http://www.hoboes.com/html/RPG/Defense.html
The quantity of slander against role playing is disturbingly large. To my knowledge there has never been a *single* death attributed to RPGs that stood up to fact checking. On the other hand there have been something like 1,800 accused ones. The most famous of which was published by Patricia Pulling, and actually taken thru Court. Interesting thing was the boy who had hypothetically committed suicide never even existed.
There is a lot of literature out there on this subject, but only one side bothers to do any fact checking.
heres a quick quote from one paper for those who don't want to bother doing any clicking.
Quote:
BADD estimated 4 million gamers worldwide (this number has increased since then), and with the average suicide rate, this means 500 gamers would commit suicide each year. As of 1987, BADD had documented an average of seven suicides of gamers a year, meaning D&D actually lowers the suicide rate (5).
James Forest and Suzanne Abyeta studied criminal tendencies of people who played RPG's and found that fewer crimes were committed by gamers than the average for each age group. The Association of Gifted-Creative Children of California endorses D&D for its educational content. After surveying psychological autopsies of adolescent suicides, they found no links to D&D (5).
No links between D&D and teen suicides were found after extensive studies by The American Association of Suicidology, The Center for Disease Control, and Health & Welfare (Canada).
Dr. S. Kenneth Schonbert studied over 700 adolescent suicides and found that D&D was not a factor in any of them. Luis H. Zayas found D&D can help treat disruptive eight and nine year olds. FBI Supervisory Special Agent Kenneth Lanning states in his book that there are no connections between RPG's and crime (6).
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