I was looking at past reports of role-playing game hysteria from the 90's and comparing it to attempts to ban violent video games in this decade. Mostly I was hoping to map it out and find a correlation in various states, such as a predilection to ban threatening sub-culture media in the Mid-West. It was clear pretty quickly that there are some big differences.
First, RPG's never became mainstream, only a misunderstood sub-culture that caused a stir of concern, but never percolated to the top of the agenda. The video game market, sales wise is about 100 times larger, and about half the population have consoles.
Second, because the video game market is so large, and violence in them is so pronounced and viewable, it's very easy to understand and document the images. They're the same in each individual console game and not in some kids imagination. Because of this and the prevalence of video games, it has become an easy attack of opportunity, an method for politicians, both experienced (like Hillary Clinton, Joe Lieberman and ironically, Arnold Schwarzenegger) and newcomers, to make names for themselves.
This has spread legislation far beyond the Mid-West, which does have a good share of it, to New York and California. Luckily the video game community, with it's sales 100 times larger than the RPG community, can mount vigorous defenses with the first amendment on their side. They always win, at least so far. To use a computer industry term, the RPG industry has security through obscurity. Nobody cares anymore because they're culturally insignificant.
