Want to Find Yourself? Try Playing Dungeons & Dragons.

Video games wish they had the same creative freedom as Dungeons & Dragons. Gamers may be able to create their gender, race, and class, but they’ll never be able to grow and test their personalities in the way tabletop role-playing games allow.

“Ultimately, [D&D] tantalizes its players with what seems like a very American promise: that each of us can be the master of our own dungeon,” Jon Michaud writes for The New Yorker.

Director Jon Favreau once said that he credits Dungeons & Dragons for giving him “a really strong background in imagination, storytelling, understanding how to create tone, and a sense of balance.”

When asked what his cultural influences were, The Atlantic blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates explained to Big Think that “the first things that taught [him] about how words were beautiful [were], hip-hop and Dungeons and Dragons.”