I played in a group for years in middle and high school. The town I grew up in was sort of backward and religious. Let's just say there was considerable pressure to abandon the game.

We didn't have book burning though. (saw that down thread, and I can only imagine what younger me would have thought of that!)

I think these games are just great! Many of us took turns being the DM, and that's where a lot of learning happens! Theater of the mind becomes something tangible. You need to make it real enough for the others to get their own creative juices running, and when you do it right, the whole thing is immersive. We soon learned to replace things like, "you enter a dark room and encounter two trolls looking to fight!" with, "you enter a musky, dark room..." Players then ask what do they see, or cast light, or listen, and the whole exchange takes a bit longer. However, the interaction quality goes way up. So does the fun.

A good friend, who died early (sadly), had the seriously great idea to take a movie, "Escape From New York", and turn it into a campaign playable by 4 people. Several of us worked on it, maps, translating rules and setting up the damage tables, etc... so that it would work reasonably with "modern" type weapons, no magic, and so forth.

That campaign ran a few times and we really enjoyed it. Sometimes I feel that's a potential branch of fantasy gaming that got missed, or just seriously under exploited. The D&D idea, rules, dynamics, works for a lot of things. We found that out more or less accidentally. The realizations falling out of that were something our group thought about for a long time afterword.

Sometimes, it was necessary to play the game in secret. A gathering would be arranged under some other pretense. Fear of evil, the devil, and other inane things was enough to make it very highly controversial. Nobody I know was impacted in any way, other than positive ways.

This also made it difficult for both genders to play at times. Our group had one girl in it early on. She really wanted to play the game, and just kept at us, until she was in. Once she was, that was it! We all bonded and it was just something we enjoyed doing. Years later, she talked about that experience at a reunion, and it mattered far more to her than it did us. Being accepted and being able to play on par with the others in the group was liberating and empowering to her. Interesting how these things play out.

I purged my set of stuff during that last year of High School. Sometimes wish I hadn't, as some of it is totally collectible now. And it would be fun to read through and remember... I took a mechanical drafting class once, just for access to the tools to make big, great maps!

Someone should make an audio / text type adventure / campaign. Let the computer be the DM, it can present information in various ways, offer up maps on the screen, and provide audio clues. Maybe it's a stretch, but it could also query the players and take voice commands. The idea here would be to use a display to present and manage all the tedium, but use audio and voice input to actually communicate the players actions and game state in a way that would closely simulate the experience.