Recently, I received an email from an Attic visitor who was going through some abuse from religious nuts about a game he plays: Magic - The Gathering. In case you've been living in a cave for the past decade, Magic is a game played with decks of cards, pitting players against each other in battles of (duh) magic. There are literally thousands of cards in the many decks available, and it's an intense, strategy-driven game.
As should come as no surprise, the "magic" aspect of it has come under fire from closed-minded religious zealots who see it as a horrid game of casting spells and summoning evil creatures. I know how he feels. I experienced the same thing when I was younger with a different game: Dungeons & Dragons.
And in case you've been in a cave for the last two decades, D&D is what's known as a role-playing game. You basically take on the role of a character going through adventures in a fantasy setting. Like being an actor in an improvisational story.
This game, too, got hit hard by ignorant people. There was even a TV movie starring a young Tom Hanks called Mazes and Monsters. It was about a group of kids who were into this game (quite obviously based on D&D), but they were more into it than anyone I'd ever known or even heard of. I mean, they dressed up in costumes, went out into the wilderness to enact weird scenarios… Really excessive stuff. And in the end, Tom Hanks' character goes insane.
This friggin' movie was responsible for countless parents being against their children playing a game that, I think, was the best thing to hit the gaming scene ever.
Like Magic, it taught strategy. But it taught way more: creativity, problem-solving, personal interaction skills, etc. An amazing thing, the role-playing game. Yet small-minded idiots will always find something wrong with it.
In the case of D&D, it was (of course) the inclusion of demons and monsters and gods of other pantheons that raised the ire of parents. But it could always be something else. Violence, for example.
People will always ridicule and fear things they don't understand. D&D was a game that was played without a board and had no "winner" at the end. Parents were clueless about this (my dad included). It made no sense. All they saw were a bunch of kids sitting around a table, sucking down pizza and soda pop, rolling dice, and talking about casting spells and disembowling orcs with bastard swords. Just like at the beginning of the movie, E.T. (Appropriate, since that's what they were playing.)
I don't blame them for being baffled. But I do blame those who condemn it without trying to understand it. And is it any surprise that those with the loudest condemnations are the religious nuts?
To them, games like Magic and Dungeons & Dragons are just one step shy of holding a black mass to summon the dark lord himself. But then, that's because they're ignorant.
