around it, one for each of the clan members. Ferrell was sentenced to death in early 1999.

Gore, Tipper: Wife of vice president Al Gore and founder of the Parent's Musical Resource Center (PMRC), a watchdog group for popular music. In her book Raising PG Kids In An X-Rated World, she lists D&D as one of the many occultic fads that teens of the day have involved themselves. The book also listed contact information for B.A.D.D. and Pat Pulling.

Hobgoblin: A novel written by John Coyne in the shadow of Mazes & Monsters, in which one of the members of a gaming group begins killing the others one by one. Printed sometime in the early 1980s.

Honor Thy Mother: Made-for-television movie. In it, a "phony" copy an AD&D manual was featured as a prop. The cover of the manual was unlike anything TSR has ever put out for AD&D, and while reading it, an investigator claims to find a reference to "extra points for multiple hits," an obvious fabrication by the writers, as AD&D contains no rules that are even similar to such a description.

Jesse: NBC television series starring Christina Applegate as a single mother attempting to get her G.E.D. In an episode that aired in February of 1999, Jesse goes out on a date with her math teacher to an "exclusive club." As it turns out, the teacher is an avid D&D player, and has brought her to a gaming club meeting. The ten-minute segment pokes a lot of fun at gamers, but leaves out any references to Satanism, witchcraft, or the occult. (The best part: when Jesse calls a friend to tell her she's at a D&D game, the friend yells "Oh crap! Get out of there!")

Mazes & Monsters: A novel by Rona Jaffe, later turned into a made-for-TV movie starring Tom Hanks. In the movie, a bright young college student (Hanks) loses his hold on reality while playing a role-playing game. Gaming is depicted as an obsessive hobby, played by social outcasts. One of the most humorous scenes of the film happens when Jay Jay's character jumps into a pit to collect what he thinks is treasure, only to find it filled with sharp spikes. "Why didn't you use your sonar?" chides another player (Sonar? Were they playing dolphins?). Released to video as "Dungeons And Dragons" (!) in the late 80's by Film Ventures. Recently, I found a copy (with the original title, by Front Row Entertainment) in the budget video rack of my local Suncoast Video. Both videos, for obvious reasons, have Hanks' face plastered on the cover.

Pulling, Irving "Bink": Son of Patricia Pulling, founder of Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons (B.A.D.D.). Pulling committed suicide with his mother's revolver not long after returning home from school on June 9^th, 1982. His mother was quick to blame his suicide on a D&D session that occurred that day in which his character allegedly received a curse. None of the other players present at the game remember such a curse. Pulling faced a lot of problems that could have been contributing factors: he had troubles fitting in at school and couldn’t find a running partner in his bid for school office, and was known to have written "Life is a joke" on a school blackboard not long before his suicide. Weeks before his death, nineteen rabbits that he had been raising and a housecat were found disembowled.

Pulling, Patricia: Mother of Irving "Bink" Pulling and founder of Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons (B.A.D.D.). Pulling was infamous for her selective reporting techniques; that is, when displaying an article from a newspaper or magazine, she would remove sections of text that did not agree with her point of view and shift the order of the paragraphs in the article. This would often alter the original intention of the article drastically. After the suicide of her son, "Bink", Pulling devoted her life to spreading the word of the imagined evils behind gaming. In this time, she founded B.A.D.D., sued (and lost against) Bink's school and TSR for wrongful death, and solicited the Surgeon General to put a warning label on D&D, claiming that it could cause it’s players to commit suicide. She also wrote "Interviewing Techniques For Adolescents," a primer for police officers who are dealing with crimes that involve role-playing games. In it, she lists ESP (extra sensory perception) as a occultic ability, despite the fact that she claimed to have had a premonition of Bink's death as she approached her house the day of his suicide. Pulling died of cancer in October of 1997.

Radecki, Thomas: Founder of NCTV (National Coalition for Television Violence) who once used quoted material from Rona Jaffe's novel Mazes & Monsters as if it was real and factual.

Sellers, Sean: Murderer who killed a convenience store clerk in 1985, and his parents in 1986. Sellers' attorneys tried several defenses to avoid the death penalty; the classic "D&D made me do it" defense, the Satanism defense, and later, the Multiple Personality Disorder defense. All of them failed. Sellers was executed in February of 1999. He was the first person executed for a crime committed at the age of 16 in the last forty years.

The X-Files: Popular Fox television show that has had it's share of D&D references... usually in good taste. One of the members of Mulder's contact group The Lone Gunmen is a gamer, and a couple of episodes have depicted him and some friends playing D&D for money (how exactly is this done?). In one of the best episodes of the show, "Rosie Chung's From Outer Space," a UFO fanatic tells Chung: "I didn't play Dungeons & Dragons for all those years and not learn something about courage."

This document is a work in progress, and is in no way complete as you see it here. If I have left something out, or missed an important point, it is imperitave that you, the reader, bring it to my attention. All contributors will receive credit for their contributions at the end of the document.

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