WHAT DOES THE BIBLE SAY ABOUT... HIS DARK MATERIALS: THE PULLMAN TRILOGY
The Damaris Group (Connect Bible Studies, Scripture Union). A4 stapled. £3.00. ISBN 1 85999 714 7
(Connect Bible Studies are print versions of an innovative Internet project.).
Twenty years ago a man named Dave Hargrave wrote: 'You have to blow a hole through that video shell the kids are enclosed in. They are little zombies. They don't know what pain is. They have never seen a friend taken out in a body bag. They've got to understand that what they do has consequences. The world is sex, it is violence. It's going to destroy most of these kids when they leave TV land.'
Hargrave was the author of the Arduin Grimoire, a fantasy role-playing game accessory that provided useful suggestions on how players might incorporate dismemberments, genitals skewered on spears and a variety of other horrors into their game play. The book was available in most serious game shops of the time.
The Grimoire raised a cocktail of issues for Christians concerned with young people. Hargrave had some kind of a moral agenda, as the quote makes clear, and his violence was not strictly gratuitous. On the other hand, a myriad of subtexts ran through his book, and a certain moral ambiguity - at that time, anybody publishing a widely read role-playing text was going to make a lot of money. But who was Dave Hargrave anyway, to be shouldering the responsibility of blowing away the innocence of a generation? And did he have anything to put in its place?
