Rona Jaffe published Mazes and Monsters in 1981 as a cautionary tale about a young man named Chris who loses the ability to distinguish between reality and fantasy while playing role-playing games. The story portrays the game as a gateway to mental instability and social isolation rather than a harmless pastime. Critics later identified the novel as a social problem story similar to the contemporary book Hobgoblin.
James Dallas Egbert III vanished into the steam tunnels of Michigan State University on the 1st of December 1979. He had entered the tunnels with the intent of committing suicide and hid at friends' houses for several weeks before being found. The media frenzy surrounding his disappearance eventually birthed the bestselling novel Mazes and Monsters.
The 1982 made-for-television movie adaptation of Mazes and Monsters starred a 26-year-old Tom Hanks in a role that became a defining early performance for the future icon. The film premiered on CBS and depicted a gamer whose obsession with the game prevented him from telling what was real and what was fantasy. The production capitalized on the existing moral panic to reinforce the idea that role-playing games were a threat to society.
In 1985, psychiatrist and anti-television violence activist Thomas Radecki of the National Coalition on Television Violence cited a fictitious letter written by a character in Mazes and Monsters as proof that Dungeons and Dragons had caused the death of gamers. Radecki used the novel's invented content to support his claims about the dangers of role-playing games despite the letter never being written by a real person. This act of misrepresentation turned a work of fiction into a weapon against the hobby.
Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons was an anti-RPG advocacy group that promulgated sensationalist reports about the hobby during the early 1980s. These groups capitalized on the fear generated by the Egbert incident and the subsequent novel and film to spread their message. The combination of negative media reports and the dramatic fictional events portrayed in Jaffe's book led to a widespread belief that the game was a dangerous cult-like activity.