April 16, 2021 • 36 mins
When James Dallas Egbert III was reported missing from his college dorm - one of America's most flamboyant private detectives was summoned to solve the case. "Dallas" had many of the same problems that most teenagers face - but P.I. William Dear stoked fears that he might have fallen under the evil spell of a mysterious and sinister game.... Dungeons & Dragons.
The global panic about the dangers the role-playing game posed to impressionable young minds may seem quaint 40 years on - but again and again we show how fearful we are of creative endeavours we don't quite understand.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. This episode discusses death by suicide. If you're suffering
emotional distress or having suicidal thoughts. Support is available, for example,
from the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline and Raymond Chandler and
(00:40):
novels and then Humphrey Bogart movies. It often begins with
a telephone call. Strange to say in real life it
often begins yet way too Those are the words of
William Dear. He's going to take us on an adventure
that's full of thrills, surprises and terrors. William Dear is
(01:01):
one of the most famous private detectives in the world. Dashing, mustachioed,
sporting a vast gold ring. He's a star with his
own private play, and this telephone call in August nineteen
seventy nine was going to get him started on one
of his most infamous cases. On the other end of
(01:22):
the telephone was a surgeon from the same part of
North Texas as William Dear. The two men had met
a few times. My nephew has disappeared. He was taking
a summer course at Michigan State University in East Lansing.
What had happened and he didn't just run off he's
not that kind of cute. He loves school. In fact,
(01:45):
he's considered to be a genius. The boy James Dallas
Egbert the Third or Dallas, was just sixteen years old.
He graduated from high school at thirteen, entered college at fourteen.
I'm telling you, Dear, he's not the type to just
go on the road. Well maybe and maybe not. Young
(02:09):
Dallas had been missing for eight days already. William Dear
called Dallas's parents, mister Jeers and God, I'm so desperate
about my son. I don't know if he's committed suicide
and is lying in some ditch or what. Maybe he's
been kidnapped. Deer's team was soon packing for the trip
(02:29):
to East Lansing, Michigan. There was an expert pilot at
a sniper Vietnam vette. They assembled telephoto lenses, bugging devices,
tracking systems, and spy cameras. Deer himself was running through
the possibilities. Most of them were mundane. One of them
(02:49):
would prove to be truly fantastical. I'm Tim Harford, and
you're listening to cautionary tales. The simplest explanation of Dallas's
(03:25):
disappearance was that the young man had killed himself. That
was William Deer's instinct. It was also Anna Egbert's. According
to Deer's account, she blamed herself. Dallas called him me
on August twelfth. He was so happy because he got
a three point five and a computer science course. I
(03:48):
told him it should have been a four point. Though
Deer's team started asking questions around the university. What they
discovered deepened the fear that this was a case of suicide.
Dallas was depressed, but Deer also asked what did Dallas
like to do with his spare time. His classmates said
that he liked computers. At the time, computers were rare
(04:11):
and mysterious, and Dallas did some other mysterious things too.
But then so did William Dear. For example, when he
received an anonymous tip that Dallas used to risk a
kind of thrill seeking dare lying down on the railroad
tracks and letting the trains pass over him, Deer decided
(04:32):
that he really needed to put himself in Dallas's position. Literally,
I laid down on railroad ties and tried to imagine
myself as Dallas. Was this how Dallas felt. His colleague
screamed a warning the oncoming train had a cattle catcher.
(04:54):
William Dear scrambled off the tracks just in time. No,
couldn't have been a train. If Dallas had been hit
by a train, surely his body would have been found
soon enough. It did seem likely that Dallas was dead.
But if he was dead, where was the body? William
(05:20):
Deer couldn't rid himself of the suspicion that there was
something rather different behind Dallas's disappearance, something fantastically strange. A game,
a game that reportedly hundreds of students were playing in dark,
humid tunnels beneath the campus, a game called Dungeons and Dragons. Now,
(05:50):
William Dear didn't know what Dungeons and Dragons was. Neither
did Dallas's friends. I don't know how to play it,
but I do know that you can't play if you're
a dumbass. But what kind of game is it? William
Deer received phone calls, There were rumors. He tried to
(06:11):
piece together clues. It was difficult to understand. You might
find this bafflement odd. Dungeons and Dragons is pretty mainstream
these days. You might well have played a game yourself.
But in nineteen seventy nine. In nineteen seventy nine, Dungeons
and Dragons was pretty much unknown. Dallas's disappearance was going
(06:34):
to change all that. As William Dear explained in his
subsequent book titled The Dungeon Master, he wanted to get
into those mysterious tunnels to search for Dallas's body in
order to pressure Michigan State University into giving access to
a celebrity detective from Texas. Deer frequently spoke to the
(06:56):
press about his Dungeons and Dragons hypothesis. The newspapers lapped
it up. Tunnels are searched for missing student, reported The
New York Times, explaining that Dallas might have become lost
in the tunnels, which carry heat to campus buildings, while
playing an elaborate version of a bizarre, intellectual game called
(07:17):
Dungeons and Dragons. If you've noticed there's a lot of
vague talk about this game, how it's intellectual and bizarre
and you can't play if you're a dumbass, but no specifics,
You're right. Dungeons and Dragons was a blank canvas onto
which parents, media critics, and celebrity detectives could project any
(07:42):
anxiety in the informational vacuum rumors grew. Apparently people wore costumes.
Apparently a dungeon master would lead quests around the tunnels.
In the scalding heat and the darkness and the stench.
You'd have to put your hand into crevices and there
(08:02):
might be rotting calfs liver in there, or spaghetti to
represent an orc's brain, or in my treasure. Apparently there
were more than one hundred dungeons in the East Lansing area.
And if you don't know what that means, don't worry.
William Deer didn't either, but he had a theory. Whatever
(08:23):
this strange game was, whether it involved dungeons or rotten liver,
or all sorts of other things that William Dear didn't understand,
it might have something to do with Dallas's disappearance. And
since William Deer was an investigator, heck he was going
to investigate. He called a hobby store, got the contact
(08:45):
details of one of these so called dungeon masters and
offered him fifty bucks to drop everything and initiate Deer
in the Mysteries of Dungeons and Dragons sixty bucks if
it was good. Back in nineteen seventy nine, that was
a lot of money. I didn't know what to expect
(09:06):
from my dungeon master. Would he show up in a
Merland castle with a funny pointed cap. I knew he
would have complete control over the circumstances of the fantasy
adventure on which I was about to embark when the
(09:30):
young man knocked on the door. He and his friend
were both wearing jeans, sweaters and sneakers, and rather than
leading deer into the tunnels to mine for Calf's liver,
he pulled out a pencil and paper, some books, and
some dice. The adventure was about to begin. Cautionary tails
(09:56):
will be back in a moment. William Dear didn't wear
a pointy hat. He didn't have to dip his hand
into dark crevices in the tunnels under Michigan State University.
