Some friends of mine regularly played D&D in what was supposed to be electronics class. (The instructor was an old hippie who’d spend the class sitting in his office listening to Steely Dan, and occasionally we’d notice an interesting smell, but that’s another story.) One day there was a substitute teacher in the class who told my friends D&D was the Devil’s work, that it was corrupting America, and that they must all be on drugs and practicing Satanism.
My friend Michael, the straight-A student, did a small research project that night. He went to the school library first, then the public library. He came to class next day with two or three hand-written pages about D&D’s positive effects, and photocopied articles to back him up.
The substitute was gone, so he never saw it, and he never would have believed it anyway. There’s a small part of me that wants to believe the substitute was using reverse psychology, that he wanted my friends to do research. But from my experience I seriously doubt it.
