Could D&D Help Fight Screen Addiction? | Full Report

- The warnings are familiar, kids become so obsessed with gaming, they may lose all sense of reality but before today's video games like Fortnite caused parents to panic about how kids were spending time, there was Dungeons & Dragons.

(rattling of dice) - In the 1980's, D&D players became engrossed, creating a fantasy world that some adults saw as, not only an unhealthy addiction, but a dangerous invitation into devil worship.

The twist is that today, the imaginative role playing in D&D may seem like an antidote to the modern obsession with screen time and that's a far cry from the fear it once inspired.

(somber music) On a summer day in August 1979, the family of a missing teenager called a Texas investigator named William Dear with some startling information.

Dallas Egbert had disappeared from Michigan State University during the summer session.

- [Male Host] James Dallas Egbert, III was a 16 year old sophomore and his family hired Dear to help find him.

- He was a computer nerd and he had a large amount of hair and carries his little briefcase.

I wasn't sure that I was being told exactly what precipitated his disappearance so I said, "Well, I guess the best thing we do is "I'll go to Michigan State University "and I'll find out for myself exactly what was going on."

When I went to his room, there was a corkboard with a series of tacks.

- [Male Host] In what might look like a random pattern of thumb tacks, the investigator saw what he thought could be a clue.

The shape resembled a building that was part of a network of underground campus steam tunnels which students told him they sometimes explored.

- We set out with maps and we started going into the tunnels one morning with press everywhere.

I entered with the idea that I did not know what I was getting into.

- [Male Host] But he had a hunch that it had something to do with a game that was growing in popularity.

(adventurous music) - [Male Newscaster] This is a quest in a fantasy world of castles and dungeons, monsters and dragons.

This world has become real to these people (laughing) It's all part of a game called Dungeons & Dragons.

- [Male Host] Dungeons & Dragons, also known as D&D was created by the late Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson in the early 1970's.

It was born out of their love for military war games and they devised scenarios with made up characters that incorporated their interest in history and fantasy fiction.

Gygas said, "It provided an escape."

- All of us at times feel a little inadequate in dealing with the modern world.

It would feel much better if we knew that we were a super hero or a mighty wizard.

- [Male Host] The game is played in a group and the guide, or Dungeon Master.

- You enter a very small room.

- [Male Host] Talks the players through the fictional, sometimes violent adventures they will go on.

- [Female Narrator] A throw of these special dice decide the outcome of battles in an intricate scoring system.

Nothing is acted out, the real action is in the mind.

- Now you guys are entering the castle.

- [Male Host] But some, including private investigator William Dear, worried that while the action was imaginary, some kids might take it too far.

- You're leaving the world of reality into the world of fantasy.

It advocated murder, decapitation and I'm going, "This isn't a healthy game."

How can it be a healthy game?

- [Male Host] That game and Dear's hunch that Egbert was playing it in the tunnels made great fodder for headlines but it was a dead end and Dear went back to Texas empty handed.

- It was within a day or two that a phone call came in and you're still alive.

- [Male Host] Egbert was a complicated teenager whose disappearance was never fully explained and who later committed suicide.

- There was speculation he was the victim of a campus game called Dungeons & Dragons but after a month long, nationwide search, he was found unharmed.

- [Male Host] Dear fed into the growing suspicions about D&D in a book that pointed to the game as a culprit in Egbert's disappearance but Tim Kask who helped developed D&D with Gary Gygax says Dear was just hyping the story for personal gain.

- He was a publicity hound and he knew that he could hang it on D&D and gather a lot of media frenzy and he did.

Dallas Egbert was a tragic story.

Brilliant young man sent off to university at 15 that had nothing to do with D&D in the steam tunnels.

- [Male Host] Still, that attention set off an unexpected chain of events.

- Our stock took off, literally.

We sold thousands of more copies within 90 days of all that stuff happening and we were up in print runs.

That's when we took off.

- [Male Host] Sales nearly quadrupled the year after Egbert disappeared.

As the cult game was going mainstream, Dungeons & Dragons generated interest in two conflicting groups: people who wanted to buy it and those who wanted to ban it.

And televangelists took on a new crusade.

- [Female Announcer] They are kids like yours, like the ones in your neighborhood.

Kids who are turning to darkness because society has shut God out.

- A conservative Fundamentalist Christian group would see a game that involved satanic figures, evil figures that would be a source of concern.

- [Male Announcer] Dungeons & Dragons have been called the most effective introduction to the occult in the history of man.

It is a fantasy role playing game that teaches demonology... - [Male Host] Gygax, a religious man himself, was put on the defensive.

