Speaker 1: Pushkin, as all dungeon masters and adventurers know. Twenty twenty
Speaker 1: four is the fiftieth anniversary of Dungeons and Dragons, the
Speaker 1: first commercial role playing game. I'm a huge fan of
Speaker 1: role playing games. I've been playing them since the early
Speaker 1: nineteen eighties, and to mark the anniversary, I wanted to
Speaker 1: give you another chance to hear an old favorite. A
Speaker 1: quick word of warning. This episode discusses death by suicide.
Speaker 1: If you're suffering emotional distress or having suicidal thoughts, support
Speaker 1: is available, for example, from nine eight to eight Suicide
Speaker 1: and Crisis Lifeline in the US and from the Samaritans
Speaker 1: if you're in the UK. Cautionary Tales will return with
Speaker 1: new episodes on the tenth of January. In the meantime,
Speaker 1: I give you demonizing Dungeons and Dragons.
Speaker 2: And Raymond Chandler novels, and in Humphrey Bogart movies, it
Speaker 2: often begins with a telephone call. Strange to say in
Speaker 2: real life that often begins that way too.
Speaker 1: For those are the words of William Deer. He's going
Speaker 1: to take us on an adventure that's full of thrills, surprises,
Speaker 1: and terrors. William Dear is one of the most famous
Speaker 1: private detectives in the world. Dashing mustachioed, sporting a vast
Speaker 1: gold ring. He's a star with his own private plays,
Speaker 1: and this telephone call in August nineteen seventy nine was
Speaker 1: going to get him started on one of his most
Speaker 1: infamous cases. On the other end of the telephone was
Speaker 1: a surgeon from the same part of North Texas, Alliam Deer.
Speaker 1: The two men had met a few times.
Speaker 3: My nephew has disappeared. He was taking a summer course
Speaker 3: at Michigan State University and East Lansing when it happened.
Speaker 2: And he didn't just run off.
Speaker 3: He's not that kind of kid. He loves school. In fact,
Speaker 3: he's considered to be a genius.
Speaker 1: The boy, James Dallas Egbert the Third or Dallas, was
Speaker 1: just sixteen years old.
Speaker 3: He graduated from high school at thirteen, entered college at fourteen.
Speaker 3: I'm telling you, Dear, he's not the type to just
Speaker 3: go on the road.
Speaker 1: Well maybe and maybe not. Young Dallas had been missing
Speaker 1: for eight days already. William Deere called Dallas his parents.
Speaker 4: Mister Dear, thank god you called. I'm so desperate about
Speaker 4: my son. I don't know if he's committed suicide and
Speaker 4: is lying in some ditch or what. Maybe he's been kidnapped.
Speaker 1: Deer's team was soon packing for the trip to East Lansing, Michigan.
Speaker 1: There was an expert pilot at a sniper Vietnam vette.
Speaker 1: They assembled telephoto lenses, bugging devices, tracking systems, and spy cameras.
Speaker 1: Deer himself was running through the possibilities. Most of them
Speaker 1: were mundane. One of them would prove to be truly fantastical.
Speaker 1: I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to cautionary tales. The
Speaker 1: simplest explanation of Dallas's disappearance was that the young man
Speaker 1: had killed himself. That was William Dear's instinct. It was
Speaker 1: also Anna Egbert's. According to Dear's account, she blamed herself.
Speaker 4: Dallas called me on August twelfth. He was so happy
Speaker 4: because he got a three point five and a computer
Speaker 4: science course. I told him it should have been a
Speaker 4: four point zero.
Speaker 1: Deer's team started asking questions around the university. What they
Speaker 1: discovered deepened the fear that this was a case of suicide.
Speaker 1: Dallas was depressed, but Deer also asked what did Dallas
Speaker 1: like to do with his spare time, his classmates said
Speaker 1: that he liked computers. At the time, computers were rare
Speaker 1: and mysterious, and Dallas did some other mysterious things too.
Speaker 1: But then so did William Deer. For example, when he
Speaker 1: received an anonymous tip that Dallas used to risk a
Speaker 1: kind of thrill seeking day, lying down on the railroad
Speaker 1: tracks and letting the trains pass over him, Deer decided
Speaker 1: that he really needed to put himself in Dallas's position.
