“But Mom, we’re in the middle of a campaign!” complains Mike, the prepubescent hero of Netflix’s new series Stranger Things, set in 1983. Grown-ups of a similar vintage and geeky disposition might experience a strange flashback hearing those words. Mom has just broken up Mike and his friends’ 10-hour session of the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons. They’ve just been ambushed by a two-headed demogorgon and Mike’s friend Will is rolling a 20-sided die to see if his “protection spell” works. Pay attention, this could be relevant to later developments.

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Nothing says “80s geekdom” quite like Dungeons & Dragons (D&D to aficionados), but the game’s influence goes deeper than mere period shorthand. Those 80s geeks who immersed themselves in D&Ds’ Tolkien-esque fantasies of elves, dragons, medieval weaponry and magical empowerment have grown up to conquer popular culture, and they have clearly brought their obsessions with them. The Duffer brothers, creators of Stranger Things, are no exception. “We were just regular kids, living in the suburbs of North Carolina, playing Dungeons & Dragons with our nerdy friends,” they say of their own childhoods. Now we are all in thrall to their magic.

Stranger Things gets its period details exactly on point: the Clash and Toto on the soundtrack, a Dark Crystal poster here, a Yoda toy there. The cast includes era-appropriate icons such as Matthew Modine and Winona Ryder (her best role in years, incidentally). And, in plot terms, 80s connoisseurs will detect notes of Stephen King, John Carpenter, The Lost Boys, The Goonies, Twin Peaks, even Home Alone. JJ Abrams has already strip-mined this territory, but the even larger shadow looming over Stranger Things is that of Steven Spielberg. ET: The Extra-Terrestrial would have been the smash-hit movie of the preceding year, and elements of Stranger Things are suspiciously similar: BMX-riding small-town kids discover a mysterious being with special powers (in this case a telekinetic girl) whom they must conceal from uncaring parents, hormonal siblings and shady government forces. They even hide her in their closet. Nobody says: “Whoah! This is just like ET!”, but you suspect ET is the very “thing” Stranger Things is trying to be stranger than.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A dragon, as featured in Game of Thrones. Photograph: c.HBO/Everett/REX

ET’s kids were also obsessed by Dungeons & Dragons. Early on in the movie, Elliott tries to join in his older brother’s game in the kitchen, but they’re “in the middle of a campaign”, too. Instead, Elliott is sent out for pizza, which is when he discovers something extraterrestrial in the woodshed. Spielberg was turned on to the game by his junior cast members, the story goes, and held an evening gaming session with them before they began shooting.

That was then. In the intervening years, D&D has become the game that dares not speak its name. Former players tend not to boast about it. I know this from experience, as a former seventh-level Paladin, who immersed himself in the game’s arcane jargon and encyclopedic tomes for a year, only to be cruelly slain by my friend’s Gnome Thief/Illusionist one day. I took up under-age smoking instead.

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Playing D&D was a training ground for your imagination, and an opportunity to explore our own identities Vin Diesel

Video games all but killed off the D&D craze but TV shows still use it to signify nerdy males who can’t get girlfriends. In the final episode of Freaks & Geeks, for example, cool kid James Franco is made to hang out at the geeks’ “audio/visual club” as punishment. Out of curiosity, he deigns to join in their D&D game. To everyone’s surprise, he enjoys the experience and asks to come again. The geeks can’t believe their luck: “Does him wanting to play with us again mean he’s turning into a geek, or we’re turning into cool guys?”

The menfolk in The Big Bang Theory eagerly break out the D&D the moment the women go away. “Are we gonna sit around chatting like a bunch of teenage girls? Or are we gonna play D&D like a bunch of teenage boys who are never gonna have sex with those teenage girls?” The game crops up in a similar context in shows such as Community, That 70s Show (where Alice Cooper joins in), and, almost inevitably, The IT Crowd. “It seems gay,” says Phil after Moss has explained the rules. “Are dragons gay, Phil?” Moss asks. “Mighty warrior priests wielding golden staffs. I suppose they’re gay, too?”

In the movies, D&D has fared worse, particularly in the 2000 misadventure of the same name, whose shonky computer effects at least limited the amount of real scenery for Jeremy Irons to chew on. “Dungeons & Dragons looks like they threw away the game and photographed the box,” quipped Roger Ebert. Now they’re having another go: after years of wrangling, an expensive new Dungeons & Dragons epic is due next year. Having viewed the qualified success of the earnest Warcraft movie, they’re said to be going for more of a Guardians of the Galaxy vibe.

Behind the scenes, though, D&D appears to have been working a deeper magic on the entertainment industry, which makes perfect sense. The game is essentially a cross between a marathon pitching session and an improv workshop. The Dungeon Master, who leads the game, narrates their setup – “You are going down a long, dark corridor. Suddenly a monster jumps out” – the other players decide what to do, based on their wits and their characters’ superhuman and magical abilities. Outcomes are often determined by the rolling of polyhedral dice, so it basically comes down to chance – again, much like the entertainment industry.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Roll with it: the cast of The Big Bang Theory play Dungeons & Dragons in the episode The Love Spell Potential. Photograph: CBS via Getty Images

As former acolyte Vin Diesel wrote in his foreword to 30 Years of Adventure: A Celebration of Dungeons & Dragons (no, honestly), “Playing D&D was a training ground for your imagination, and an opportunity to explore our own identities.” Diesel once divulged that he killed time on the set of The Chronicles of Riddick playing D&D with Karl Urban, Thandie Newton and Judi Dench. That’s a movie in itself right there.

The list of former D&D players who have “come out” is revealing: George RR Martin – Mr Game of Thrones himself – apparently still plays it. Creatures from his writings have been adopted by the official D&D franchise. Other ex-gamers include Jon “Iron Man” Favreau, Matt Groening (The Simpsons and Futurama are peppered with nods), Mike Myers, Elon Musk, Moby, Marilyn Manson, Robin Williams and China Miéville. JJ Abrams, despite being a self-confessed geek, has explicitly denied playing it.

And let’s not forget former D&D-head of the moment: Michael Gove. David Cameron’s love of Fruit Ninja made the headlines in a 2013 poll of politicians’ favourite games, but the then education secretary chose D&D. “Michael likes calculating the probabilities of the polyhedral dice,” it was reported, in a chilling presentiment of his Brexit strategy. Gove as a frustrated dungeon master would explain a lot. One pictures him with a lead figurine clenched in his fist, vowing to take his revenge as the players walk away from his meticulously planned adventure. Now we’re all in the middle of Gove’s campaign.

In Stranger Things, too, Dungeons & Dragons is more than just a retro detail; it’s pretty much the basis for the plot. When Mike asks telekinetic mystery girl where their missing friend Will is, she wordlessly flips over their D&D board and places Will’s figurine on the black surface. The presence of a monster, possibly demogorgon-like, is made clear from the very first scene. Sure enough, proceedings become more D&D-like the further the series progresses.

When you look around, that D&D influence is all over the place. Take Game of Thrones, for example. Rather than chart a linear beginning-to-end story, George RR Martin has created a world and populated it with characters, then let developments unfold, more like a dungeon master than a storyteller. It’s not just a fantasy thing; this ultra-long-form, multi-stranded, character-driven, potentially open-ended style of storytelling seems to have found a natural home in our current golden age of TV. It’s more about people and places than plots, be that Westeros or Deadwood, Lost’s mysterious island or Breaking Bad’s New Mexico. Perhaps the standard unit of television should no longer be the episode, or even the season, but the “campaign”.