He just got into character, pretending to be a wizard
(10:17):
named Tor who was accompanied by a sneak thief named Dan.
Nor did Dear visit any tunnels. He just sat at
a table describing what Tor was doing in his vivid
imagination tour, and Dan got into various scrapes around a
medieval town, scrambling through an escape tunnel pursued by some guards,
(10:39):
being attacked by giant rats, being taken prisoner by orcs,
and finally triumphing thanks to a combination of bluff and cunning.
All this took place in the Theater of the Mind,
with the dungeon master simply describing what they saw and
with the aid of a few dice rolls, whether their
(11:00):
schemes succeeded or failed. In fact, the game wasn't nearly
as odd as all the rumors suggested. Yes, the stuff
about wizards and orcs is a bit strange, but then
Star Wars, with its Jedy nights and dark powers and
the mysterious Force, had just been a smash hit. The
(11:21):
animated film of The Lord of the Rings had just
been released, too. Nothing's more culturally mainstream than wizards and
heroes dice pencils sitting around a table playing Let's Pretend
was all very tame, But William Dear had fun. In fact,
(11:43):
he worried that this game of the imagination might just
be too much fun. Maybe for a troubled mind it
could be dangerous. Dallas might actually have begun to live
the game, not just to play it. Dungeons and Dragons
could have absorbed him so much that his mind had
(12:06):
slipped through the fragile barrier. But in reality and fantasy,
if there is a time and a place that the
fragile barrier between reality and fantasy first broke down, perhaps
it was Saint Paul, Minnesota in nineteen sixty nine. Behind
(12:28):
this breakdown was a young physics graduate named David Wesley.
Wesley was a founder of the Twin Cities Military Miniatures Group,
a wargaming club. Wargames are more realistic descendants of chess,
allowing players to re enact battles from history with model
soldiers on a realistic miniature battlefield. Robert Lewis Stevenson, the
(12:51):
author of Treasure Island, was a war gamer, so was HG. Wells.
Wargames can be used for serious military training. David Westley,
who was in the Army Reserves himself, was interested in
these training exercises, where making decisions over a tabletop battlefield
might prepare a young officer for the real thing over
(13:12):
in Vietnam. To be useful, a training war game couldn't
be restricted to a limited set of moves as in chess.
Players should be able to dream up all sorts of tricks,
and tactics, which meant the game needed a referee to
use his or her judgment when a player tried something unusual.
The game of war was open ended and unpredictable, just
(13:36):
like war itself. In a war game set in eighteen
o six in the fictional Prussian town of Braunstein, David
Wesley took this open endedness to the next level. As
with a normal war game, he put players in charge
of Napoleon's French army and the Prussian resistance, but then
(13:57):
he assigned rather more unusual roles. One player, for example,
was given the role of the chancellor of Braunstein's university.
What could he do well anything. He didn't command any troops,
but he could rally the students and urge them to
join the resistance. Or he could challenge another player to
a duel, perhaps over the affections of a lady. Another
(14:20):
player's character started in jail. Any of these players could
attempt anything Wesley, as referee, had to improvise. The experimental
game was a chaotic series of whispered conferences between the
players and Wesley, the referee. It took ages, and the
French and the Prussians never even fired a shot not
(14:42):
so much a war game as a phony war game.
Wesley felt like it had been a flop. Then the
players told him they loved it. One of those players
was Dave Arnisson, who seized Westley's idea with both hands
in a follow up game set in a Banana Republic.
Arnson started as a student revolutionary, but managed to convince
(15:05):
the other players he was working for the CIA. He
ran things around them, not by rolling dice or pushing
pieces around the map, but by acting the part and
bluffing his way to success. What Wesley and Arnison and
the group had invented together was a strange combination of
a classical war game, a military training exercise, and an
(15:27):
improvised acting class. It came to be known as a
role playing game, the first commercial role playing game, designed
in part by Dave Arnison. Could have been about Napoleonic
battles or pretending to be in the CIA, but it wasn't.
It was about heroes and wizards exploring the tunnels beneath
(15:47):
the medieval castle. It was called you guessed it, Dungeons
and Dragons, And it was dungeons and dragons that William
Deer Feared had driven Dallas Egbert into some kind of
delusional state, but he imagined he was a wizard. So
does the barrier between reality and fan I see breakdown
(16:10):
in a role playing game? Well, maybe a bit, But
the same is true for novels or movies. I don't
watch horror movies. I don't like the way they scare me.
I cried uncontrollably at the end of Cinema Paradiso. Did
the barrier between reality and fantasy break down at that moment?
(16:31):
I suppose it did, But there's nothing shameful or dangerous
about that. And yet there was something different about these
role playing games, something that drove America into a state
of moral panic. Maybe it was the fact that, as
I suppose I've just demonstrated, they are quite hard to describe.
(16:51):
But for many people it must have been the context
in which they first heard of the game Dungeons and Dragons.