Speaker 2: Literally, I laid down on railroad ties and tried to
Speaker 2: imagine myself it was Dallas. Was this how Dallas fell?
Speaker 1: His colleague screamed a warning the oncoming train had a
Speaker 1: cattle catcher. William Deer scrambled off the tracks just in time. No,
Speaker 1: couldn't have been a train. If Dallas had been hit
Speaker 1: by a train, surely his body would have been found
Speaker 1: soon enough. It did seem likely that Dallas was dead.
Speaker 1: But if he was dead, where was the body? William
Speaker 1: Deer couldn't rid himself of the suspicion that there was
Speaker 1: something rather different behind Dallas's deay disappearance, something fantastically strange.
Speaker 1: A game, a game that reportedly hundreds of students were
Speaker 1: playing in dark humid tunnels beneath the campus a game
Speaker 1: called Dungeons and Dragons. Now, William Dear didn't know what
Speaker 1: Dungeons and Dragons was. Neither did Dallas' friends.
Speaker 2: I don't know how to play it, but I do
Speaker 2: know that you can't play if you're a dumbass.
Speaker 1: But what kind of game is it? William Dear received
Speaker 1: phone calls, There were rumors. He tried to piece together clues.
Speaker 1: It was difficult to understand. You might find this bafflement odd.
Speaker 1: Dungeons and Dragons is pretty mainstream these days. You might
Speaker 1: well have played a game yourself, But in nineteen seventy nine,
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy nine, Dungeons and Dragons was pretty much unknown.
Speaker 1: Dallas's disappearance was going to change all that. As William
Speaker 1: Deere explained in his subsequent book titled The Dungeon Master,
Speaker 1: he wanted to get into those mysterious tunnels to search
Speaker 1: for Dallas's body. In order to pressure Michigan State University
Speaker 1: into giving access to a celebrity detective from Texas, Deer
Speaker 1: frequently spoke to the press about his Dungeons and Dragons hypothesis.
Speaker 1: The newspapers lapped it up, tunnels are searched for missing student,
Speaker 1: reported The New York Times, explaining that Dallas might have
Speaker 1: become lost in the tunnels, which carry heat to campus buildings,
Speaker 1: while playing an elaborate version of a bizarre, intellectual game
Speaker 1: called Dungeons and Dragons. If you've noticed there's a lot
Speaker 1: of vague talk about this game, how it's intellectual and
Speaker 1: bizarre and you can't play if you're a dumbass, but
Speaker 1: no specifics, You're right. Dungeons and Dragons was a blank
Speaker 1: canvas onto which parents, media critics, and celebrity detectives could
Speaker 1: project any anxiety. In the informational vacuum. Rumors grew. Apparently,
Speaker 1: people wore costumes. Apparently a dungeon master would lead quests
Speaker 1: around the tunnels in the scalding heat and the darkness
Speaker 1: and the stench. You'd have to put your hand into
Speaker 1: crevices and there might be rotting calf sliver in there,
Speaker 1: or spaghetti to represent an orc's brain, or they might
Speaker 1: be treasured. Apparently there were more than one hundred dungeons
Speaker 1: in the East Lansing area, And if you don't know
Speaker 1: what that means, don't worry. William Deer didn't either but
Speaker 1: he had a theory. Whatever this strange game was, whether
Speaker 1: it involved dungeon or rotten liver, or all sorts of
Speaker 1: other things that William Dear didn't understand, it might have
Speaker 1: something to do with Dallas's disappearance. And since William Dear
Speaker 1: was an investigator, heck he was going to investigate. He
Speaker 1: called a hobby store, got the contact details of one
Speaker 1: of these so called dungeon masters, and offered him fifty
Speaker 1: bucks to drop everything and initiate Deer in the mysteries
Speaker 1: of dungeons and dragons. Sixty bucks if it was good.
Speaker 1: Back in nineteen seventy nine, that was a lot of money.
Speaker 2: I didn't know what to expect from my dungeon master.
