The Y Files

"The virus that caused the greatest world epidemic of influenza in modern history – the pandemic of 1918-1919 – may have returned." Those words, written by Harold Schmeck, appeared in pages of the New York Times not in the fall of 2009, but during the winter of 1976. A month later, on March 24 of that bicentennial year, President Gerald R. Ford asked Congress to provide immediate funding "for the production of sufficient vaccine to inoculate every man, woman, and child in the United States."

Editor's Note: This is the second in a three-part series. Click here if you missed Part 1.

The day after President Ford's announcement, Dr. Harry Meyer met with representatives of pharmaceutical companies and personnel from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). Meyer, director of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Bureau of Biologics (BoB), learned from drug manufacturers that, in the words of one participant, "you couldn't possibly have 200 million doses by fall".

There's Something Wrong with the Vaccine

Doubts about its ability to produce enough swine flu vaccine wasn't the pharmaceutical industry's only concern. During the summer of 1976, vaccine manufacturers delivered an "ultimatum" to the CDC, demanding protection against claims of adverse reactions. As then-CDC Director Dr. David J. Sencer later recalled, this demand sent an "unintended, unmistakable message" to the American pubic that "there's something wrong with the vaccine". Faced with an epidemic, however, the federal government agreed to industry's indemnification demands.

Soon after the National Influenza Immunization Program (NIIP) began delivering flu vaccine to state health departments, another crisis of confidence occurred. On August 2, 1976, a mysterious pneumonia-like illness sickened over 250 veterans at an American Legion convention in Philadelphia. Although CDC researchers later determined that the illness, Legionnaire's Disease, was caused by bacteria from a hotel cooling tower, the media used the episode to hype fears of an early-season flu epidemic.

The subsequent deaths of three elderly people who had recently received the swine flu vaccine then caused the pendulum of public panic to swing back towards fears about the vaccine itself. Ultimately, venerable CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite scolded the media for sensationalism and shoddy reporting.

This time, fears about the swine flu vaccine were unfounded – or were they?

Editor's Note: Part 3 of this series will run soon.

Resources:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125571271634890319.html

http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/eid/vol12no01/05-1007.htm

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=103642563

http://blogs.consumerreports.org/health/2009/04/the-swine-flu-epidemic-that-never-really-was-1976-swine-flu-outbreak.html

http://www.salon.com/env/feature/2009/04/28/1976_swine_flu/

http://www.amazon.com/epidemic-that-never-was-Policy-making/dp/0394711475

In the early 1980s, Dungeons & Dragons was accused of being the source of psychological instability and encouraging cultism and crime. The role-playing game was also (and remains) popular among many engineering students.

Yet clinical research has determined that there is no real link between fantasy gaming and suicide. Studies have shown that role players do not typically exhibit depression or suicidal tendencies. Feelings of alienation are not associated with mainstream players, but players who are deeply and financially committed to the game do tend to feel alienated from others. Still, according to one study, there is "no significant correlation between years of playing the game and emotional stability."

People & Players

It's hard to say exactly what kind of person plays D&D. To play, all you really need is an interest in the fantasy genre, a willingness to play a role, and an imagination. And that can be anyone – not just engineering students! D&D can span all ages and interests.

My D&D group, for example, consists of college students and recent graduates. We all study different things: physics, economics, and philosophy; aeronautical, electrical, and mechanical engineering; psychology; and computer science. In high school, some of us were in the band, some of us were on sports teams, and some of us were class officers. And we all have different interests.

We also play very different characters.

Ah, the Flexibility

There is a great deal of flexibility regarding what kind of character you play. You can be good, evil, or somewhere in the middle. You can also be so lawfully, chaotically, or (again) somewhere in the middle In case you're wondering about the term "chaotically" here, a popular example of a chaotic-good character is Batman.

You can play a male or female character, too. And you can choose from a large number of races and classes. Races include, but are not limited to, human, half-orc, elf, gnome, halfling, and dwarf. Classes are like professions and include fighter, cleric, ranger, bard, wizard, and many more.

The choices don't end there. Your character's reaction in a given situation depends upon the back-story you've created. For example, my character never knew his parents and was treated with great disdain in his youth. He spent a lot of time on the outskirts of the village where he was born, and traveled all over the continent as a bodyguard. So if you insulted his mother, he wouldn't be offended. He has a great affinity for nature. He is also very hesitant to trust characters he meets in his travels, but if you do gain his trust, he will fight to the death in order to protect you.

