Slaying the demons of 'Dungeons & Dragons' — theverge.com

Twenty three years ago I left my just-purchased copy of the Dungeons & Dragons Rules Cyclopedia in math class. I went back for it at the end of the day, and found that my teacher wanted to have a Very Serious Talk about D&D. I was primed for this discussion, ready to fight. I’d been an avid reader of Dragon magazine, which in those days was filled with letters from soldiers in Iraq for Operation Desert Shield. They were writing in defense of D&D — how it taught them leadership, teamwork, even a little math. Most of all, they were pushing back against the moral panic that D&D had inspired in the ’80s. The Christian right had been campaigning against this role-playing game: it was a danger to the youth of America; the weak among them lost the ability to distinguish between fantasy and reality.

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