Speaker 2: Would he show up in a Merlin castrome with a
Speaker 2: funny pointed cap. I knew he would have complete control
Speaker 2: over the circumstances of the fantasy adventure on which I
Speaker 2: was about to embark.
Speaker 1: When the young man knocked on the door, he and
Speaker 1: his friend were both wearing jeans, sweaters and sneakers, and
Speaker 1: rather than leading deer into the tunnels to mine for
Speaker 1: Calf's liver, he pulled out a pencil and paper, some books,
Speaker 1: and some dice. The adventure was about to begin. Cautionary
Speaker 1: tales will be back in a moment. William Dear didn't
Speaker 1: wear a pointy hat. He didn't have to dip his
Speaker 1: hand into dark crevices in the tunnels under Michigan State University.
Speaker 1: He just got into character, pretending to be a wizard
Speaker 1: named Tor who was accompanied by a sneak thief named Dan.
Speaker 1: Nor did Deer visit any tunnels. He just sat at
Speaker 1: a table describing what Tor was doing. In his vivid imagination.
Speaker 1: Tor and Dan got into various scrapes around a medieval town,
Speaker 1: scrambling through an escape tunnel, pursued by some guards, being
Speaker 1: attacked by giant rats, being taken prisoner by orcs, and
Speaker 1: finally triumphing thanks to a combination of bluff and cunning.
Speaker 1: All this took place in the Theater of the mind,
Speaker 1: with the dungeon master simply describing what they saw and
Speaker 1: with the aid of a few dice rolls, whether their
Speaker 1: schemes succeeded or failed. In fact, the game wasn't nearly
Speaker 1: as odd as all the rumors suggested. Yes, the stuff
Speaker 1: about wizards and orcs is a bit strange, but then
Speaker 1: Star Wars with its Jedi nights and dark powers and
Speaker 1: the Mysterious Force had just been a smash hit. The
Speaker 1: animated film of The Lord of the Rings had just
Speaker 1: been released too. Nothing's more culture really mainstream than wizards
Speaker 1: and heroes, dice pencils sitting around a table playing Let's
Speaker 1: Pretend was all very tame, but William Deer had fun.
Speaker 1: In fact, he worried that this game of the imagination
Speaker 1: might just be too much fun. Maybe for a troubled
Speaker 1: mind it could be dangerous. Dallas might actually have begun
Speaker 1: to live the game, not just to play it.
Speaker 2: Dungeons and dragons could have absorbed him so much that
Speaker 2: his mind had slipped through the fragile barrier between reality
Speaker 2: and fantasy.
Speaker 1: If there is a time and a place that the
Speaker 1: fragile barrier between reality and fantasy first broke down, perhaps
Speaker 1: it was Saint Paul, Minnesota in nineteen sixteen. Behind this
Speaker 1: breakdown was a young physics graduate named David Wesley. Wesley
Speaker 1: was a founder of the Twin Cities Military Miniatures Group,
Speaker 1: a wargaming club. Wargames are more realistic descendants of chess,
Speaker 1: allowing players to re enact battles from history. With model
Speaker 1: soldiers on a realistic miniature battlefield. Robert Lewis Stevenson, the
Speaker 1: author of Treasure Island, was a wargamer, so as H. G. Wells,
Speaker 1: wargames can be used for serious military training. David Wesley,
Speaker 1: who was in the Army reserves himself, was interested in
Speaker 1: these training exercises, where making decisions over a tabletop battlefield
Speaker 1: might prepare a young officer for the real thing over
Speaker 1: in Vietnam. To be useful, a training wargame couldn't be
Speaker 1: restricted to a limited set of moves as in chess.
