'D&D: Honor Among Thieves,' 'Tetris' use games to pit good against evil

The biggest mistake the 2000 "Dungeons & Dragons" movie made, even a year before the 2001 release of Peter Jackson's "The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring," was to try and compete directly with the works of J.R.R. Tolkien.

Tolkien was a scholar who researched and curated his own awe-inspiring mythos, but "Dungeons & Dragons," the game, was created by nerds like Gary Gygax, who simply knew they wanted Tolkienesque fantasy, but more of it, so its mythology plagiarized from any set of legends or fantasies that its creators fancied.

It makes sense that such disorderly, inclusive world...