First, sit back and twist open a tasty bottle of Dungeons & Dragons Spellcasting Soda. Ready?

One time, at cyber camp ...

Winners of the Cyber Challenge will be invited to attend Cyber Camps at California State University, Sacramento, where they will further develop the technical skills needed to become cybersecurity experts.

One time, at D&D camp ...

It was the summer of 1982, at the Shippensburg College Dungeons & Dragons summer camp ... There were a lot of other summer camps going on at the Shippensburg campus at the same time: baseball, tennis, cheerleading, etc. Everybody stayed in the dorms, with different buildings for different camp groups ... All the usual coming-of-age stereotypes were in force: gamers gawked at cheerleaders and were hunted by baseball players. The cheerleaders were in the neighboring dorm and literally did their practices in our front yard. Every morning. I was always curious whether some clever administrator intentionally put the cheerleaders next to the relatively-safe gamers (as opposed to baseball players), but that's just speculation.

To be fair, the gamers were pretty busy just getting to know each other -- you're packed in a dorm with more gamers than you've ever seen in your entire life. There's a lot to talk about.

Murray Gell-Mann:

I was still discouraged, though, about having to go to MIT, which seemed so grubby compared with the Ivy League. I thought of killing myself (at the age of 18) but soon decided that I could always try MIT and then kill myself later if it was that bad but that I couldn't commit suicide and then try MIT afterwards. The two operations, suicide and going to MIT, didn't commute, as we say in math and physics jargon.

Tamar Lewin:

Many high school seniors avidly follow student blogs at the colleges they are interested in, and post comments. Luka, one of dozens responding to Ms. Chinea, for example, wrote: "I didn't know about the anime club. I would have never guessed that people at M.I.T. are interested in anime. Oh well ... +1 on my 'Why should I go to M.I.T.' list."

Chris Mills:

"Now you know what you're in for, you know the sleepless nights and frustrations are never far away, but this knowledge can't seem to remove the exhilarating smile on your face. And it's in that masochistic moment that you realize who you are. That this is what you're made for."

From the archive:

Thirty-one years after the invention of Dungeons & Dragons, the original role-playing game remains the most popular and financially successful brand in the adventure gaming industry.