Isn't that the game that poor kid was playing when
he died? Newspapers such as The New York Times and
the San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner try to get their
heads around what the game actually was and how people
(17:13):
played it. Words such as cult and bizarre were often used,
but the publicity fueled demand. The game briefly appears in Et,
which was released in nineteen eighty two, and at the
same time but less favorably, in Mazes and Monsters, a
TV movie inspired by the giddy media reports about Dallas
(17:36):
Egbert's disappearance. Tom Hanks and his friends get caught up
in a deadly game of fantasy until they take it
too far. In Mazes and Monsters, a young Tom Hanks
plays a teenager who completely loses his grip on reality
while playing the game. This is only a game. Mazes
(17:59):
and Monsters seventy three, UZTV, seventeen. The other thing that
happened in nineteen eighty two was that a young man
named Irving Pulling killed himself. His mother, Patricia Pulling, was
convinced that Dungeons and Dragons was involved. Indeed, she sued
(18:19):
Irving's school principle, claiming that Irving's suicide was a response
to having a curse put on his character. Patricia Pulling
even appeared on sixty Minutes. The creators of Dungeons and
Dragons complained that sixty Minutes had misrepresented two other teenage
suicides as being connected to the game, Despite letters from
(18:41):
the bereaved mothers saying otherwise. In her grief, Patricia Pulling
described Dungeons and Dragons as a fantasy role playing game
which uses demonology, witchcraft, voodoo, murder, rape, blasphemy, suicide, assassination, insanity, sex, perversion, homosexuality, prostitution,
satanic type rituals, gambling, barbarism, cannibalism, sadism, desecration, demons, summoning, necromantics, divination,
(19:08):
and other teachings. Now, a role playing game can describe
all sorts of activities, just like a novel or a movie.
But Harry Potter uses witchcraft, and not many people lose
sleep over Harry Potter. On the other hand, people seemed
willing to believe anything about this mysterious game. There are
(19:33):
sixes involved in the pieces of the game, explained one
religious critic of Dungeons and Dragons. The number of the
beast and all that. But I think he was referring
to dice. But it wasn't just the hardline evangelicals who
worried about Dungeons and Dragons. In nineteen eighty four, a
baffled police chief blamed a teenage suicide on the game.
(19:56):
My understanding is that once you reach a certain point
where you are the master, your only way out is death.
This claim is analogous to saying that once you become
a tennis umpire, only way to quit is to kill yourself.
It makes no sense, but if you know nothing at
all about the game, you don't realize that it makes
(20:18):
no sense. In nineteen eighty eight, Tippa Goore, then wife
of Algore, claimed that Dungeons and Dragons had been linked
to nearly fifty teenage suicides and homicides, but there are
thousands of teenage suicides each year, tens of thousands over
the course of the nineteen eighties. As a whole, Dungeons
(20:40):
and Dragons was becoming a popular game. Of course, some
of those suicide victims would have played the game, just
as others would have listened to heavy metal law been vegetarians.
But people who should have known better took role playing
games all too seriously. In nineteen ninety, the US Secret
Service took the panic to the next level. They raided
(21:04):
the headquarters of one role playing games publisher and confiscated
their compute. The Secret Service had become convinced that a
role playing game about futuristic cyborgs and Hackers was in
fact a practical guide for computer crime. This was beyond odd.
The game included rules for hacking computers by plugging your
(21:27):
brain directly into the net and uploading your consciousness. It
is a technique that seems unlikely to bear fruit for
any aspiring hacker. The US Secret Service were unmoved right
up to the point at which they were successfully sued.
Remind me who exactly is confused about the boundary between
(21:49):
reality and fantasy. From the Vantini point of today, it's
easy to laugh, but perhaps we shouldn't feel quite so smug.
Back in February twenty nineteen, parents were anxiously warning each
other about a new threat to their children. Please read
(22:11):
this is real. There is this thing called Momo that's
instructing kids to kill themselves. Inform everyone you can. That
tweet received tens of thousands of retweets, as did other
similar warnings, but as with the Dungeons and Dragons panic,
the details were a bit vague. There was an unsettling
(22:34):
picture of a creepy puppet. One claim was that somehow
this puppet Momo, would use WhatsApp messages to deliver its
deadly instructions. Another was that children's television programs had been hacked,
although what exactly that meant wasn't clear. Schools sent out
messages of warning, so did some police forces, so did newspapers,
(22:58):
even the BBC. In each case, the evidence that there
was a problem was simply that others were reporting that
there was a problem, and you can't be too careful,
except that schools even gathered children together to warn them
about Momo, which was predictably, absolutely terrifying for the children.
(23:20):
You can see where this is going. There is no
Momo puppet that creepy images from a Tokyo art gallery's
exhibition about ghosts. There were no hacked television programs. There
have been no credible reports of any Momo related suicides.
I'm tempted to add there is no Momo challenge, but
(23:41):
that wouldn't be quite right. The Momo challenge is very real,
but it exists not as a deadly game shared among children,
but as a panicky myth shared among their parents. What
we're really talking about here is the anxiety of parents
who don't really understand what their kids are into, and
(24:04):
they feel bad about it. That's just as true today
as it was a generation when the panic was not
about WhatsApp but about wizards. Cautionary tales will return shortly.
(24:27):
In nineteen eighty five, the cultural critic Neil Postman published
an influential book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, in which he
lamented the effect of television on the intellectual, cultural, and
political life of the United States. Adapting an idea from
his teacher Marshall McLuhan, Postman argued that the medium is
(24:48):
the metaphor that any communications medium, from the spoken word
to the written word to primetime TV, subtly influenced the
kind of ideas that could be communicated. Fifty years ago,
movies and TV favored good looks and strong, simple stories,
and a former Cowboy actor, Ronald Reagan, was the perfect
(25:11):
fit for the time. It's easy to read Postman as
a profit of inevitable cultural decline, with each new medium
stupider than the last. But decline is not inevitable. Consider
how TV drama has been changed by the availability first
of affordable box sets and then on demand streaming. TV
(25:32):
producers would have to assume that people would miss episodes
and so would make simple, predictable episodic comedies and soap operas.
Now writers and directors can reasonably expect that people will
catch up on any episodes they missed, or even binge
watch an entire season in a weekend. The result longer,
more complex story arcs and characters who grow over time.
(25:56):
This isn't the result of some sudden cultural hunger for
more sophisticated storytelling. A subtle difference to the medium also
changes the metaphor. Movies invite us to value beauty and
classic story arcs. Streaming TV drama valorizes complex plots and
character development, and reality TV thrives on attention seeking and treachery.
(26:20):
So then, what is the underlying metaphor of a role
playing game? The game's demand imagination. They're collaborative. You can't
really play by yourself. They're active, rather than passive. If
you sit back and watch, nothing happens. You need to create,
not just observe the creativity of others. A collaborative, imaginative,
(26:44):
and actively creative pastime doesn't sound so bad to me.
After all, we're constantly being told of the importance of creativity,
the creative class, the creative economy, or simply the need
for every child to be creative in school. And yet,
and we actually see some creativity. We can't quite comprehend
(27:06):
what we're looking at. Back in nineteen seventy nine, Dungeons
and Dragons seemed to be a bit too creative for
William Dear and the journalists and commentators who were intrigued
by his theory. The story became bigger than Dallas Egbert himself,
and the question of what happened to Dallas was forgotten.