Speaker 1: Players should be able to dream up all sorts of
Speaker 1: tricks and tactics, which meant the game needed a referee
Speaker 1: to use his or her judgment when a player tried
Speaker 1: something unusual. The game of war was open ended and unpredictable,
Speaker 1: just like war itself. In a wargame set in eighteen
Speaker 1: oh six in the fictional Prussian town of Braunstein, David
Speaker 1: Wesley took this open endedness to the next level. As
Speaker 1: with a normal wargame, he put players in charge of
Speaker 1: Napoleon's French army and the Prussian resistance, but then he
Speaker 1: assigned rather more unusual roles. One player, for example, was
Speaker 1: given the role of the chancellor of Bronstein's university. What
Speaker 1: could he do well anything. He didn't command any troops,
Speaker 1: but he could rally the students and urge them to
Speaker 1: join the resistance. Or he could challenge another player to
Speaker 1: a duel, perhaps over the affections of a lady. Another
Speaker 1: player's character started in jail. Any of these players could
Speaker 1: attempt anything. Wesley, as refere had to improvise. The experimental
Speaker 1: game was a chaotic series of whispered conferences between the
Speaker 1: players and Wesley, the referee. It took ages, and the
Speaker 1: French and the Prussians never even fired a shot. Not
Speaker 1: so much a war game as a phony wargame. Wesley
Speaker 1: felt like it had been a flop. Then the players
Speaker 1: told him they loved it. One of those players was
Speaker 1: Dave Arnison, who seized Wesley's idea with both hands in
Speaker 1: a follow up game set in a Banana Republic. Arnason
Speaker 1: started as a student revolutionary, but managed to convince the
Speaker 1: other players he was working for the CIA. He ran
Speaker 1: rings around them, not by rolling dice or pushing pieces
Speaker 1: around the map, but by acting the part and bluffing
Speaker 1: his way to success. What Wesley and Arnison and the
Speaker 1: group had invented together was a strange combination of a
Speaker 1: classical wargame, a military training exercise, an improvised acting class.
Speaker 1: It came to be known as a role playing game,
Speaker 1: the first commercial role playing game, designed in part by
Speaker 1: Dave Arnison. Could have been about Napoleonic battles or pretending
Speaker 1: to be in the CIA, but it wasn't. It was
Speaker 1: about heroes and wizards exploring the tunnels beneath a medieval castle.
Speaker 1: It was called you guessed it, Dungeons and Dragons, and
Speaker 1: it was dungeons and dragons that William Deer feared had
Speaker 1: driven Dallas Egbert into some kind of delusional state that
Speaker 1: he imagined he was a wizard. So does the barrier
Speaker 1: between reality and fantasy break down in a role playing game? Well,
Speaker 1: maybe a bit, But the same is true for novels
Speaker 1: or movies. I don't watch horror movies. I don't like
Speaker 1: the way they scare me. I cried uncontrollably at the
Speaker 1: end of Cinema Paradiso. Did between reality and fantasy breakdown
Speaker 1: at that moment? I suppose it did, But there's nothing
Speaker 1: shameful or dangerous about that and yet there was something
Speaker 1: different about these role playing games, something that drove America
Speaker 1: into a state of moral panic. Maybe it was the
Speaker 1: fact that, as I suppose I've just demonstrated, they are
Speaker 1: quite hard to describe. But for many people it must
Speaker 1: have been the context in which they first heard of
Speaker 1: the game Dungeons and Dragons. Isn't that the game that
Speaker 1: poor kid was playing when he died? Newspapers such as
Speaker 1: the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle and
Speaker 1: Examiner tried to get their heads around what the game
Speaker 1: actually was and how people played it. Words such as
Speaker 1: cult and bizarre were often used, but the publicity fueled demand.
Speaker 1: The game briefly appears in Et, which was released in
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty two, and at the same time, but less favorably,
Speaker 1: in Mazes and Monsters, a TV movie inspired by the
Speaker 1: giddy media reports about Dallas Egbert's disappearance.
Speaker 2: Tom Hanks and his friends get caught up in a
Speaker 2: deadly game of fantasy until they'd take it too far.
Speaker 1: In Mazes and Monsters, the young Tom Hanks plays a
Speaker 1: teenager who completely loses his grip on reality while playing
Speaker 1: the game.
Speaker 3: This is only a game, Abody Mazes and Monsters seventy
Speaker 3: three on ZTV Fox seventeen.
Speaker 1: The other thing that happened in nineteen eighty two was
Speaker 1: that a young man named Irving Pulling killed himself. His mother,
Speaker 1: Patricia Pulling, was convinced that Dungeons and Dragons was involved. Indeed,
Speaker 1: she sued Irving's school principle, claiming that Irving's suicide was
Speaker 1: a response to having a curse put on his character.
