Patricia Pulling

Patricia Pulling (born June 30, 1948 in Richmond (Virginia) ; † September 18, 1997 in Henrico (Virginia) ; sometimes just Pat Pulling when appearing on television) was an anti- occult activist who started with the initiative she founded Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons (BADD, Eng .: 'concerned about Dungeons & Dragons') took action against pen & paper role-playing games in general and against Dungeons & Dragons in particular with the aim of banning role-playing games, or at least regulating them.

Start of anti-role play engagement

Patricia Pulling began to get involved against RPG in general and against Dungeons & Dragons specifically after her son Irving committed suicide on June 9, 1982. Irving was a temporary D&D player, and Pulling very soon began to draw links between role-playing and her son's death, having played D&D just hours before his suicide. As a devout Christian , Pulling was convinced that Irving had drawn a curse at the last game session that ultimately drove him to suicide. A lawsuit against the then editor of D&D, Tactical Studies Rules (TSR), was dismissed in 1984, as was a lawsuit against the principal of the high school that Irving attended.

BADD

After all of her lawsuits against those allegedly responsible for her son's suicide had been dismissed by American courts, Pulling founded the Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons (BADD) initiative in 1982, which immediately began to publish educational pamphlets and other materials in which Pulling expressed her convictions expressed that role-playing games seduced adolescents into satanism and eventually drove them to suicide. Pulling said in their informational materials that Dungeons & Dragons educate young people in violence, murder and blasphemy and that the games practice witchcraft , satanism, demonology and other occult rituals.

While Pulling initially received the hoped-for attention only in fundamental Christian circles in the USA, her theses soon gained attention in the mass media. Local newspapers, later also national papers, increasingly highlighted suicides and acts of violence committed by teenagers when Dungeons & Dragons game materials were found in their possession, and constructed links between the game and the crime. Although Pulling had no corresponding qualifications, she was increasingly perceived and accepted in the media as an expert on the dangers of pen & paper role-playing games. Some of their theses were also reproduced in specialist journals. Her appearances on talk shows and her interviews in magazines and newspapers certainly attracted the attention of concerned parents. In addition, the design and illustrations of the game materials were often designed in such a way that particularly conservative Christian viewers believed they recognized figures of the devil and satanic rituals. Protests and repeated legal proceedings, in which Patricia Pulling was heard as an expert, eventually prompted the manufacturer of D&D to voluntarily rename certain monsters in order to no longer face the accusations of demonology and devil worship.

Downfall of BADD

Despite all attempts to ban, regulate and present Dungeons & Dragons as a threat to young people in general, role-playing had developed into a widespread hobby among adolescents and young adults, and above all among them, by the mid-1980s Universities and colleges spread. BADD had not been able to win a single lawsuit, on the contrary, with its campaigns against the role-playing game, it may even have advanced its spread. Pulling's hypotheses were now increasingly called into question, which was still supported by pulling's various appearances. She once stated in a newspaper interview that 8% of the Richmond population were Satanists. When asked how she came up with this number, Pulling said that 4% of the adult population and 4% of adolescents added up to a total of 8%, and stayed that way when the interviewer tried to make her understand that the calculation was incorrect is.

In 1989 the game developer Michael A. Stackpole dealt with the pulling theses. He authored the pamphlet Game Hysteria and the Truth , in which he sharply attacked BADD and Pulling, accusing them of the methods they used to make opinions against a game and pointing out any inaccuracies and errors in the Pullings argument. A year later, Stackpole wrote The Pulling Report, an educational pamphlet in which he explained the methods of data analysis, but also the twisting of facts, as BADD operated them, which led Pulling to leave the organization in 1990 and from then on to act only in the background. The American and Canadian health authorities had also independently concluded in studies that a connection between fantasy role-playing games and suicide among teenagers has not been proven. Patricia Pulling died on September 18, 1997 after suffering from lung cancer, and the BADD initiative she founded also disbanded shortly after her death.

Web links

• The Pulling Report
• The Escapist with a scan of Pat Pulling's educational pamphlet Dungeons & Dragons

Individual evidence

1. ↑ believermag.com Archived copy ( Memento from January 17, 2016 in the Internet Archive )
2. ↑ ^{a b} Gerro Pappe, P&P role play: the collective access to utopian world designs and individual fantasy constructs , Logos Verlag Berlin GmbH, 2011, ISBN 9783832527778 , p. 72 f.
3. ^ David Waldron, Role-Playing Games and the Christian Right: Community Formation in Response to a Moral Panic , Journal of Religion and Popular Culture, Volume 9, Issue 1 (Spring 2005)
4. ↑ Shannon Appel Cline (2011). Designers & Dragons. Mongoose Publishing. ISBN 978-1-907702-58-7 .
5. ↑ Shannon Appel Cline (2011). Designers & Dragons. Mongoose Publishing. ISBN 978-1-907702-58-7
6. ↑ Tom Hillenbrand, Youth Culture: How Fantasy Fun was turned into a "killer game" . In: Spiegel Online from August 12, 2009.
7. ^ Lizzie Stark, Leaving Mundania: Inside the Transformative World of Live Action Role Playing Games . In: Chicago Review Press, 2012, ISBN 1613740670 .
8. ↑ Michael A. Stackpole , Game Hysteria and the Truth ( Memento of the original from June 30, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (English). 
9. ↑ Michael A. Stackpole , The Pulling-Report , 1990 (English).
10. ^ Obituary in the Richmond Times [1]