(27:29):
Mazes and monsters, For example, the movie in which Tom Hanks,
his character becomes utterly delusional, stabbing someone, hallucinating monsters and
trying to leap from the top of the World Trade Center. Robbie,
what are you doing? I'm going to fly is often
thought to be loosely based on Dallas's disappearance. Don't you
want to mind here? Jadwigat I remember, Let's just say
(27:55):
that in this case, the fantasy and the reality were
a very long way apart. Reading William Deer's breathless book
The Dungeon Master, it's easy to be carried away with
the tales of chits and steakouts and lying down in
front of trains. But when you have time to stop
and read carefully, the story becomes a lot more mundane.
(28:19):
When I first heard about the steam tunnels beneath Michigan
State University, I imagine students exploring inside huge steam filled pipes.
But when I looked up steam tunnels on Wikipedia, I
was redirected to an entry on utility corridors, which is
a rather more prosaic name. The corridors contain hot pipes,
(28:42):
but nobody gets inside the pipes themselves. William Dear describes
the tunnels as stinking, hellish, and deadly. Lieutenant Bill Wardell
of the MSU Campus Police told The Washington Post they're
hot and dirty, but not as bad as he portrays them.
Utility corridors have existed in various universities since the nineteen twenties,
(29:05):
and students have been messing around in them long before
Dungeons and Dragons existed. A team of men, including William Deer,
explored the tunnels thoroughly. Dallas wasn't down there, but he
had been missing for weeks, and it was increasingly hard
to see what rolling dice around a gaming table had
to do with that. Dallas Egbert's parents seemed to publicly
(29:30):
accept William Deer's media friendly theory about a Dungeons and
Dragon's game gone wrong, but Deer's investigations brought more straightforward
possibilities to light. Dallas had a drug habit, so perhaps
a drug deal had gone awry, and Dallas was also
a member of the campus organization for gay students. William
(29:51):
Deer mused about how what he called the gays might
somehow have been involved in Dallas's disappearance. More likely, Dallas's
sexuality simply compounded his risk of self harm. Even today,
in our more enlightened times, gay teenagers are substantially greater
risk of suicide. But William Deer made the dungeons and
(30:15):
dragons theory seem so compelling. The case ended as it began,
with a phone call, mister Dear, this is Dallas, and
then Dallas burst into tears. Soon enough, he was reunited
(30:41):
with his parents, and William Dear was fending off a
pack of newshounds desperate for the scoop. It was simple enough.
Dallas had indeed been severely depressed, and he had indeed
tried to kill himself. Fortunately it not succeeded, but he
had run away When he called William Deer. It was
(31:02):
from all the way down in Louisiana, leading Deer and
his crew of elite operatives to fly over his private plane.
They affect what Deer describes as the tense rescue, but
which on a second reading, is simply two grown men
knocking on the door of a rented room to find
a tearful teenage boy ready to go home. Later, Dallas
(31:26):
told Deer the story over a hamburger. Apparently he did
like to hang out in the steam tunnels. I could
go down there and nobody would bother me. And he
also enjoyed playing dungeons and dragons. When I played a character,
I was that character. I didn't bring along all my
personal problems with me. It's a terrific way to escape.
(31:47):
And while the media clung onto the tale of a
boy who had been lost to a world of mazes
and monsters, and evangelical campaigners warned of satanic rituals and
Tippa Goore feared an epidemic of D and D related suicide,
the truth was simpler and harder to bear. Dallas disappeared
(32:09):
because he ran away. He ran away because he was
suicidely unhappy. Some young people are. And I'm sorry to
tell you that Dallas did not recover from his depression.
He took his own life a year later, but the
narrative had moved on. An isolated and depressed young man
(32:32):
had been largely forgotten. I have a confession to make.
I too, am a role player. I can't imagine you're
terribly shocked, but I love these games. To me, there
is important to creative outlet as writing my books or
(32:55):
this podcast, and not everyone gets to publish a book
or present a podcast with respected actors and its own composer.
But anyone can be creative in a game. I learned
to play in the middle of the Satanic Panic of
the nineteen eighties. I remember having to have a long
conversation with a senior teacher at my school who was
(33:16):
concerned that the game might open me up to evil influences.
To his credit, he listened and changed his mind. And
I'm still playing games sometimes with the same people I
went to school with, some of my oldest and closest friends.
My hobby is a pastime that's as creative as drawing, writing,
(33:37):
or drama, that's as collaborative as a team sport, that
involves no drinks stronger than coffee, no mind altering chemicals
more potent than whatever it is they used to flavor
Derito's and alas no sex at all. The kids tell
me that these days Dungeons and Dragons is cool. Maybe
(33:58):
I'm just thankful that despite everything, the hobby has survived
and flourished. William Dear has survived and flourished two penning
works such as OJ Is Innocent and I Can Prove
It and appearing in the TV documentary Alien Autopsy Fact
or Fiction. He was interested in the entertainment business back
(34:21):
in the nineteen eighties too. He had been urging Dallas
and his family to work with him on a movie
about the case, But as Dallas's mother Anna said, it
was never all that exciting. He just got on a
bus and went as far as his money would take him. Yet,
when William Dear told the story, it was an unforgettable
(34:44):
tale the fragile barrier between reality and fantasy. Indeed, the
key sources for this episode are of Dice and Men
by David Ewalt and Playing at the World by John Peterson,
(35:06):
and of course The Dungeon Master by William Dear. For
a full list of references, see Tim Harford dot com.
(35:29):
Cautionary Tales is written by me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright.
It's produced by Ryan Dilley and Marilyn Rust. The sound
design and original music are the work of Pascal Wise.
Julia Barton edited the scripts. Starring in this series of
Cautionary Tales are Helena Bonham, Carter and Jeffrey Wright, alongside
(35:52):
Nazar Alderazzi, Ed Gochen, Melanie Gutteridge, Rachel Hanshaw, Cobnor Holbrook Smith,
Greg Lockett, Siam Unrowe, and Rufus Wright. The show also
wouldn't have been possible without the work of Mia LaBelle,
Jacob Wisburg, Hell of Fame, John Schnarz, Carlie mcgliori, Eric Sandler,
(36:14):
Emily Rostock, Maggie Taylor, Daniella Lakhan, and Maya Kanig. Cautionary
Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like
the show, please remember to share, rate, and review.