Speaker 1: Patricia Pulling even appeared on sixty Minutes. The creators of
Speaker 1: Dungeons and Dragons complained that sixty Minutes had misrepresented two
Speaker 1: other teenage suicides as being connected to the game, despite
Speaker 1: letters from the bereaved mothers saying otherwise. In her grief,
Speaker 1: Patricia Pulling described Dungeons and Dragons as a fantasy role
Speaker 1: playing game which uses demonology, witchcraft, voodoo, murder, rape, blasphemy, suicide, assassination, insanity, sex, perversion, homosexuality, prostitution,
Speaker 1: satanic type rituals, gambling, barbarism, cannibalism, sadism, desecration, demon summoning, necromantics, divination,
Speaker 1: and other teachings. Now, a role playing game can describe
Speaker 1: all sorts of activities, just like a novel or a movie.
Speaker 1: But Harry Potter uses witchcraft, and not many people lose
Speaker 1: sleep over Harry Potter. On the other hand, people seemed
Speaker 1: willing to believe anything about this mysterious game.
Speaker 2: There are sixes involved in the pieces of the.
Speaker 1: Game, explained one religious critic of Dungeons and Dragons. The
Speaker 1: number of the beast and all that. But I think
Speaker 1: he was referring to dice. But it wasn't just the
Speaker 1: hardline evangelicals who worried about Dungeons and Dragons. In nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty four, a baffled police chief blamed a teenage suicide
Speaker 1: on the game.
Speaker 3: My understanding is that once you reach a certain point
Speaker 3: where you are the master, your only way out is death.
Speaker 1: This claim is analogous to saying that once you become
Speaker 1: a tennis umpire, the only way to quit is to
Speaker 1: kill yourself. It makes no sense, But if you know
Speaker 1: nothing at all about the game, you don't realize that
Speaker 1: it makes no sense. In nineteen eighty eight, tip A Gore,
Speaker 1: then wife of Al Gore, claimed that Dungeons and Draggons
Speaker 1: had been linked to nearly fifty teenage suicides and homicides.
Speaker 1: But there are thousands of teenage suicides each year, tens
Speaker 1: of thousands over the course of the nineteen eighties. As
Speaker 1: a whole, Dungeons and Dragons was becoming a popular game.
Speaker 1: Of course, some of those suicide victims would have played
Speaker 1: the game, just as others would have listened to heavy
Speaker 1: metal or been vegetarians. But people who should have known
Speaker 1: better took role playing games all too seriously. In nineteen ninety,
Speaker 1: the US Secret Service took the panic to the next level.
Speaker 1: They raided the headquarters of one role playing games publisher
Speaker 1: and confiscated their computers. The Secret Service had become convinced
Speaker 1: that a role playing game about futuristic cyborgs and hackers
Speaker 1: was in fact a practical guide for computer crime. This
Speaker 1: was beyond odd. The game included rules for hacking computers
Speaker 1: by plugging your brain directly into the net and uploading
Speaker 1: your consciousness. It is a technique that seems unlikely to
Speaker 1: bear fruit for any aspiring hacker. The US Secret Service
Speaker 1: were unmoved right up to the point at which they
Speaker 1: were successfully sued. Remind me who exactly is confused about
Speaker 1: the boundary between reality and fantasy. From the vantage point
Speaker 1: of today, It's easy to laugh, but perhaps we shouldn't
Speaker 1: feel quite so smug. Back in February twenty nineteen, parents
Speaker 1: were anxiously warning each other about a new threat to
Speaker 1: their children. Please read this is real. There is this
Speaker 1: thing called Momo that's instructing kids to kill themselves. Inform
Speaker 1: everyone you can. That tweet received tens of thousands of retweets,
Speaker 1: as did others similar warnings, but as with the Dungeons
Speaker 1: and Dragons panic, the details were a bit vague. There
Speaker 1: was an unsettling picture of a creepy puppet. One claim
Speaker 1: was that somehow this puppet, Momo, would use WhatsApp messages
Speaker 1: to deliver its deadly instructions. Another was that children's television
Speaker 1: programs had been hacked, although what exactly that meant wasn't clear.
