Welcome to the Colette Podcast. My name is Claire Lehman and I am editor and chief of Colette.

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These young people are playing Dungeons and Dragons.

It's an enormously complicated game in which each player chooses an imaginary character he'll assume.

They're dwarfs, knights, and thieves, gods and devils, magic and spells. There are those who are fearful that the game in the hands of vulnerable kids could do harm.

Welcome to the Colette Podcast.

I'm Jonathan Kay.

And what you just heard is an excerpt from the introduction to a 1985-60 minute special

on the role-playing tabletop game Dungeons and Dragons, or as it's known, D&D.

I was a teenager at the time that episode aired, a stereotypically nerdy D&D player, and I watched the game soar in popularity among my friends, even as some conservative and Christian groups fretted about whether it promoted occultism, social withdrawal, and even suicide.

Those are the claims, in fact fact that 60 Minutes host Ed Bradley was set to talk about in the clip we just heard.

Well, fast forward 37 years and people are still playing D&D,

and there's still social panic surrounding the game.

But maybe to no one's surprise, that social panic isn't coming from conservatives these days,

but from progressives, some of whom worry that D&D promotes racism through the negative depiction of evil creatures such as Orks and Ghouls, who some impressionable players might link to real life people of color. Fiction writer

N. K. Jemison, for instance, recently was quoted in Wired magazine to the

effect that, quote, Orks are human beings who can be slaughtered without

conscience or apology."

...