Our second piece is an academic paper from Dr David Waldron. This may seem a strange development for what is mostly a hedonistic occupation but D&D is now 30 years old. Many roleplayers have children, or even grandchildren, and roleplaying is a much more common term in people's vocabulary, particularly with reference to computer games. As public awareness of the hobby has increased, as the games have come of age, so has intellectual interest in the game grown.

David's paper is entitled "Role-Playing Games and the Christian Right, Community Formation in Response to a Moral Panic" and was presented at the December 2003 Tasa conference at the University of New England, Armidale. He is keen to hear from anyone who would like to comment on his article and I think it would be very interesting to hear from anyone personally affected by the clash of Christian and Roleplaying cultures.

Another tactic was a process called church baiting in which gamers would provoke fundamentalist churches into loud raucous displays in the media and in public gatherings and then humiliate them by revealing it to be a fake or leave satirical models or slogans at the gathering place or supposed site of Satanic activity. An example of this approach is an extract from an article in "Critical Miss" an online Gaming magazine, on how to provoke a public response from fundamentalist Christians. [...] The following is an example of church baiting taken from an article in "Critical Miss" magazine.