Pushkin. This episode discusses death by suicide. If you're suffering
emotional distress or having suicidal thoughts. Support is available, for example,
from the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline and Raymond Chandler and
(00:40):
novels and then Humphrey Bogart movies. It often begins with
a telephone call. Strange to say in real life it
often begins yet way too Those are the words of
William Dear. He's going to take us on an adventure
that's full of thrills, surprises and terrors. William Dear is
(01:01):
one of the most famous private detectives in the world. Dashing, mustachioed,
sporting a vast gold ring. He's a star with his
own private play, and this telephone call in August nineteen
seventy nine was going to get him started on one
of his most infamous cases. On the other end of
(01:22):
the telephone was a surgeon from the same part of
North Texas as William Dear. The two men had met
a few times. My nephew has disappeared. He was taking
a summer course at Michigan State University in East Lansing.
What had happened and he didn't just run off he's
not that kind of cute. He loves school. In fact,
(01:45):
he's considered to be a genius. The boy James Dallas
Egbert the Third or Dallas, was just sixteen years old.
He graduated from high school at thirteen, entered college at fourteen.
I'm telling you, Dear, he's not the type to just
go on the road. Well maybe and maybe not. Young
(02:09):
Dallas had been missing for eight days already. William Dear
called Dallas's parents, mister Jeers and God, I'm so desperate
about my son. I don't know if he's committed suicide
and is lying in some ditch or what. Maybe he's
been kidnapped. Deer's team was soon packing for the trip
(02:29):
to East Lansing, Michigan. There was an expert pilot at
a sniper Vietnam vette. They assembled telephoto lenses, bugging devices,
tracking systems, and spy cameras. Deer himself was running through
the possibilities. Most of them were mundane. One of them
(02:49):
would prove to be truly fantastical. I'm Tim Harford, and
you're listening to cautionary tales. The simplest explanation of Dallas's
(03:25):
disappearance was that the young man had killed himself. That
was William Deer's instinct. It was also Anna Egbert's. According
to Deer's account, she blamed herself. Dallas called him me
on August twelfth. He was so happy because he got
a three point five and a computer science course. I
(03:48):
told him it should have been a four point. Though
Deer's team started asking questions around the university. What they
discovered deepened the fear that this was a case of suicide.
Dallas was depressed, but Deer also asked what did Dallas
like to do with his spare time. His classmates said
that he liked computers. At the time, computers were rare
(04:11):
and mysterious, and Dallas did some other mysterious things too.
But then so did William Dear. For example, when he
received an anonymous tip that Dallas used to risk a
kind of thrill seeking dare lying down on the railroad
tracks and letting the trains pass over him, Deer decided
(04:32):
that he really needed to put himself in Dallas's position. Literally,
I laid down on railroad ties and tried to imagine
myself as Dallas. Was this how Dallas felt. His colleague
screamed a warning the oncoming train had a cattle catcher.
(04:54):
William Dear scrambled off the tracks just in time. No,
couldn't have been a train. If Dallas had been hit
by a train, surely his body would have been found
soon enough. It did seem likely that Dallas was dead.
But if he was dead, where was the body? William
(05:20):
Deer couldn't rid himself of the suspicion that there was
something rather different behind Dallas's disappearance, something fantastically strange. A game,
a game that reportedly hundreds of students were playing in dark,
humid tunnels beneath the campus, a game called Dungeons and Dragons. Now,
(05:50):
William Dear didn't know what Dungeons and Dragons was. Neither
did Dallas's friends. I don't know how to play it,
but I do know that you can't play if you're
a dumbass. But what kind of game is it? William
Deer received phone calls, There were rumors. He tried to
(06:11):
piece together clues. It was difficult to understand. You might
find this bafflement odd. Dungeons and Dragons is pretty mainstream
these days. You might well have played a game yourself.
But in nineteen seventy nine. In nineteen seventy nine, Dungeons
and Dragons was pretty much unknown. Dallas's disappearance was going
(06:34):
to change all that. As William Dear explained in his
subsequent book titled The Dungeon Master, he wanted to get
into those mysterious tunnels to search for Dallas's body in
order to pressure Michigan State University into giving access to
a celebrity detective from Texas. Deer frequently spoke to the
(06:56):
press about his Dungeons and Dragons hypothesis. The newspapers lapped
it up. Tunnels are searched for missing student, reported The
New York Times, explaining that Dallas might have become lost
in the tunnels, which carry heat to campus buildings, while
playing an elaborate version of a bizarre, intellectual game called
(07:17):
Dungeons and Dragons. If you've noticed there's a lot of
vague talk about this game, how it's intellectual and bizarre
and you can't play if you're a dumbass, but no specifics,
You're right. Dungeons and Dragons was a blank canvas onto
which parents, media critics, and celebrity detectives could project any
(07:42):
anxiety in the informational vacuum rumors grew. Apparently people wore costumes.
Apparently a dungeon master would lead quests around the tunnels.
In the scalding heat and the darkness and the stench.
You'd have to put your hand into crevices and there
(08:02):
might be rotting calfs liver in there, or spaghetti to
represent an orc's brain, or in my treasure. Apparently there
were more than one hundred dungeons in the East Lansing area.
And if you don't know what that means, don't worry.
William Deer didn't either, but he had a theory. Whatever
(08:23):
this strange game was, whether it involved dungeons or rotten liver,
or all sorts of other things that William Dear didn't understand,
it might have something to do with Dallas's disappearance. And
since William Deer was an investigator, heck he was going
to investigate. He called a hobby store, got the contact
(08:45):
details of one of these so called dungeon masters and
offered him fifty bucks to drop everything and initiate Deer
in the Mysteries of Dungeons and Dragons sixty bucks if
it was good. Back in nineteen seventy nine, that was
a lot of money. I didn't know what to expect
(09:06):
from my dungeon master. Would he show up in a
Merland castle with a funny pointed cap. I knew he
would have complete control over the circumstances of the fantasy
adventure on which I was about to embark when the
(09:30):
young man knocked on the door. He and his friend
were both wearing jeans, sweaters and sneakers, and rather than
leading deer into the tunnels to mine for Calf's liver,
he pulled out a pencil and paper, some books, and
some dice. The adventure was about to begin. Cautionary tails
(09:56):
will be back in a moment. William Dear didn't wear
a pointy hat. He didn't have to dip his hand
into dark crevices in the tunnels under Michigan State University.