Speaker 1: Schools sent out messages of warning, so did some police forces,
Speaker 1: so did newspapers, even the BBC. In each case, the
Speaker 1: evidence that there was a problem was simply that others
Speaker 1: were reporting that there was a problem, and you can't
Speaker 1: be too careful. Except that schools even gathered children together
Speaker 1: to warn them about Momo, which was predictably, absolutely terrifying
Speaker 1: for the children. You can see where this is going.
Speaker 1: There is no momo puppet. That creepy image is for
Speaker 1: a Tokyo Art Galleries exhibition about ghosts. There were no
Speaker 1: hacked television programs. There have been no credible reports of
Speaker 1: any Momo related suicides. I'm tempted to add there is
Speaker 1: no Momo challenge, but that wouldn't be quite right. The
Speaker 1: Momo challenge is very real, but it exists not as
Speaker 1: a deadly game shared among children, but as a panicky
Speaker 1: myth shared among their parents. What we're really talking about
Speaker 1: here is the anxiety of parents who don't really understand
Speaker 1: what their kids are into, and they feel bad about it.
Speaker 1: That's just as true today as it was a generation ago,
Speaker 1: when the panic was not about WhatsApp but about wizards.
Speaker 1: Cautionary tales will return shortly. In nineteen eighty five, the
Speaker 1: cultural critic Neil Postman published an influential book, Amusing Ourselves
Speaker 1: to Death, in which he lamented the effect of television
Speaker 1: on the intellectual, cultural, and political life of the United States.
Speaker 1: Adapting an idea from his teacher Marshall McLuhan, Postman argued
Speaker 1: that the medium is the metaphor that any communications medium,
Speaker 1: from the spoken word to the written word to primetime
Speaker 1: TV subtly influenced the kind of ideas that could be communicated.
Speaker 1: Fifty years ago, movies and TV favored good looks and strong,
Speaker 1: simple stories, and a former Cowboy actor, Ronald Reagan, was
Speaker 1: the perfect fit for the time. It's easy to read
Speaker 1: Postman as a profit of inevitable cultural decline, with each
Speaker 1: new medium stupider than the last, But decline is not inevitable.
Speaker 1: Consider how TV drama has been changed by the availability
Speaker 1: first of affordable box sets and then on demand streaming.
Speaker 1: TV producers would have to assume that people would miss
Speaker 1: episodes and so would make simple, predictable episodic comedies and
Speaker 1: soap operas. Now writers and directors can reasonably expect that
Speaker 1: people will catch up on any episodes they missed, or
Speaker 1: even binge watch an entire season in a weekend. The
Speaker 1: result longer, more complex story arcs and characters who grow
Speaker 1: over time. This isn't the result of some sudden cultural
Speaker 1: hunger for more sophisticated storytelling. A subtle difference to the
Speaker 1: medium also changes the metaphor. Movies invite us to value
Speaker 1: beauty and classic story arcs. Streaming TV drama valorizes complex plots,
Speaker 1: and character development, and reality TV thrives on attention seeking
Speaker 1: and treachery. So then, what is the underlying metaphor of
Speaker 1: a role playing game? Demand imagination. They're collaborative, You can't
Speaker 1: really play by yourself. They're active rather than passive. If
Speaker 1: you sit back and watch, nothing happens. You need to create,
Speaker 1: not just observe the creativity of others. A collaborative, imaginative,
Speaker 1: and actively creative pastime doesn't sound so bad to me.
Speaker 1: After all, we're constantly being told of the importance of creativity,
Speaker 1: the creative class, the creative economy, or simply the need
Speaker 1: for every child to be creative in school. And yet
Speaker 1: and we actually see some creativity, we can't quite comprehend
Speaker 1: what we're looking at. Back in nineteen seventy nine, Dungeons
Speaker 1: and Dragons seem to be a bit too creative for
Speaker 1: William Deere and the journalists and commentators who were intrigued
Speaker 1: by his theory. The story became bigger than Dallas Egbert himself,
Speaker 1: and the question of what happened to Dallas was forgotten
Speaker 1: long after the panic remained. Mazes and Monsters, for example,
Speaker 1: the movie in which Tom Hanks, his character becomes utterly delusional,
Speaker 1: stabbing someone, hallucinating monsters, and trying to leap from the
Speaker 1: top of the World Trade Center.
