Description

Jeu de rôle, a sociological study of the 1990s moral panic

Jeu de rôle - édition 2022 is the reissue of a book first published in 1997, written by Jean-Hugues Matelly, a gendarmerie officer and roleplayer himself. The book methodically deconstructs the false links drawn by the media of the time between roleplaying games, crime, Satanism, and cult activity, during a genuine "witch hunt" that took place between 1990 and 1997 in France.

The book notably revisits the Carpentras affair (1990), where the press wrongly tried to link the desecration of a Jewish cemetery to roleplaying games, the TV show Bas les masques hosted by Mireille Dumas (1994), which portrayed RPGs as an activity that could lead to suicide or madness, and the conflation with cults in the context of the 1995 Guyard report. This campaign had concrete consequences: club closures, RPG books pulled from retail shelves, publisher bankruptcies, and social stigma for players.