You can even decide to become a member of a group of good adventuring humans whose main goal is to help those in need and to destroy all things evil and magical!

Most importantly, your character is exactly that – a character. Your character can be whoever or whatever you want it to be. Your actions do not need to reflect your character's actions, and vice versa. Perhaps if some people realized this beforehand, they would not have been so critical of the game and its players (then again, that might not have changed a thing).

More Popular Than You Think

As of 2006, D&D was the best-known and best-selling role-playing game. It's estimated that some 20 million people have played Dungeons and Dragons, and more than $1 billion (USD) has been spent buying D&D books and equipment. The game has also been translated into many different languages.

Its popularity and influence has also inspired many other role-playing games. Some are about knights and sorcerers. Others are about vampires. Some incorporate space travel, and there is even one based on H.P. Lovecraft's story, The Call of Cthulhu. D&D has also had a large impact on many modern video games. After all, isn't D&D just like a more interactive version of one?

Based on what I've read (and please correct me if I'm wrong here), average D&D players are in their 30s or 40s and work in varying professions. So are you wondering how many of your co-workers are D&D players?

It is a common belief that all D&D players are geeky or nerdy. Obviously, the truth of this is disputable. I, for one, am proud to call myself a nerd. I even have a set of dice displayed on my desk at work.

Gaming conventions with one or more D&D tables are held at colleges, universities, and convention centers all over the world. D&D is also played widely within Mensa, the world's the oldest, largest, and best-known high-IQ society.

Some well-known people who play D&D are basketball player Tim Duncan; comedian Stephen Colbert; and actors Robin Williams, Mike Meyers and Vin Diesel. Diesel, star of the 2001 film The Fast and the Furious, even wrote the forward to a book called 30 Years of Adventure: A Celebration of Dungeons & Dragons.

Today, despite all efforts to eliminate it, Dungeons & Dragons is more popular than ever. Regardless of whether you consider D&D to be geeky or not, it remains a good way for friends to get together and go on adventures without ever leaving home
.

Click here to read Part 1!
Here to read Part 2!
And here for Part 3!

Sources:

Wikipedia – Dungeons & Dragons

In January 1976, a 19-year old solider died of pneumonia at Fort Dix, New Jersey. U.S. Army Private David Lewis was just one of many recruits afflicted by respiratory illness, but the cause of his pneumonia wasn't the Victoria virus, the dominant cause of human influenza since 1968. Rather, David Lewis' death was attributed to an unknown, a virus which the U.S. Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) predicted would kill one million Americans in 1976.

"There is evidence", warned HEW Secretary F. David Matthews, that "there will be a major flu epidemic this coming fall". Matthews' bold prediction, delivered just a month after Lewis' death, reflected the darkest fears of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta. There, scientists had determined that the unknown virus from Fort Dix was the "swine flu", an acute and highly contagious respiratory disease of swine that was thought to be caused by the same virus behind the 1918 influenza pandemic.

According to Richard E. Neustadt and Harvey V. Fineberg, authors of The Epidemic That Never Was: Policy-Making and the Swine Flu, the government's concerns were four-fold. First, David Lewis and several other soldiers from Fort Dix hadn't been infected through contact with pigs. Rather, they were the viral victims of human-to-human transmission. Second, because the swine flu had confined itself to pigs since the 1920s, only Americans older than 50 years old "would have build up specific antibodies from previous infection".

Younger Americans had some immunity to the then-dominant Victoria virus, of course, but the swine flu was different. Third on the list of the CDC's concerns was that the Fort Dix virus bore different surface proteins, or antigens. Such an "antigenic shift" would, as Neustadt and Fineberg write, "negate any resistance" that might otherwise protect healthy segments of the U.S. population. Finally, the government worried that weakened immune systems would be susceptible to bacterial pneumonia, the immediate cause of Army Private David Lewis' death.

Underlying the CDC's concerns was the belief that "pandemics follow antigenic shifts as night follows day" – and that these changes occur approximately once every 10 years. As evidence, public health officials pointed to antigenic shifts in 1946, 1957, and 1968 and the influenza pandemics that followed.

This time, the pandemic had come early – or had it?