The company hired psychologist Dr. Joyce Brothers to fend off criticism.

- [Joyce Over Radio] There is good and evil in life and the way Dungeons & Dragons is set up is that good triumphs over evil.

- [Male Host] Tim Kask says that in private, he and Gygax couldn't believe the game was being linked to devil worship.

- Without sounding disrespectful at all, we laughed our butts off most of the time.

Because it was like, "Are you kidding me?

"You really think we're teaching your children demonology?"

- [Male Host] But the controversy grew after the news media reported that a string of teen murders and suicides had one thing in common, the killers or victims were D&D players.

- [Female Newscaster] Mary Towey was killed by two friends, Ron Adcox and Darren Molitor.

The crucial point is, can a game create psychosis?

Or is someone like Darren Molitor an accident waiting to happen with or without the game?

- [Ed] If you found 12 kids in murder suicide with one connecting factor in each of them, wouldn't you question it?

And that's all people are doing.

- [Gary] I would certainly do it in a scientific matter and this is as unscientific as you can get.

It's nothing but a witch hunt.

- [Male Host] But many grieving parents believed there was a connection.

Pat Pulling's teenage son committed suicide and she spoke publicly, claiming that his game playing contributed to his death.

- It has been linked in suicide notes, police reports, and coroner's reports.

- Young people commit suicide for a whole variety of reasons.

In my research, I saw nothing that led anyone towards depression or suicide.

- [Male Host] Northwestern University professor of sociology, Gary Alan Fine, wrote a book called "Shared Fantasy" and studied the D&D subculture.

- They were the kind of kids and young people who didn't go to dances or date on the weekends.

They were part of a nerd culture, I guess you would say.

- I can still throw guest spells huh, Steve?

- [Male Host] The D&D culture intrigued filmmakers and fiction writers.

Rona Jaffe's book, "Mazes and Monsters" was loosely based on what people thought had happened to Dallas Egbert.

It was made into a movie starring a young Tom Hanks.

- [Male] Led the journey begin.

- Well, which way do we go?

- They went down the storm tunnels and got to play D&D in the tunnels.

We had to like sit around a table like, how awesome would it have been if it turned out that D&D was like what they did.

- [Male Host] Cory Doctorow is a writer and activist who early on was profiled as an avid D&D player in this story from 1985.

- Tag lures him.

- The moral panic was mostly laughable.

The idea that there were people who were Fundamentalist Christians for whom Dungeons & Dragons represented some kind of existential threat to my soul was silly.

You could go around and have really satisfying arguments with like profoundly ignorant grown ups.

- [Male Host] Over time, the Dungeons & Dragons controversy lost steam and today, the common thread between D&D players is less likely to include any reported links to violence.

And more likely to involve Emmy Awards and literary prizes.

Stephen Colbert and writers Ta-Nehisi Coates and Junot Diaz are among the millions of smart, bookish kids who played D&D and shrugged off any sense of panic.

- People went bananas.

My mom moral panicked, she was way more worried about us getting shanked or getting caught up in some nonsense.

- It was a lot of fun.

It also provided them a variety of other skills, leadership skills and negotiation skills.

- [Male Host] And for Diaz, as a young immigrant from the Dominican Republic, the game had special meaning.

- This was a revolution.

Being a bunch of kids of color in a society that tells us we're nothing.

Being permitted under our own power to be heroic.

To have agency, to do the hero stuff.

To take and be on adventures.

There was nothing like it for us.

It was very, very, very, very impactful.

- [Male Host] While some parents used to worry about what kids were playing.

Now they're more likely to be worried about how they're playing.

- [Male Broadcaster] Screen time, what's the right amount for modern kids?

- Cell phones and social media have revolutionized the way we live but how is plugging in changed the way your kids are growing up?

- This is the biggest parenting issue of our time.

- Through the 20th century, you have this tension between free play and controlled media.

I mean, we were concerned about what sitting in darkened movie theaters would do to our children.

Just wait 30 years and they will be worried about what their children are doing and it will no doubt be something different than sexting and bullying as we know it today.

This is not a new phenomenon.

It just changes with each new technology.

- [Male Host] The American Academy of Pediatrics says that in this media saturated age, it's important for kids to use their imaginations in free play.

(children chattering) And in a twist, the role playing games that set off a moral panic in the past, may look more like a solution to getting kids off screens and encouraging them to spend time playing face to face.

(children chattering) - It's a great thing to dream yourself in other places and it helps understand who you are, it's just nice to spend a lot of time thinking, imagining, in a group, collaborating.

- Bobby is awesome.

- [Junot] Imagination is a good thing.

Very powerful.

(gong and cheering)