Gamebooks Never Taught Me To Levitate

    As a kid I loved the Fighting Fantasy solo gamebooks. They were my first taste of the fantasy gaming genre, before I ever got the chance to encounter RPGs. Recalling this got me to reminiscing, which led me the Wikipedia page. That references this old BBC article where Ian Livingstone mentions a mother allegedly calling into a radio station to report that her son started to levitate after reading one of his books.

    I collected the Fighting Fantasy books in my youth, including several by Ian Livingstone. None of those books ever imparted this ability to me, nor even hinted of it. I'm sure that I would have remembered. If only I'd known at the time that a book could grant such powers; I would never have stopped and would now have a complete FF collection :-)

    I suppose that the moral panic around gaming may have been bigger in the States than in the UK; I don't recall any talk of this as at the time. It's funny to think back now on evangelicals getting righteous about such an imaginary threat as a child playing D&D, let alone a single-player gamebook. A child reading a physical book? How quaint that must seem now.