Editor's Note: Click here for Part 2 of this multi-part series.

Resources:

http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=swine%20flu

http://blogs.consumerreports.org/health/2009/04/the-swine-flu-epidemic-that-never-really-was-1976-swine-flu-outbreak.html

http://www.salon.com/env/feature/2009/04/28/1976_swine_flu/

http://www.amazon.com/epidemic-that-never-was-Policy-making/dp/0394711475

http://www.sagepub.com/upm-data/5071_Yin_Chapter_1.pdf

In addition to extreme "geekiness", Dungeons & Dragons has been linked to psychological instability, suicide, and cultism. Rumors surrounding D&D caused something of a moral panic in the 1980s, but the "steam tunnel incident" was just one aspect of the hysteria.

In Part 2 of this series, we learned about some crimes that were falsely linked to D&D, a role-playing game that is popular among many engineering students. The books and movies based upon these events gave the game a bad reputation, and were extremely unsettling to those who were unfamiliar with D&D. Today, we will look at the reactions of some members of the religious community.

Authors & Articles

In the 1980s, some religious groups accused D&D of promoting interest in devil worship, witchcraft, sorcery, suicide, murder, and demons. The two driving forces of these accusations were Patricia Pulling and Chick Publications.

D&D is BADD

Patricia Pulling was an avid anti-occult campaigner in Virginia who had very little knowledge about D&D. When her son Irving, an active D&D player, committed suicide, she believed it was directly related to the game.

Pulling first filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Irving's high school principal. She accused him of being responsible for the "Dungeons & Dragons curse" that was placed on her son. She also filed a lawsuit against the D&D publishers, Tactical Studies Rules (TSR), Inc. (The game is now published by Wizards of the Coast.)

After both of her lawsuits were dismissed, Pulling founded Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons (BADD). Essentially a one-person advocacy group, BADD promoted the regulation of D&D and other similar role-playing games.

Pulling published and circulated her beliefs about D&D. She obtained a private investigator's license, became a consultant to law enforcement, and served as an expert witness in several gaming-related lawsuits (all of which lost). Pulling also wrote the book The Devil's Web: Who Is Stalking Your Children For Satan?

The book, contrary to the author's intentions, revealed that Pulling had, at best, only a basic understanding of the alleged occult activities that she was so vehemently against. For example, she writes about the Necronomicon as if it is a real and factual publication.

In reality, the Necronomicon is a fictional book created by horror, fantasy, and science fiction writer H.P. Lovecraft. It appears in the stories by Lovecraft and many of his followers as an evil and powerful book. Many authors have written, based on the few descriptions provided by Lovecraft, their interpretation of what Necronomicon is. These books, many also with the word Necronomicon in their titles, are also fictional.

Straight Talk

Chick Publications is a publishing company that produces and markets Protestant fundamentalist comic tracts, books, DVDs, posters, etc. The Chick tracts are the company's most widely known products.

Dark Dungeons is a tract about a group of teenagers playing D&D. In the tract, the players believe that the game and their characters within it are more important than all else, including real life. When one player's character dies within the game, she commits suicide. The teenaged players also attempt to learn how to cast real spells, claiming that the magic system of D&D is preparation for real spell-casting. Dark Dungeons ends with one of the teenagers converting to Christianity and attending a book burning of D&D-related materials.

Chick Publications also published two essays by Bill Schnoebelen, "Straight Talk on Dungeons and Dragons" and "Should a Christian Play Dungeons and Dragons?" Both essays describe D&D as a means of teaching ideas and behaviors that are contrary to that of Christianity.

The first essay, which cites Patricia Pulling as a source, suggests that spells and rituals from the game are capable of summoning demons and producing other effects. Aside from describing the effects of these spells and the type and level of spell-caster that a player must be in order to use them, these D&D books contain very little information about the spells themselves.

In reality, any incantations and rituals are left to the imagination of the player. For example, the sorcerer in our group usually says something to the effect of "Fireballs, go!" while making a slow throwing motion with his arms. (In my opinion, this isn't very imaginative – and hardly a reason for alarm.)

The essay also takes portions of D&D books out of context. For example, Bill Schnoebelen writes that "the Dungeon Master's Guide gives the celebrated Adolf Hitler as an example of a real historical person that exhibited D&D charisma!" The actual purpose of using Hitler as an example, however, is to demonstrate the difference between physical attractiveness and diplomatic attractiveness.

