It's nearly impossible to enforce actual consequences in video games at the moment, but at a table, sitting face-to-face across a tabletop game, or even playing at a LAN party, sportsmanship matters.

To be sure, anonymity online has it uses and is very important. Governments hoover up people's telephone and e-mail records without oversight, and companies track astonishingly granular personal information.

Even when I was little, people would always ask me if I wanted to be a movie star, and I would always say, 'No, I just want to be an actor.'

I spent a lot of my childhood not fitting in, in a lot of different ways.

I fell in love with Dungeons & Dragons, and the storytelling of it, and the weird dice, and the fact that it didn't use a traditional board. It felt like I was a part of something special and almost kind of like a secret club because a lot of people didn't know what it was and didn't understand it.