He just got into character, pretending to be a wizard
(10:17):
named Tor who was accompanied by a sneak thief named Dan.
Nor did Dear visit any tunnels. He just sat at
a table describing what Tor was doing in his vivid
imagination tour, and Dan got into various scrapes around a
medieval town, scrambling through an escape tunnel pursued by some guards,
(10:39):
being attacked by giant rats, being taken prisoner by orcs,
and finally triumphing thanks to a combination of bluff and cunning.
All this took place in the Theater of the Mind,
with the dungeon master simply describing what they saw and
with the aid of a few dice rolls, whether their
(11:00):
schemes succeeded or failed. In fact, the game wasn't nearly
as odd as all the rumors suggested. Yes, the stuff
about wizards and orcs is a bit strange, but then
Star Wars, with its Jedy nights and dark powers and
the mysterious Force, had just been a smash hit. The
(11:21):
animated film of The Lord of the Rings had just
been released, too. Nothing's more culturally mainstream than wizards and
heroes dice pencils sitting around a table playing Let's Pretend
was all very tame, But William Dear had fun. In fact,
(11:43):
he worried that this game of the imagination might just
be too much fun. Maybe for a troubled mind it
could be dangerous. Dallas might actually have begun to live
the game, not just to play it. Dungeons and Dragons
could have absorbed him so much that his mind had
(12:06):
slipped through the fragile barrier. But in reality and fantasy,
if there is a time and a place that the
fragile barrier between reality and fantasy first broke down, perhaps
it was Saint Paul, Minnesota in nineteen sixty nine. Behind
(12:28):
this breakdown was a young physics graduate named David Wesley.
Wesley was a founder of the Twin Cities Military Miniatures Group,
a wargaming club. Wargames are more realistic descendants of chess,
allowing players to re enact battles from history with model
soldiers on a realistic miniature battlefield. Robert Lewis Stevenson, the
(12:51):
author of Treasure Island, was a war gamer, so was HG. Wells.
Wargames can be used for serious military training. David Westley,
who was in the Army Reserves himself, was interested in
these training exercises, where making decisions over a tabletop battlefield
might prepare a young officer for the real thing over
(13:12):
in Vietnam. To be useful, a training war game couldn't
be restricted to a limited set of moves as in chess.
Players should be able to dream up all sorts of tricks,
and tactics, which meant the game needed a referee to
use his or her judgment when a player tried something unusual.
The game of war was open ended and unpredictable, just
(13:36):
like war itself. In a war game set in eighteen
o six in the fictional Prussian town of Braunstein, David
Wesley took this open endedness to the next level. As
with a normal war game, he put players in charge
of Napoleon's French army and the Prussian resistance, but then
(13:57):
he assigned rather more unusual roles. One player, for example,
was given the role of the chancellor of Braunstein's university.
What could he do well anything. He didn't command any troops,
but he could rally the students and urge them to
join the resistance. Or he could challenge another player to
a duel, perhaps over the affections of a lady. Another
(14:20):
player's character started in jail. Any of these players could
attempt anything Wesley, as referee, had to improvise. The experimental
game was a chaotic series of whispered conferences between the
players and Wesley, the referee. It took ages, and the
French and the Prussians never even fired a shot not
(14:42):
so much a war game as a phony war game.
Wesley felt like it had been a flop. Then the
players told him they loved it. One of those players
was Dave Arnisson, who seized Westley's idea with both hands
in a follow up game set in a Banana Republic.
Arnson started as a student revolutionary, but managed to convince
(15:05):
the other players he was working for the CIA. He
ran things around them, not by rolling dice or pushing
pieces around the map, but by acting the part and
bluffing his way to success. What Wesley and Arnison and
the group had invented together was a strange combination of
a classical war game, a military training exercise, and an
(15:27):
improvised acting class. It came to be known as a
role playing game, the first commercial role playing game, designed
in part by Dave Arnison. Could have been about Napoleonic
battles or pretending to be in the CIA, but it wasn't.
It was about heroes and wizards exploring the tunnels beneath
(15:47):
the medieval castle. It was called you guessed it, Dungeons
and Dragons, And it was dungeons and dragons that William
Deer Feared had driven Dallas Egbert into some kind of
delusional state, but he imagined he was a wizard. So
does the barrier between reality and fan I see breakdown
(16:10):
in a role playing game? Well, maybe a bit, But
the same is true for novels or movies. I don't
watch horror movies. I don't like the way they scare me.
I cried uncontrollably at the end of Cinema Paradiso. Did
the barrier between reality and fantasy break down at that moment?
(16:31):
I suppose it did, But there's nothing shameful or dangerous
about that. And yet there was something different about these
role playing games, something that drove America into a state
of moral panic. Maybe it was the fact that, as
I suppose I've just demonstrated, they are quite hard to describe.
(16:51):
But for many people it must have been the context
in which they first heard of the game Dungeons and Dragons.
Isn't that the game that poor kid was playing when
he died? Newspapers such as The New York Times and
the San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner try to get their
heads around what the game actually was and how people
(17:13):
played it. Words such as cult and bizarre were often used,
but the publicity fueled demand. The game briefly appears in Et,
which was released in nineteen eighty two, and at the
same time but less favorably, in Mazes and Monsters, a
TV movie inspired by the giddy media reports about Dallas
(17:36):
Egbert's disappearance. Tom Hanks and his friends get caught up
in a deadly game of fantasy until they take it
too far. In Mazes and Monsters, a young Tom Hanks
plays a teenager who completely loses his grip on reality
while playing the game. This is only a game. Mazes
(17:59):
and Monsters seventy three, UZTV, seventeen. The other thing that
happened in nineteen eighty two was that a young man
named Irving Pulling killed himself. His mother, Patricia Pulling, was
convinced that Dungeons and Dragons was involved. Indeed, she sued
(18:19):
Irving's school principle, claiming that Irving's suicide was a response
to having a curse put on his character. Patricia Pulling
even appeared on sixty Minutes. The creators of Dungeons and
Dragons complained that sixty Minutes had misrepresented two other teenage
suicides as being connected to the game, Despite letters from
(18:41):
the bereaved mothers saying otherwise. In her grief, Patricia Pulling
described Dungeons and Dragons as a fantasy role playing game
which uses demonology, witchcraft, voodoo, murder, rape, blasphemy, suicide, assassination, insanity, sex, perversion, homosexuality, prostitution,
satanic type rituals, gambling, barbarism, cannibalism, sadism, desecration, demons, summoning, necromantics, divination,
(19:08):
and other teachings. Now, a role playing game can describe
all sorts of activities, just like a novel or a movie.
