World of Warcraft

World of Warcraft

The New Guard

My casual impression is that successful authors of fiction do not have a very high opinion of college creative writing courses. Quite a lot of them, however, seem to have developed their skills in the context of Dungeons and Dragons or similar games, as dungeon masters and/or players. A role playing game is, after all, an exercise in collaborative story telling. The things that make it work or not work are, to a considerable extent, the same as the things that make a novel work or not work. And, unlike a creative writing course, the participants are doing it because they want to, for the fun of it, not because someone else has told them that this is what they have to do to learn to write.I was reminded of this observation recently by conversation inin which a player was discussing with others his problems in writing. It was clear, in context, that the writing was neither a school assignment nor an attempt at a publishable novel or short story, but posts to one of theforums. Such posts often take the form of fictionalized accounts of things that actually happened in the game. I will not be surprised to discover, ten or twenty years in the future, that some of the new generation of authors, especially fantasy authors, got their start there.My own non-fiction writing largely developed during the years when I was producing a monthly column for, a conservative student magazine on which I was the token libertarian columnist. There too, I was writing not as a school exercise but because I actually had things I wanted to say.All of which fits into my general views on the advantages of unschooling , education that takes the form of doing things one wants to do, learning things one wants to learn, over the approach to education embedded in the conventional K-12 curriculum and many college courses.