For decades, role-playing games have been an outlet for kids and young adults who for whatever reason crave an alternate reality, in which their acne or their social awkwardness won't prevent them from conquering monsters, courting princesses, or battling a well-matched enemy with mallets and cannonballs.

Such fantasies are harmless, though some have argued that they can blur the line between reality and fantasy to the point where players might actually hurt themselves, not just their avatars. Throughout the 1970s and 80s, anxiety ran high over the rising popularity of role playing games, namely Dungeons & Dragons.

That game is now the subject of a dispute in a Wisconsin prison, where an inmate and lifelong D&D enthusiast has been denied access to the game on the grounds that it might inspire escape fantasies.

I've never been incarcerated, but I have been in plenty of places that I don't want to be, and I have never needed any help in fantasizing about escape. That's what people do when they're stuck someplace they desperately want to get out of. Whether or not they follow through is another matter, but I have a very hard time understanding how limiting a prisoner's gaming privileges will curb their desire to get out of prison.

You can imprison a person's body, but their mind is theirs alone. Unless, that is, prisons impose control on a person's psychic reality as well as their physical one, which measures like this threaten to do.

What's next? Banning books, pens, card games, and anything else that might provide a brief mental reprieve from the drudgery of prison life?

Anthony Burgess's novel about a dystopian future and its draconian prison system, A Clockwork Orange, predicted precisely such control over inmates' minds when it was written almost 50 years ago. Somehow I doubt that Burgess would be proud of his prescience.

[Image: Chicago Sun Times]