While figures such as Napoleon Bonaparte or Adolf Hitler may not have been described as particularly beautiful people, they were highly persuasive and had personal magnetism, which would give them a high level of Charisma. (In D&D, "Charisma" measures a character's ability to lead, among other attributes.) Similarly, an extremely beautiful woman could be described as having a high level of Charisma.

The second essay, though subtler in its statements, argues similar points.

All Things Immoral

While the steam tunnel incidents linked Dungeons & Dragons to crime, murder, and suicide, Patricia Pulling and Chick Publications directly accused D&D of endorsing cultism, witchcraft, and all things immoral.

In the final part of this four-part series, we'll examine the current state of D&D's reputation and take a look at the people who play.

Click here for Part 1!
Here for Part 2!
And here for Part 4!

Sources:

Wikipedia – Dungeons & Dragons

Wikipedia – Dungeons & Dragons controversies

Wikipedia – Patricia Pulling

Wikipedia – Necronomicon

Wikipedia – Chick Publications Inc.

Wikipedia – Chick tract

In addition to extreme "geekiness", Dungeons & Dragons has been linked to psychological instability, suicide, and cultism. The rumors surrounding D&D, a game still popular with many engineering students, caused something of a moral panic in the 1980s. The origin of this hysteria began with the original "steam tunnel incident".

Incidents & Impacts

The "steam tunnel incident" doesn't refer to a single event. Rather, the term refers to a set of urban legends in which students involved in live action role-playing games die or disappear in the steam tunnels below their university's campus.

The Original

In 1979 James Dallas Egbert III, a 16-year-old child prodigy suffering from depression, academic pressures, and drug addiction, disappeared into the steam tunnels of Michigan State University (MSU) to commit suicide. After the failed attempt, Egbert fled into hiding.

William Dear, the private investigator hired to find Egbert, did not know anything about D&D except that Egbert played it. Questioning Egbert's MSU friends resulted in very few facts about the game because Egbert had never played on campus, and they knew very little about it. Yet Dear theorized that Egbert may have gotten lost in the steam tunnels during a live-action version of the game. The press reported William Dear's theory as truth, thus spurring the negative attention on D&D.

Several weeks later, Dear received a call from Egbert, who revealed that he was hiding elsewhere in the country (some reports say Louisiana, others say Texas). After promising to conceal the truth of the boy's story, Dear released Egbert to the custody of his uncle.

In 1984, four years after Egbert's third and successful suicide attempt, Dear wrote The Dungeon Master. The book reveals the truth about Egbert's disappearance, explaining that there was no link between D&D and the steam tunnel incident.

Unfortunately, the damage to D&D's reputation had already been done. In 1981, Rona Jaffe wrote a novel, Mazes and Monsters, based on the press exaggerations of the Egbert case. The novel was adapted into a made-for-TV movie the next year.

Hobgoblin, also published in 1981, was written by horror and suspense writer John Coyne. Using the current unease about D&D to his advantage, Hobgoblin is about Scott Gardiner, a traumatized young man who plays a role-playing game called Hobgoblin. Scott identifies with his Hobgoblin character more and more throughout the novel and begins to have difficulty distinguishing between reality and fantasy.

For the Money

In 1988 Chris Pritchard, with the help of some friends, allegedly planned the murder of his stepfather, Lieth von Stein, for his $2 million fortune. During police interviews, Pritchard and his friends stated that they occasionally went (sometimes under the influence of drugs and alcohol) into the steam tunnels of North Carolina State University to map them out in order to incorporate the tunnels into their D&D campaign. Authorities discovered a "game map" of the von Stein house, further linking D&D to the case.

Joe McGinniss and Jerry Bledsoe, two crime authors who wrote books based on the murder, emphasized the D&D aspect. Both books were adapted for television in 1992.

These incidents and the books and movies about them created a significant amount of bad press for D&D, but they weren't the only cause of the moral panic that ensued. The next entry in this serious will be about some other-wordly objections to D&D.

Click here to read Part 1!
Here to read Part 3!
And here to read Part 4!

Sources:

Wikipedia – Dungeons & Dragons

Wikipedia – Dungeons & Dragons controversies

Wikipedia – Steam tunnel incident