Speaker 2: Robbie, what are you doing?
Speaker 3: I'm going to fly?
Speaker 1: Is often thought to be loosely based on Dallas's disappearance
Speaker 1: Don't you want to?
Speaker 2: I do here?
Speaker 4: Jat?
Speaker 3: Why ageat? I remember?
Speaker 1: Let's just say that in this case, the fantasy and
Speaker 1: the reality were a very long way apart. Reading William
Speaker 1: Deere's breathless book The Dungeon Master, it's easy to be
Speaker 1: carried away with the tales of gadgets and stakeouts and
Speaker 1: lying down in front of trains, But when you have
Speaker 1: time to stop and read carefully, the story becomes a
Speaker 1: lot more mundane. When I first heard about this steam
Speaker 1: tunnels beneath Michigan State Universe, I imagine students exploring inside
Speaker 1: huge steam filled pipes. But when I looked up steam
Speaker 1: tunnels on Wikipedia, I was redirected to an entry on
Speaker 1: utility corridors, which is a rather more prosaic name. The
Speaker 1: corridors contain hot pipes, but nobody gets inside the pipes themselves.
Speaker 1: William Deer describes the tunnels as stinking, hellish and deadly
Speaker 1: Lieutenant Bill Wardell of the MSU Campus Police told The
Speaker 1: Washington Post, they're hot and dirty, but not as bad
Speaker 1: as he portrays them. Utility corridors have existed in various
Speaker 1: universities since the nineteen twenties, and students have been messing
Speaker 1: around in them long before Dungeons and Dragons existed. A
Speaker 1: team of men, including William Deer, explored the tunnels thoroughly.
Speaker 1: Dallas wasn't down there, but he had been missing for weeks,
Speaker 1: and it was increasingly hard to see what rolling dice
Speaker 1: around a gaming table had to do with that. Dallas
Speaker 1: Egbert's parents seemed to publicly accept William Dere's media friendly
Speaker 1: theory about a Dungeons and Dragons game gone wrong, but
Speaker 1: Deer's investigations brought more straightforward possibilities to light. Dallas had
Speaker 1: a drug habit, so perhaps a drug deal had gone awry,
Speaker 1: and Dallas was also a member of the campus organization
Speaker 1: for gay students. William Deer mused about how what he
Speaker 1: called the gays might somehow have been involved in Dallas's disappearance.
Speaker 1: More likely, Dallas's sexuality simply compounded his risk of self harm.
Speaker 1: Even today, in our more enlightened times, gay teenagers are
Speaker 1: at substantially greater risk of suicide, but William Deer made
Speaker 1: the dungeons and dragons theory seem so compelling. The case
Speaker 1: ended as it began, with a phone.
Speaker 4: Call, mister Dear, this is Dallas.
Speaker 1: And then Dallas burst into tears. Soon enough he was
Speaker 1: reunited with his parents, and William Deer was fending off
Speaker 1: a pack of newshounds desperate for the scoop. It was
Speaker 1: simple enough. Dallas had indeed been severely depressed, and he
Speaker 1: had indeed tried to kill himself. Fortunately it not succeeded,
Speaker 1: but he had run away. When he called William Deer,
Speaker 1: it was from all the way down in Louisiana, leading
Speaker 1: Deer and his crew of elite operatives to fly over
Speaker 1: in his private plane. They effect what Deer describes as
Speaker 1: the tense rescue, but which on a second reading is
Speaker 1: simply two grown men knocking on the door of a
Speaker 1: rented room to find a tearful teenage boy ready to
Speaker 1: go home. Later, Dallas told Dear the story over a hamburger.
Speaker 1: Apparently he did like to hang out in the steam tunnels.
