The Steam Tunnel Incident and the D&D Panic (1979)
This Day in Esoteric Political History
Jody Avirgan & Radiotopia
4.6 • 982 Ratings
🗓️ 17 August 2023
⏱️ 21 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
It’s August 17th. This day in 1979, a young college student by the name of James Dallas Egber III disappeared into a steam tunnel below his university, intending to commit suicide. But the story of his disappearance became a media - and moral - panic because of his affinity for the fantasy role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons.
Jody, Niki, and Kellie discuss what we know and don’t know about Egber’s troubled life, and why the D&D narrative was so pervasive.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from radiotopia. |
| 0:07.0 | My name is Jody Avergan. |
| 0:09.0 | This day, August 15, 1979, a college student by the name of James Dallas-Egber |
| 0:17.0 | the 3rd, disappeared into a steam tunnel below his university intending to commit |
| 0:22.2 | suicide. He was unsuccessful and would be found |
| 0:25.1 | a few weeks later hiding out at a family member's house, but in the time in between |
| 0:29.6 | his disappearance and when he was found, his disappearance caused a nationwide panic and a nationwide |
| 0:35.4 | moral panic because the story that emerged about Eggber was not that he was a depressed and suicidal |
| 0:41.5 | young person, but mostly that he was a devotee of fantasy role-playing games, in particular Dungeons and Dragons. |
| 0:49.0 | And that set off and played into this larger frenzy about what these kinds of games were doing to our cherished youth. |
| 0:56.0 | So let's talk about the Dungeons and Dragons panic and this larger moment of satanic panic. |
| 1:02.0 | Here, as always, are Nicole Hammer of Vanderbilt and |
| 1:04.4 | Kelly Carter Jackson of Wellesley. Hello there. Hello Jody. Hey there. |
| 1:08.6 | Let's start with the person at the heart of this, James Agbert III, you know, so much of this story |
| 1:15.6 | is about the medias narrative around him, |
| 1:18.2 | not really acknowledging what was really going on with him. |
| 1:20.6 | So what is really going on with him? |
| 1:22.2 | Who is he really? And then we'll talk |
| 1:23.5 | about the kind of skewed version that goes out into the world. |
| 1:27.4 | He was a kid growing up in Dayton, Ohio. The thing to know about him is he was considered a child prodigy. |
| 1:34.4 | He was so smart, he was so good with technology at just the beginning of this new technological |
| 1:40.3 | age of computers. And by the time he was 16 he was in college he was at Michigan State |
... |
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