"I don't know why I can't remember," Robbie said. "There's blood all over my knife."
     "What knife?" Kate asked. It occurred to her that he might be thinking of the sword in the game, and perhaps there was no bloody weapon at all.
     "My Boy Scout knife," Robbie said. "And there's blood on my clothes, but it isn't mine."

- Mazes and Monsters by Rona Jaffe

Pretty much since the beginning people have been wondering if role-playing games are dangerous. Most of these people are outside the hobby and have little or no idea what role-playing games are about or how they work. The nutty claims of these people were always easy to laugh off.

Well, maybe laugh off isn't the word. James Dallas Egbert III, whose disappearance was blamed on RPGs, eventually committed suicide. The late Pat Pulling's son also committed suicide. Tragic, but that has nothing to do with role-playing games aside from the negative opinion generated by and for the general population.

The anti-RPG movement enjoyed an upswing of sorts in the early eighties with the publication Jaffe's Mazes and Monsters and the subsequent TV movie. Actually the movie probably had more influence that the book. It starred a young Tom Hanks as Robbie delivering the lines above with the kind of overacting they hand out Oscars for.

Lately the anti-RPG sentiment diminished considerably. Sure there's still the occasional fundamentalist minister who'll preach about the evils of role-playing games or the web site but it's no longer as hot a topic as it might have been back then.

I did a search the other day for "dungeons" and "dragons" just to see what would come up. The search engine found a religious site with some anti-D&D material, but when I clicked the link, the anti-D&D material was gone. I guess RPGs just aren't a hot topic anymore. I guess they'd rather blame computer games for all of the world's problems. As they should. Commander Keen pisses me off.

Besides, it doesn't matter. We all know role-playing games are safe.

I spent a little time on John Tynes' web site today. Tynes, in case you didn't know, is a game designer. Among other things, he created the wonderful game Puppetland. Since I liked that game so much, I decided to check out what else he had. On his site is a game called Powerkill. (It's also available in the hard copy version of Puppetland from Hogshead Press.) Powerkill isn't a game in it's own right but an add-on to any role-playing game to tell what really happens during the game. For example, if the game was a typical dungeon-bashing free-for-all, then the reality was the players went to a housing project and murdered the people they found there, taking their stuff.

The question posed by Tynes is: Are role-playing games really good for you? At least this style of play, not necessarily dungeon adventures, but many of the actions performed and encouraged in many games are criminal at worst or have a big ethical, moral question mark at worst.

It's jarring getting this notion from a game designer rather than person outside the hobby. Worse since the points he makes, the questions he asks actually have bearing. He's not talking about going crazy, thinking you're your character and slaying people you think are goblins with your Boy Scout knife. He's talking about acting out negative behavior and having it positively reinforced. Eventually this will bleed into a person's everyday life, especially impressionable young people who tend to play RPGs and may not have fully developed their social/ethical skills yet.

Yesterday I thought role-playing games were safe. Today I'm not so sure.

Actually this is an age-old question. Does art influence life?

The wife dragged me to that movie Quills about the Marquis de Sade (and we also have the DVD now...sigh). For those who don't know, the Marquis spent his life in a mental institution writing extreme fiction of a sexual nature. So extreme, in fact, that the term "sadism" was coined after him. It has been an ongoing debate for centuries over whether the Marquis' writings inspired actual sex crimes or not. It's a question with no real answer. The real question is if it's possible that one rape will be caused by the writings of the Marquis de Sade is it worth banning the books and deny everyone else the pleasure of reading them?

This doesn't parallel Tynes' Powerkill exactly. He doesn't say we should ban role-playing games, but he does suggest we think about how we play and what we do when we play. That play a catharsis for these sorts of activities is not the best thing for people to be doing for entertainment.

I have committed countless acts of cold-blooded murder in the name of fun. Sure they were only orcs, but does that make it right? Especially the attitude I had about it. "We could use some extra cash. Let's got kill some orcs." Egad! Killing orcs is the fantasy RPG equivalent of mowing lawns on the side and I had as much concern for those creatures as I would a blade of grass.

It's chilling. Chilling to think I or anyone else is capable of such casual disregard for life, human or otherwise. Granted in the role-playing context it's mostly dice and numbers, but still...

So the question remains. Is John Tynes full of shit?

I suspect that like the Marquis de Sade there is no easy answer to this question. To his credit, Tynes doesn't suggest there is. What he does suggest is that we think about what we're doing when we play.