My most successful friend now runs a major high street retail outlet. He's naturally charismatic, has lectured on the world's most prestigious MBA programme, has been sought out by some of the biggest private investors in Britain to grace their projects and he's the only man I know who can make the ethics of stock control both hilarious and interesting. For a whole weekend.

But S, as I must reluctantly call him out of regard for his reputation, has a dark secret. From his teenage days. Something so terrible that his wife forbids discussion of it, even with close friends. You wouldn't think it to look at him now - the essence of English suavity and a master of the universe (summa cum laude) - but S fell in with a bad lot towards the end of his time at school and very nearly went completely off the rails. The only reason why I feel that I can talk about his problem with any authority is that I, too, succumbed to the same addiction. And in my case I don't think that I'll ever be completely clean. Unless a lawful good cleric can pass a level-three spell to lift the curse.

All those of you who understood the last sentence will understand why I and my friend have tried so hard to shield our own secret. For you will also bear the mark. You will have been under the control of a dungeon master. And therefore, like me, in positions far more compromising than anything even the Marquis de Sade could have contrived. Because the dungeons in which you will have spent so many pleasurable hours will have been those brought into being by E. Gary Gygax, the godfather of geekdom, who died last week.

Gary Gygax was the creator of Dungeons & Dragons, the very first, and most successful, fantasy role-playing game. D&D (or AD &D, for advanced dungeons and dragons, as it became) was the defining activity of the Eighties nerd in much the same way that wearing red braces was the defining activity of the Eighties banker. You knew that it was embarrassing, but so many people were doing it you felt liberated enough to indulge.

It's hard now to describe what D&D involved to anyone who hasn't rolled a 12-sided die in earnest without invoking either pity or derision. The idea of people on the verge of adulthood - indeed, many actually fully physically mature - choosing to pretend to be an elf, wizard, warrior or fighting monk for an afternoon, giving expression to these fantasies with sheets of paper that carried the statistical strengths and weaknesses (intelligence, wisdom etc) of their imaginary creations and then collaborating with other like-minded souls to negotiate a series of challenges on a made-up quest is almost too ludicrous for words. But reader, for a few spotty years I was that tragic geek. And I loved it.

I still remember the process of generating each alter-ego by rolling those preposterous many-sided dice to cf your character's qualities. I still remember the distinction Gygax himself drew, in his guide for all fantasy role-players, between “intelligence”, the quality that wizards needed, and “wisdom”, the characteristic most needed if your character was to be a cleric.

Intelligence, Gygax told us, was the ability to understand why smoking caused lung cancer. Wisdom was the ability to act on this information and stop smoking. Gygax, a dedicated Camel smoker almost all his life, informed us, in his rulebook, that he personally possessed more intelligence than wisdom. And the same could be said of all his disciples. You needed a degree of intelligence to think yourself into the alternative universe of role-playing games. But spending time there is not the sort of thing it is wise to draw attention to. Because the idea that, as an adolescent, the only way you could mainline excitement was as a half-elf wizard is quite epically tragic.

But the ranks of those of us who did venture into that parallel world are clearly more numerous than you might imagine. When Gygax passed away The Times and The Guardian, along with a host of American and Canadian newspapers, devoted affectionate leading articles to his memory. Clearly, there are a lot of leader writers (indeed, maybe even editors) out there who remember their dungeon days with fondness. But no British journalist was prepared to emerge from behind the Cloak of Invisibility that the leader bestows on its author to fess up to full-on fantasy roleplaying. Until now.

And in preparing to come out, I have discovered that I am not alone. Vin Diesel, Mike Myers and Moby have all confessed in the past week to being D&D fans. The brilliant Dominican novelist Junot Díaz makes extensive use of D&D references in his wonderful new novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. And it is not surprising that those figures, all of whose adolescences overlapped with mine, should have found an outlet for their particular active imaginations in constructing fantasy narratives with other provincial teenage contemporaries.

I shan't make any great claims for D&D as some sort of school of virtue or nursery of creativity. It didn't even, like my other dirty teenage habit, board wargaming, give you a feel for history. It was simply the purest escapism. But in reflecting on my shameful dungeon past, I at least have the opportunity to stand up for geeks everywhere.

Without geeks we'd have no Microsoft 2.0 and no CGI , no iPods and no sat-nav, no Heroes, no Lost and no 24. Who else but geeks develops this stuff? Who else but the D&D generation has been working on collaborative narratives with unlikely but gripping plot twists since puberty? The founder of D & D may have been laid to rest, but his geeks have inherited the Earth.

True hero should be put on a pedestal
Since writing about the vacant fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square and the various modishly preposterous ideas for what should fill it, I have been alerted to the perfect solution. I had remarked on the way in which the statue of General Napier at the southern end of the square, which so offends Ken Livingstone, was built with money raised from voluntary contributions, most of them from private soldiers. Could we imagine such a thing today, I wondered. Well, more than £100,000 has been subscribed to the campaign to erect a statue to the hero of the Battle of Britain, Sir Keith Park, on the vacant plinth. Sir Keith, a New Zealander, was the architect of victory in the crucial struggle for aerial supremacy that secured our freedom, and thus the world's. And wouldn't it be wonderful if our response to the events of last week was to place a hero in RAF uniform on a pedestal to emphasise that Britain has never been more proud of those who have pledged themselves to that service?

A right royal stinker
I've been wondering how Peter Morgan, the brilliant screenwriter behind The Queen and The Deal, could have written the screenplay for the stonkingly awful The Other Boleyn Girl. The only possible conclusion is that he bottled it. Faced with adapting a bestselling novel for a mass-market audience, he felt he had to slum it, in cultural terms, and wrote down to his audience. He abandoned the intelligence and skill that characterised his original work, thinking it perhaps too narrowly BBC Two-ish, and tried to pull off something much more Sunday night ITV. And by abandoning the work he believed in, he found himself floundering. It underlines my hunch that you attract a larger, more appreciative, audience for quality work when you make real demands of them rather than pandering to the lowest common denominator. In other words, if you build it, they will come ....

Michael Gove is the Conservative MP for Surrey Heath.