Mazes and Monsters (novel)

• 1. Introduction

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  Mazes and Monsters, a 1981 novel by Rona Jaffe, warns readers about the imagined dangers of the then-new hobby of fantasy role-playing games.

  In 1985, psychiatrist Thomas Radecki of the National Coalition on Television Violence pointed to a letter written by one of Jaffe's fictional characters. He held it up as proof that Dungeons & Dragons had caused real gamers to die.

  The letter was invented. The character was fictional. Yet the claim reached a public already unsure what to make of role-playing games.

  What really happened at the college campus that supposedly inspired Jaffe's story? Why did so many readers mistake her novel for a factual account? And what happened once this cautionary tale left the page altogether?

• 2. Lost In The Tunnels

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  By the late 1970s, rumors spread that university students playing a live version of Dungeons & Dragons had wandered into steam tunnels and vanished. Some of these stories claimed the missing students died of hypothermia or other causes. The tales were largely apocryphal, yet many people believed them.

  James Dallas Egbert III, a student at Michigan State University, was the real disappearance behind these legends. Egbert had played Dungeons & Dragons, and he genuinely entered his school's steam tunnels, though his goal was to end his life. When the attempt failed, he hid at various friends' houses for several weeks.

  The private investigator hired by Egbert's parents offered a different theory to the press. He speculated that Egbert had gone into the tunnels to play a live version of the game and gotten lost there. Reporters treated this guess as established fact, sparking controversy over what effects the game itself might have.

  That speculative theory, rather than the truth behind Egbert's disappearance, became the seed for Rona Jaffe's novel.

• 3. Believed As Fact

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  Many of Jaffe's readers came to the novel with no firsthand knowledge of role-playing games at all. They took her fictional account as a legitimate depiction of how the hobby actually worked. The book landed inside a public conversation already thick with uncertainty about this new pastime.

  That confusion between fiction and lived experience is exactly the terrain Jaffe built her plot around.

• 4. A Social Problem Novel

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  Hobgoblin, a contemporary novel, belongs to the same genre as Mazes and Monsters: the social problem novel. Jaffe, already an established writer, did not write her book for young adult readers. She treated the playing of role-playing games as a sign of deep neurotic needs.

  In both novels, the protagonist carries a mental health condition throughout the story. Growing into real adulthood, in each book, means giving up role-playing games for good.

  That same arc would soon catch the attention of a television network eager for a dramatic story.

• 5. Turning Into Television

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  Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons, an advocacy group opposed to the game, added fuel to the negative press surrounding role-playing games in the early 1980s. That climate, combined with the dramatic fictional events in Jaffe's book, may have helped drive its sales. It also convinced CBS to buy the television rights to the story.

  The adaptation premiered on CBS in 1982, sharing its title with the novel. Tom Hanks, then 26 years old, starred as a gamer whose obsession with the game left him unable to tell fantasy from reality.

  That image, a bewildered young man lost inside his own game, became the version of the story most people would come to know.