RE: [Re: Does Dungeons and Dragons make technical writers?]

["Jane Carnall" <jane -dot- carnall -at- digitalbridges -dot- com>]

---Original Message-----
Andrew Plato <intrepid_es -at- yahoo -dot- com> wrote:
> "Darren Barefoot" wrote...
> D&D might have made you a better writer, but wargames prepare you for
> business. Got to think like a general and flank the competition.

>>what's wrong with both? i guess i was thinking of d&d as a catch-all for
all
table-top gaming. i'm all for a good game of battletech and delving into
strategy as well as a fun time in the role-playing d&d. <<

I'd agree. It's all basically fantasy - it's just that war-games give you
the fantasy you're dealing with real life, whereas D&D is more obviously in
the realm of the imagination. Tolkien says something like this in his essay
"On Fairy Stories". Against the argument that fairy stories - as we would
say, fantasy - do not prepare you for "real life", he pointed out that he
read both fairy stories and school stories when he was a child (he meant, of
course, before going to prep school) and that he knew that the real world
was not like the fairy stories, but that he expected school to be like the
school stories. So the school stories were actually worse preparation for
"real life" than the fairy stories, since the school stories were fantasy
pretending to be a shadow of reality, whereas the fairy stories were fantasy
out in the open.

Connection with tech writing? When an SME looks me in the eye and tells me,
three weeks into the project, "No, Jane, the installation instructions are
set so you can complete that chapter now," with his voice ringing with
sincerity, I know that this guy is convinced that his fantasy is real. He
has played too many war games and not enough Dungeons and Dragons. He has
read too much Jackie Collins and not enough Tanith Lee. He has watched too
many episodes of _Neighbours_ and not enough _Blake's 7_. I smile, I shake
my head, and I say, as politely as possible, "I'm sorry, it's just my policy
always to leave documenting the install to the very end of the project."

You have to be kind to people who can't tell fantasy from reality. <g>

Jane Carnall
Re vera, cara mea, mea nil refert.


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