Did D&D and similar media actually increase interest in the occult?
score:2
It occurs to me there may actually be a way to measure this, if I take the question quite literally. Here's the Google ngram graphs for the words "occult" and "magic"
It looks like there was in fact an inflection point to an upturn in "occult" and "magic" references around the time Advanced D&D was released by TSR (1977-1980 for the core rulebooks). The timing is, if not related, incredibly coincidental. However, I have a few caveats that should be added.
- The previous "occult" trajectory when those same complainers were young adults (in the 1966-1972 years) was far steeper without benefit from TTRPGs.
- Correlation is not causation. Its quite possible the new gaming system took off in part because of an uptick in occult interest.
- There's certainly no evidence I can see in the graph that the anti-D&D campaigns of the mid 80's had any noticeable affect on the curve.
- A correlation (rather than a causation) jibes much better with my personal experience.
- Take that shooting up of "magic" after about 1993 as completely unrelated. That was the release date of the card game Magic the Gathering, which had a unique game system that proved incredibly addictive, and made it the best selling card game of all time. Nearly all hits from about 2000 forward are likely for that one card game.
"Personal experience" is anecdotal of course. But I was into D&D at the time myself, had a lot of friends who were as well, and I also knew several Wiccans (and a couple of dabblers). I've met exactly one person who was into both. Otherwise, it was a completely disjoint set.
In general Wiccans didn't think occult forces were something to toy with, and the dabblers were your right-brained dreamer types.
D&D players tended to be left-brained mathy types who didn't believe in much of anything supernatural. That version of the game was heavily math reliant, so if you didn't like spending a lot of type playing with numbers and stats and adding things up, it really wouldn't have appealed to you.
Part of what made the whole BADD thing so annoying for us was that clearly they believed in magic and demons way more than any of us did. If anyone was out there promoting that stuff as real, it was the anti-D&D people.
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