But Harry Potter uses witchcraft, and not many people lose
sleep over Harry Potter. On the other hand, people seemed
willing to believe anything about this mysterious game. There are
(19:33):
sixes involved in the pieces of the game, explained one
religious critic of Dungeons and Dragons. The number of the
beast and all that. But I think he was referring
to dice. But it wasn't just the hardline evangelicals who
worried about Dungeons and Dragons. In nineteen eighty four, a
baffled police chief blamed a teenage suicide on the game.
(19:56):
My understanding is that once you reach a certain point
where you are the master, your only way out is death.
This claim is analogous to saying that once you become
a tennis umpire, only way to quit is to kill yourself.
It makes no sense, but if you know nothing at
all about the game, you don't realize that it makes
(20:18):
no sense. In nineteen eighty eight, Tippa Goore, then wife
of Algore, claimed that Dungeons and Dragons had been linked
to nearly fifty teenage suicides and homicides, but there are
thousands of teenage suicides each year, tens of thousands over
the course of the nineteen eighties. As a whole, Dungeons
(20:40):
and Dragons was becoming a popular game. Of course, some
of those suicide victims would have played the game, just
as others would have listened to heavy metal law been vegetarians.
But people who should have known better took role playing
games all too seriously. In nineteen ninety, the US Secret
Service took the panic to the next level. They raided
(21:04):
the headquarters of one role playing games publisher and confiscated
their compute. The Secret Service had become convinced that a
role playing game about futuristic cyborgs and Hackers was in
fact a practical guide for computer crime. This was beyond odd.
The game included rules for hacking computers by plugging your
(21:27):
brain directly into the net and uploading your consciousness. It
is a technique that seems unlikely to bear fruit for
any aspiring hacker. The US Secret Service were unmoved right
up to the point at which they were successfully sued.
Remind me who exactly is confused about the boundary between
(21:49):
reality and fantasy. From the Vantini point of today, it's
easy to laugh, but perhaps we shouldn't feel quite so smug.
Back in February twenty nineteen, parents were anxiously warning each
other about a new threat to their children. Please read
(22:11):
this is real. There is this thing called Momo that's
instructing kids to kill themselves. Inform everyone you can. That
tweet received tens of thousands of retweets, as did other
similar warnings, but as with the Dungeons and Dragons panic,
the details were a bit vague. There was an unsettling
(22:34):
picture of a creepy puppet. One claim was that somehow
this puppet Momo, would use WhatsApp messages to deliver its
deadly instructions. Another was that children's television programs had been hacked,
although what exactly that meant wasn't clear. Schools sent out
messages of warning, so did some police forces, so did newspapers,
(22:58):
even the BBC. In each case, the evidence that there
was a problem was simply that others were reporting that
there was a problem, and you can't be too careful,
except that schools even gathered children together to warn them
about Momo, which was predictably, absolutely terrifying for the children.
(23:20):
You can see where this is going. There is no
Momo puppet that creepy images from a Tokyo art gallery's
exhibition about ghosts. There were no hacked television programs. There
have been no credible reports of any Momo related suicides.
I'm tempted to add there is no Momo challenge, but
(23:41):
that wouldn't be quite right. The Momo challenge is very real,
but it exists not as a deadly game shared among children,
but as a panicky myth shared among their parents. What
we're really talking about here is the anxiety of parents
who don't really understand what their kids are into, and
(24:04):
they feel bad about it. That's just as true today
as it was a generation when the panic was not
about WhatsApp but about wizards. Cautionary tales will return shortly.
(24:27):
In nineteen eighty five, the cultural critic Neil Postman published
an influential book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, in which he
lamented the effect of television on the intellectual, cultural, and
political life of the United States. Adapting an idea from
his teacher Marshall McLuhan, Postman argued that the medium is
(24:48):
the metaphor that any communications medium, from the spoken word
to the written word to primetime TV, subtly influenced the
kind of ideas that could be communicated. Fifty years ago,
movies and TV favored good looks and strong, simple stories,
and a former Cowboy actor, Ronald Reagan, was the perfect
(25:11):
fit for the time. It's easy to read Postman as
a profit of inevitable cultural decline, with each new medium
stupider than the last. But decline is not inevitable. Consider
how TV drama has been changed by the availability first
of affordable box sets and then on demand streaming. TV
(25:32):
producers would have to assume that people would miss episodes
and so would make simple, predictable episodic comedies and soap operas.
Now writers and directors can reasonably expect that people will
catch up on any episodes they missed, or even binge
watch an entire season in a weekend. The result longer,
more complex story arcs and characters who grow over time.
(25:56):
This isn't the result of some sudden cultural hunger for
more sophisticated storytelling. A subtle difference to the medium also
changes the metaphor. Movies invite us to value beauty and
classic story arcs. Streaming TV drama valorizes complex plots and
character development, and reality TV thrives on attention seeking and treachery.
(26:20):
So then, what is the underlying metaphor of a role
playing game? The game's demand imagination. They're collaborative. You can't
really play by yourself. They're active, rather than passive. If
you sit back and watch, nothing happens. You need to create,
not just observe the creativity of others. A collaborative, imaginative,
(26:44):
and actively creative pastime doesn't sound so bad to me.
After all, we're constantly being told of the importance of creativity,
the creative class, the creative economy, or simply the need
for every child to be creative in school. And yet,
and we actually see some creativity. We can't quite comprehend
(27:06):
what we're looking at. Back in nineteen seventy nine, Dungeons
and Dragons seemed to be a bit too creative for
William Dear and the journalists and commentators who were intrigued
by his theory. The story became bigger than Dallas Egbert himself,
and the question of what happened to Dallas was forgotten.