Speaker 1: I could go down there and nobody would bother me,
Speaker 1: and he also enjoyed playing Dungeons and dragons. When I
Speaker 1: played a character, I was that character. I didn't bring
Speaker 1: along all my personal problems with me. It's a terrific
Speaker 1: way to escape. And while the media clung onto the
Speaker 1: tale of a boy who had been lost to a
Speaker 1: world of mazes and monsters, and evangelical campaigners warned of
Speaker 1: satanic rituals and tip A Gore feared an epidemic of
Speaker 1: D and D related suicide, the truth was simpler and
Speaker 1: harder to bear. Dallas disappeared because he ran away. He
Speaker 1: ran away because he was suicidally unhappy. Some young people are.
Speaker 1: And I'm sorry to tell you that Dallas did not
Speaker 1: recover from his depress He took his own life a
Speaker 1: year later, but the narrative had moved on. An isolated
Speaker 1: and depressed young man had been largely forgotten. I have
Speaker 1: a confession to make. I too, am a role player.
Speaker 1: I can't imagine you're terribly shocked, but I love these games.
Speaker 1: To me, there is important a creative outlet as writing
Speaker 1: my books or this podcast, and not everyone gets to
Speaker 1: publish a book or present a podcast with respected actors
Speaker 1: and its own composer, but anyone can be creative in
Speaker 1: a game. I learned to play in the middle of
Speaker 1: the Satanic Panic of the nineteen eighties. I remember having
Speaker 1: to have a long conversation with a senior teacher at
Speaker 1: my school who was concerned that the game might open
Speaker 1: me up to evil influences. To his credit, he listened
Speaker 1: and changed his mind, and I'm still playing games sometimes
Speaker 1: with the same people I went to school with, some
Speaker 1: of my oldest and closest friends. My hobby is a
Speaker 1: pastime that's as creative as drawing, writing, or drama, that's
Speaker 1: as collaborative as a team sport, that involves no drinks
Speaker 1: stronger than coffee, no mind altering chemicals more potent than
Speaker 1: whatever it is they used to flavor Dorito's and alas,
Speaker 1: no sex at all. The kids tell me that these
Speaker 1: days Dungeons and Dragons is cool. Maybe I'm just thankful
Speaker 1: that despite everything, the hobby has survived and flourished. William
Speaker 1: Deerre has survived and flourished too, penning works such as
Speaker 1: OJ Is Innocent and I Can Prove It and appearing
Speaker 1: in the TV documentary Alien Autopsy Fact or Fiction. He
Speaker 1: was interested in the entertainment business. Back in the nineteen
Speaker 1: eighties too. He had been urging Dallas and his family
Speaker 1: to work with him on a movie about the case.
Speaker 1: But as Dallas' mother Anna said.
Speaker 4: It was never all that exciting. He just got on
Speaker 4: a bus and went as far as his money would
Speaker 4: take him.
Speaker 1: Yet, when William Dear told the story, it was an
Speaker 1: unforgettable tale, the fragile barrier between reality and fantasy. Indeed,
Speaker 1: the key sources for this episode are of Dice and
Speaker 1: Men by David Ewalt, and Playing at the World by
Speaker 1: John Peterson, and of course The Dungeon Master by William Dear.
Speaker 1: For a full list of references, see Timharford dot com.
Speaker 1: Cautionary Tales is written by me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright.
Speaker 1: It's produced by Ryan Dilly and Marilyn Rust. The sound
Speaker 1: design and original music are the work of Pascal Wise.
Speaker 1: Julia Barton edited the scripts. Starring in this series of
Speaker 1: Cautionary Tales are Helena Bonham, Carter and Jeffrey Wright, alongside
Speaker 1: Nazar Aldurazi, Ed Gochen, Melanie Gutteridge, Rachel Hanshaw, Cobner Holbrook Smith,
Speaker 1: Greg Lockett, Massa Munroe and Rufus Wright. The show also
Speaker 1: wouldn't have been possible without the work of Mea LaBelle,
Speaker 1: Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fame, John Schnaz, Carlie mcgliori, Eric Sandler,
Speaker 1: Emily Rostick, Maggie Taylor, Daniella Lakhan, and Maya Knigg. Cautionary
Speaker 1: Tales is a production of Pushkin Indo Strees. If you
Speaker 1: like the show, please remember to share, rate, and review.