What If the Satanic Panic Had Never Happened?

I was recently reminded by a reader of the assertion that, rather than harming the sales or long-term fortunes of Dungeons & Dragons, the furor surrounding the game during the so-called “Satanic Panic” of the 1980s ultimately proved beneficial. According to this view, the controversies gave the game a level of publicity it might otherwise never have achieved, helping to propel it toward broader cultural visibility. This was certainly the position taken by TSR Hobbies and many of its employees in the years that followed and there is some evidence that lends this interpretation a degree of plausibility.

At the same time, others have suggested that this narrative is too neat and reassuring, as well as too dependent on outcomes that were visible only in retrospect. The difficulty, of course, is that the question itself resists a definitive resolution. There is no way to measure what would have happened had the moral panic not occurred. Indeed, any attempt to do so quickly runs into the limits of counterfactual history, where causes and effects cannot be isolated or tested.

The problem, as my reader put it, closely resembles survivorship bias. I think we've all seen the illustration of the battle-damaged aircraft from the Second World War. If not, I've included it at the top of this post. During the war, military analysts initially studied the bullet holes on planes that returned from combat, assuming the holes marked the most vulnerable areas. What they eventually came to realize is that the opposite was true: the planes that did not return had likely been hit in the places where the surviving aircraft were unmarked. The most important evidence was not what could be seen, but what was missing.

A similar bias may shape how we remember the Satanic Panic’s impact on the history of Dungeons & Dragons. The people who became lifelong gamers in the 1980s and 1990s were, by definition, those who passed through that period of censorship, stigma, and negative publicity. They are the aircraft that returned. Their presence is visible and their stories are often told, sometimes with pride, as proof that the panic failed or even that it backfired.

What is far harder to see are the players who never made it that far. The children whose parents forbade the game. The schools and libraries that quietly removed it from their shelves. The local groups that never formed because the social cost of participation seemed too high. These absent players leave no testimonies, no fond memories, and, of course, no sales figures. They are the aircraft that never returned and their absence subtly shapes the conclusions we draw about the era.

This does not mean that the claim that the Satanic Panic helped Dungeons & Dragons is false. It may be true or partly true or true in some contexts and not in others. Nor does it mean that the opposite claim, that the panic caused lasting harm, can be demonstrated with any greater certainty. The counterfactual remains unprovable. What it does suggest is that confidence in either position should be tempered by an awareness of what cannot be measured.

For readers who lived through that period, I'm curious about your own experiences. At the time you first encountered the game, was easy it to access or was contested or even forbidden? Did you know people who were interested in D&D but discouraged from playing or who drifted away under social pressure? I ask all this not merely out of curiosity, but because, as I'm sure I've mentioned before, I barely knew that the Satanic Panic was a thing with which anyone had to contend. I was aware of its existence, of course, but I never intersected with it in the slightest, nor did any of my friends. Without exception, our parents and extended families were supportive of our newfound obsession and, in fact, encouraged it, especially in my case. My own perspective is thus not very helpful in assessing this question.

In any case, I don't expect to come to any unassailable conclusions by raising this question. The Satanic Panic, after all, was an amorphous thing, neither a simple obstacle to the hobby's growth nor an obvious catalyst to it. It was a cultural pressure that some people resisted, some endured, and others, like myself, never encountered. That said, I think there is strength to the suggestion that any account of it that focuses only on those who remained risks mistaking survival for inevitability and resilience for proof that nothing was lost. That's why I'm curious to hear from others and their experiences of it.