(27:29):
Mazes and monsters, For example, the movie in which Tom Hanks,
his character becomes utterly delusional, stabbing someone, hallucinating monsters and
trying to leap from the top of the World Trade Center. Robbie,
what are you doing? I'm going to fly is often
thought to be loosely based on Dallas's disappearance. Don't you
want to mind here? Jadwigat I remember, Let's just say
(27:55):
that in this case, the fantasy and the reality were
a very long way apart. Reading William Deer's breathless book
The Dungeon Master, it's easy to be carried away with
the tales of chits and steakouts and lying down in
front of trains. But when you have time to stop
and read carefully, the story becomes a lot more mundane.
(28:19):
When I first heard about the steam tunnels beneath Michigan
State University, I imagine students exploring inside huge steam filled pipes.
But when I looked up steam tunnels on Wikipedia, I
was redirected to an entry on utility corridors, which is
a rather more prosaic name. The corridors contain hot pipes,
(28:42):
but nobody gets inside the pipes themselves. William Dear describes
the tunnels as stinking, hellish, and deadly. Lieutenant Bill Wardell
of the MSU Campus Police told The Washington Post they're
hot and dirty, but not as bad as he portrays them.
Utility corridors have existed in various universities since the nineteen twenties,
(29:05):
and students have been messing around in them long before
Dungeons and Dragons existed. A team of men, including William Deer,
explored the tunnels thoroughly. Dallas wasn't down there, but he
had been missing for weeks, and it was increasingly hard
to see what rolling dice around a gaming table had
to do with that. Dallas Egbert's parents seemed to publicly
(29:30):
accept William Deer's media friendly theory about a Dungeons and
Dragon's game gone wrong, but Deer's investigations brought more straightforward
possibilities to light. Dallas had a drug habit, so perhaps
a drug deal had gone awry, and Dallas was also
a member of the campus organization for gay students. William
(29:51):
Deer mused about how what he called the gays might
somehow have been involved in Dallas's disappearance. More likely, Dallas's
sexuality simply compounded his risk of self harm. Even today,
in our more enlightened times, gay teenagers are substantially greater
risk of suicide. But William Deer made the dungeons and
(30:15):
dragons theory seem so compelling. The case ended as it began,
with a phone call, mister Dear, this is Dallas, and
then Dallas burst into tears. Soon enough, he was reunited
(30:41):
with his parents, and William Dear was fending off a
pack of newshounds desperate for the scoop. It was simple enough.
Dallas had indeed been severely depressed, and he had indeed
tried to kill himself. Fortunately it not succeeded, but he
had run away When he called William Deer. It was
(31:02):
from all the way down in Louisiana, leading Deer and
his crew of elite operatives to fly over his private plane.
They affect what Deer describes as the tense rescue, but
which on a second reading, is simply two grown men
knocking on the door of a rented room to find
a tearful teenage boy ready to go home. Later, Dallas
(31:26):
told Deer the story over a hamburger. Apparently he did
like to hang out in the steam tunnels. I could
go down there and nobody would bother me. And he
also enjoyed playing dungeons and dragons. When I played a character,
I was that character. I didn't bring along all my
personal problems with me. It's a terrific way to escape.
(31:47):
And while the media clung onto the tale of a
boy who had been lost to a world of mazes
and monsters, and evangelical campaigners warned of satanic rituals and
Tippa Goore feared an epidemic of D and D related suicide,
the truth was simpler and harder to bear. Dallas disappeared
(32:09):
because he ran away. He ran away because he was
suicidely unhappy. Some young people are. And I'm sorry to
tell you that Dallas did not recover from his depression.
He took his own life a year later, but the
narrative had moved on. An isolated and depressed young man
(32:32):
had been largely forgotten. I have a confession to make.
I too, am a role player. I can't imagine you're
terribly shocked, but I love these games. To me, there
is important to creative outlet as writing my books or
(32:55):
this podcast, and not everyone gets to publish a book
or present a podcast with respected actors and its own composer.
But anyone can be creative in a game. I learned
to play in the middle of the Satanic Panic of
the nineteen eighties. I remember having to have a long
conversation with a senior teacher at my school who was
(33:16):
concerned that the game might open me up to evil influences.
To his credit, he listened and changed his mind. And
I'm still playing games sometimes with the same people I
went to school with, some of my oldest and closest friends.
My hobby is a pastime that's as creative as drawing, writing,
(33:37):
or drama, that's as collaborative as a team sport, that
involves no drinks stronger than coffee, no mind altering chemicals
more potent than whatever it is they used to flavor
Derito's and alas no sex at all. The kids tell
me that these days Dungeons and Dragons is cool. Maybe
(33:58):
I'm just thankful that despite everything, the hobby has survived
and flourished. William Dear has survived and flourished two penning
works such as OJ Is Innocent and I Can Prove
It and appearing in the TV documentary Alien Autopsy Fact
or Fiction. He was interested in the entertainment business back
(34:21):
in the nineteen eighties too. He had been urging Dallas
and his family to work with him on a movie
about the case, But as Dallas's mother Anna said, it
was never all that exciting. He just got on a
bus and went as far as his money would take him. Yet,
when William Dear told the story, it was an unforgettable
(34:44):
tale the fragile barrier between reality and fantasy. Indeed, the
key sources for this episode are of Dice and Men
by David Ewalt and Playing at the World by John Peterson,
(35:06):
and of course The Dungeon Master by William Dear. For
a full list of references, see Tim Harford dot com.
(35:29):
Cautionary Tales is written by me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright.
It's produced by Ryan Dilley and Marilyn Rust. The sound
design and original music are the work of Pascal Wise.
Julia Barton edited the scripts. Starring in this series of
Cautionary Tales are Helena Bonham, Carter and Jeffrey Wright, alongside
(35:52):
Nazar Alderazzi, Ed Gochen, Melanie Gutteridge, Rachel Hanshaw, Cobnor Holbrook Smith,
Greg Lockett, Siam Unrowe, and Rufus Wright. The show also
wouldn't have been possible without the work of Mia LaBelle,
Jacob Wisburg, Hell of Fame, John Schnarz, Carlie mcgliori, Eric Sandler,
(36:14):
Emily Rostock, Maggie Taylor, Daniella Lakhan, and Maya Kanig. Cautionary
Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like
the show, please remember to share, rate, and review.
Host
Tim Harford
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