Patricia A. Pulling (30 June 1948 – 18 September 1997) [1] was an anti-occult campaigner from Richmond, Virginia, and the founder of Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons (BADD), an advocacy group that was dedicated to the regulation of the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) and other such games.
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Pulling formed the organization after her son Irving committed suicide[2] by shooting himself in the chest[3] on 9 June 1982. Irving was an active D&D player, and she believed his suicide was directly related to the game. The grieving mother first filed a wrongful death lawsuit against her son's high school principal, Robert A. Bracey III, holding him as responsible for what she claimed was a Dungeons & Dragons curse placed upon her son shortly before his death. She also filed suit against TSR, Inc., D&D's publishers. She appeared on an episode of 60 Minutes which also featured Gary Gygax,[2] creator of Dungeons & Dragons, and which aired in 1985.
When all of her lawsuits were dismissed, she founded BADD and began publishing information circulating her belief that D&D encouraged devil worship and suicide. BADD described D&D as "a fantasy role-playing game which uses demonology, witchcraft, voodoo, murder, rape, blasphemy, suicide, assassination, insanity, sex perversion, homosexuality, prostitution, satanic type rituals, gambling, barbarism, cannibalism, sadism, desecration, demon summoning, necromantics, divination and other teachings."[4]
BADD achieved some success in airing its views in the press, both through conservative Christian media properties as well as mainstream outlets. The organization distributed its materials in Australia through conservative advocacy groups affiliated with the Reverend Fred Nile, such as the Australian Federation for Decency. In addition, Pulling obtained a private investigator's license, became a consultant to law enforcement, and was an expert witness in several gaming-related lawsuits. All of these suits lost in court.[4] Ms. Pulling was also the author of a book, The Devil's Web: Who Is Stalking Your Children For Satan? published by Vital Issues Press in August 1989 (ISBN 0-910311-59-5). The book revealed that Pulling had, at best, only a basic working knowledge of the alleged occult activities she was crusading against. The book not only treats the Necronomicon as a real publication, but refers to it as if it is widely available for reading and used regularly by teenagers; one portion of the book urges police officers to open interrogations of suspected teenage occultists with the question, "Have you read the Necronomicon, or are you familiar with it?"[5]
As the popularity of D&D and other role-playing games increased, Pulling's more extreme views and statements were increasingly called into question. For example, she once told a newspaper reporter that eight percent of the people living in Richmond, Virginia were Satanists. She had arrived at that figure, she explained, by estimating four percent of adults and four percent of teens to be involved with Satanism, and adding them to get eight percent. When the reporter informed her that mathematically that was four percent, not eight percent, she claimed that it did not matter because even eight percent was a "conservative" figure.[6]
In 1989 game player and designer Michael A. Stackpole wrote Game Hysteria and the Truth which went into all the flaws, misconceptions, inaccuracies, omission of relevant details, and questionable practices (going as far as to call her editing of newspaper accounts not only illegitimate but since newspapers are copyrighted material and the owners were not contacted about the use of these articles illegal) regarding Pulling's claims regarding RPGs in general and D&D in particular concluding "If the suicide statistics for the 14 years since D&D's introduction show anything at all, gamers kill themselves at a rate that is a fraction of that of their peers."[7] A year later the main points of Game Hysteria and the Truth regarding Pulling were reiterated in The Pulling Report.
The American Association of Suicidology, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, and Health & Welfare (Canada) all eventually concluded that there was no causal link between fantasy gaming and suicide.[8] In 1990, the writer Michael Stackpole authored The Pulling Report, a review highly critical of BADD's methods of data collection, analysis and reporting.[5]
BADD effectively ceased to exist when Pulling died of cancer in 1997.