Sunday, 9 September 2007
It is like playing roulette with the devil and a fully loaded gun
No, not really.
But I caught a title surfing the digital cable channels yesterday that was evocative of such a thought: that as a player of Dungeons and Dragons I was going to “lose touch with reality, enter an inescapable cult of lost children, at any moment ready to slit my wrists at the emotional loss of a ‘dead’ player character.” That’s quoted, not because it is a quote, but because it is the thought left by Rona Jaffe’s Mazes and Monsters in the minds of so many viewers and readers of that, now, pulp fiction.
I didn’t get to watch it, so I bought it! On Amazon.
The made-for-TV movie stars a very young Tom Hanks that loses the, apparently tenuous, connection with reality playing Mazes and Monsters. M&M is depicted as a D&D like game, only the player’s game master has kicked it up a notch by introducing a LARP element to the player's regular sessions. At least that’s how I remember it.
There is little doubt that the MSM loves a good story about innocence lost at the hands of demonic cults, unfortunately it is not the true story that M&M is loosely based on, the story of James Dallas Egbert III.
I won’t repeat what is told so well here and here. Instead, I’ll just laugh; to myself at the hysteria engine of the MSM and to the more laughable idea that I’m on a path to hell because of my hobby.
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