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[Ed note] Background taken from: The Intercept :
Barrett Brown, whose column received the 2016 National Magazine Award for columns and commentary, is an imprisoned U.S. journalist and the founder of Project PM, a crowd-sourced investigation into the cyber-industrial complex. In 2012, the FBI raided his house, and later that year Barrett was indicted on 12 federal charges relating to the 2011 Stratfor hack. The most controversial charge, linking to the hacked data, was dropped, but in 2015 Brown was sentenced to 63 months in prison.
[/Ed note]
I never really got a chance to play any pen-and-paper role-playing games growing up, so being thrown into a prison system in which such things as Dungeons and Dragons are relatively common constituted one of the silver linings of my 2012 arrest, along with not having to deal with an infestation of those little German roaches that had colonized my kitchen or having to see "World War Z."
As it happens, I'd actually learned about the prevalence of tabletop games among inmates a few months before my own incarceration, in the days after the FBI first raided both my apartment and my mother's home in March 2012 and seized laptops and papers without yet making an arrest. As they themselves noted in the search warrant, which the late Michael Hastings published at BuzzFeed, the focus of the investigation was my collaborative journalism outfit Project PM as well as echelon2.org, the online repository where we posted our ongoing findings on the still-mysterious "intelligence contracting" sector (which has since been moved here). The warrant listed HBGary Federal and Endgame Systems — two firms on which we'd focused particular attention — as topics for the FBI's search. This was revealing. A year prior, a raid by Anonymous on the servers of HBGary had revealed, among other things, the firm's leading role in a conspiracy by a consortium calling itself Team Themis to conduct an array of covert operations against WikiLeaks and even journalists like Glenn Greenwald, prompting a congressional inquiry that would ultimately be squashed by a Republican committee chairman.
Is playing an immersive fantasy game with people who have poor impulse control wise?
(Score: 2) by jdavidb on Tuesday October 18 2016, @12:41PM
Is playing an immersive fantasy game with people who have poor impulse control wise?
Here, of all places, are we seriously seeing the canard that D&D is dangerous?
ⓋⒶ☮✝🕊 Secession is the right of all sentient beings
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday October 18 2016, @01:15PM
Oh man, it took till I read your post to figure out he was making fun of the American prison industrial complex not making fun of DnD.
Although WRT impulse control I donno if the guards have the same "shoot first ask questions later" attitude modern cops have. Might actually be safer in the slammer than out on the streets.
Is caffeine free tea technically possible? Maybe someone switched mine out to F with me. Slow boot up for me today thats for sure.
There's probably a Hillary or more likely Bill joke lurking in the whole "immersive fantasy game with ... poor impulse control" thing.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 18 2016, @07:50PM
when the question was asked "if playing D&D with people with impulse control was wise", i thought of the following scenario:
DM: "Your wizard just died."
Player: (jumps up and shivs DM)
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday October 19 2016, @12:50PM
Yeah but I don't think people get it, that even a pretty dumb DM has years, decades to get to know the guys hes in the slammer with, and everyone gets into everyones business like a small town, so even a pretty dumb GM can make sure Mr Angry's character is unkillable and kinda comes along for the ride.
On the other hand we don't really treat mental illness in the USA or at least we don't treat that very well, so I suspect a GM at a pathfinder society event is statistically more likely to get stabbed than a prisoner.
(Score: 2) by Bogsnoticus on Wednesday October 19 2016, @07:02AM
Given the "Prison for Profit" model, I think the guards would be less trigger happy. Dead prisoners bring no profit, and the governor would get a right bollocking from the CEO each time a prisoner dies.
So if they do shoot, you can bet they've had better training at disabling shots.
Genius by birth. Evil by choice.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 18 2016, @02:28PM
Here, of all places, are we seriously seeing the canard that D&D is dangerous?
I think the submitter is wondering about the wisdom of losing to people with poor impulse control. One is not supposed to be stabbed in real life only in the game.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by mhajicek on Tuesday October 18 2016, @03:12PM
Let the wookie win.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by jdavidb on Tuesday October 18 2016, @03:29PM
ⓋⒶ☮✝🕊 Secession is the right of all sentient beings
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday October 18 2016, @03:14PM
Haha, no. D&D is not dangerous. I played through college.
People in prison are dangerous, and don't like losing. RPGs are more immersive than many other games, so the loss would sting more. If you read the article a bit, there's a moment when one of the inmates' characters stole all the treasure from the other inmate's character after the latter had done all the work to get it.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday October 18 2016, @08:01PM
RPGs are more immersive than many other games
I wonder how that correlates with table flipping. I've seen a lot more tables flipped over Monopoly and Risk than because someone's lvl1 bard bit the dust.
Werewolf, now there's a game that needs banning in prison and school. I've seen cans of beer flying over that game. Brutal.