From Satanic Threat to Tabletop Therapy: Multi-Modal Media, Moral Entrepreneurs, and the Cultural Legitimation of Dungeons & Dragons

Mass media play an important role in cultural legitimation processes, amplifying and silencing certain views, reinforcing or disrupting status hierarchies, and developing a “common” understanding of cultural objects. They influence whether a cultural form is taken seriously as high art, devalued as craft, or dismissed as a lowbrow waste of time. News media give voice to competing claims makers, including moral entrepreneurs who stoke public alarm, inhibiting legitimation. In this article, we examine the media’s role in the cultural legitimation process surrounding the fantasy role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons (D&D). We demonstrate the complex and contradictory coverage throughout the game’s 50-year history; media stories changed from connecting D&D to murder, suicide, and the occult to championing D&D as a creative outlet, a therapeutic modality, and a significant fount of collaborative storytelling. Analyzing newspaper, television, moral entrepreneurial, and online media, we offer examples of coverage across three overlapping processes of cultural de/legitimation: public alarm, recuperation, and redemption. In addition to fueling distrust in certain cultural forms, the media also facilitate rehabilitation, integration, acceptance, celebration, and inoculation. Mediated moral entrepreneurial campaigns complicate legitimation struggles, but generational changes, institutional acceptance, and multi-modal media provide opportunities for targeted groups to fight back.