How America punished outcasts who played pretend
In 1994, if you wanted to know who played Dungeons & Dragons at the local high school, you had to earn that information. The guys who met in Tim Fenstermacher’s basement every Saturday didn't advertise. They didn't wear band shirts for games the way metalheads wore Slayer or Megadeth. You found out the same way you found out who was gay or whose dad hit them—through slow trust-building and careful confession. Someone would mention they liked fantasy novels. You'd mention you'd seen the Monster Manual at the bookstore. They'd glance around the cafeteria. If nobody was listening, they might tell you about their half-elf ranger.
Nobody wanted to be the kid who played D&D. The social cost was too high, and in the mid-nineties, the stakes felt existential in a way that's hard to explain to anyone who grew up watching Stranger Things. Those kids were worse than nerds. In the minds of concerned parents and local news anchors, they were potential cultists, possible Satanists, one bad gaming session away from slitting their wrists or murdering their families. The hysteria had mostly died down by the time I was in high school, but its residue coated everything.
Dungeons & Dragons was something to hide.
But if D&D players were whispered about, Vampire: The Masquerade players were mythologized. I didn't know anyone who played Vampire, at least not anyone who'd admit it to me. I just knew they existed somewhere—in cities, probably, or in the bad parts of town. People talked about them the way they talked about swingers or people who went to raves. Freaks who dressed in black, wore fake fangs, drank each other's blood, and held their meetings in cemeteries. The game's very name suggested deception, a double life, something concealed from daylight.
It would take me years to understand what Vampire: The Masquerade actually was, and what it meant to the people who played it. It would take longer to understand what was done to them.
