Origins

Last weekend I and several friends attended Origins, a gaming convention in Columbus Ohio. In addition to discovering that it was not as big a culture shock as I was expecting, I also, as part of the gaming podcast I am involved in, got to sit down and chat with Mike Stackpole, noted Science Fiction author and RPG contributor. I found this especially exciting, as I had an opportunity to ask him about the Pulling Report.

I've long been a player and advocate of Role-Playing games, and even though I do not play as often as I'd like, I still keep up with the hobby, more or less. I have never bought the line of reasoning that equated Dungeons and Dragons with a path to Satanism, even before I started playing in high school. I started playing D&D in 1991, and by then it was mostly out of the woods insofar as Satanic claims were concerned, partially (I like to think) because of Mike's comprehensive defense of the hobby and surgical deconstruction of it's most vitriolic detractor's criticisms.

(At this point I must point out that my parents did not wish me to become involved with the game when I started, but not because of the Satanic scare surrounding it; they were afraid my grades would slip if I started playing, which happened, but not terribly so.)

While we spoke mainly about the state of podcasting, gaming, and gaming podcasts, I did have a chance to ask him if he thought the gaming industry was out of the woods when it came to the right-wing religious nut-jobs, and his answer was pretty much yes. Gaming has become so mainstream, partially thanks to the D20 label, that almost everybody knows someone who plays, and can immediately see claims of Satanic conspiracy directed towards them to be pretty much false.

The preponderance of girl gamers has also helped mainstream the hobby, I think. At the very least, they're helping the stereotype of the unwashed basement dwelling gamer nerd become less common. Not that they're in any danger of becoming extinct, mind you; Origins was full of them. The presence of women, though, may have encouraged more of them to bathe than would normally otherwise have.

~J