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From: hutch@shark.UUCP (Stephen Hutchison)
Newsgroups: net.kids
Subject: Re: D&D
Message-ID: <1594@shark.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 24-Oct-85 15:26:15 EDT
Article-I.D.: shark.1594
Posted: Thu Oct 24 15:26:15 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 25-Oct-85 09:08:39 EDT
References: <123@mit-hector.UUCP>
Reply-To: hutch@shark.UUCP (Stephen Hutchison)
Distribution: na
Organization: Tektronix, Wilsonville OR
Lines: 34
Keywords: D&D
Summary: 

In <123@mit-hector.UUCP> melissa@mit-hector.UUCP (Melissa Silvestre) writes:
>A few weeks ago, 60 Minutes did a show on D&D. Their claim was that there
>are a large number of homocides/suicides which are linked to D&D recently.
>They showed interviews with parents and police in a number of cases, with
>both groups saying "Johnny was obssessed with the game but I didn't realize
>how badly until he stabbed his brother and himself ..." or such stuff.
>Gary Gygax (creator of D&D) was interviewed and he denyed that there was
>any link. He sounded pretty feeble about it.

Ah, yes, 60 Minutes, *THE* most reliable news program on American television.
First off, in any case like this when trying to decide if there is a
causal, or even significant positive, correlation between two phenomena,
like, say, playing football and alcoholic parents, you need to do more
than just look at anecdotal evidence.  The episode of 60 Minutes was very
heavily discussed in net.games.frp, and the upshot (based on sources of
information closer to the events and certainly with a different bias than
60 Minutes started with) was that the case which 60 Minutes paid the
most attention to, where the mother was adamant that it was d&d that
made her boy kill himself, was grossly underresearched.  Classmates and
the boy's own brother indicated that he was not a frequent player, and
that he was a frequent drug user.  His mother refused to accept this.

Now, it is easily shown that there is a strong positive correlation between
drug usage and depression, often leading to suicide; there is also a very
strong correlation between being a teenager and suicide.  On the other
hand there are hundreds of thousands of people who play D&D and related
games, and there has been shown NO correlation between d&d and suicide;
as far as I know there haven't been any studies made.  THAT is what
Gygax was saying, and yes, it may sound "feeble" but it IS truthful, which
is a whole lot better than unsupported gossip, speculation, and innuendo.

Unfortunately, 60 Minutes trades in the latter.

Hutch