Satanic Panic and the case of the " Devil's deck": The birth of the moral crusade against the games in Brazil

In the early 2000s, speeches that accused games, movies, music and other goods of the entertainment industry of promoting cultural degeneration and political manipulation of young people became popular in Brazil. These statements argued that certain products, subliminally or explicitly, corrupt the youth, leading them to Satanism and communism, in so far as they promoted homosexuality and influenced violent behavior, that ended up serving as justification for the production of moral crusades aimed at their criminalization. This article aims to empirically investigate some of the practical effects of the Brazilian version of satanic panic- a kind of moral panic- created for games. For this, some of the memories about a series of articles shown in 2003 on the program "Boa noite Brasil" of TV Bandeirantes were analyzed in which card games and RPG games were associated with satanism. The reports were collected from comments made by users who have profiles on online platforms such as Reddit, Youtube and Discord and demonstrate the practical consequences of political use of fear, especially through digital media.