I saw an interesting article from the New York Times, "A Game as Literary Tutorial", subtitled "Dungeons & Dragons Has Influenced a Generation of Writers".  It cites a lot of writers who are or were gamers, and their history. Notably, it talks about storytelling (hippy-ish), but specifically about D&D for that.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/14/books/dungeons-dragons-has-influenced-a-generation-of-writers.html?hpw&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=HpHedThumbWell&module=well-region®ion=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well&_r=0

It isn't that long, but as a sampling quote:

QuoteThe playwright and screenwriter David Lindsay-Abaire, 44, who wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning play "Rabbit Hole," said D&D "harkens back to an incredibly primitive mode of storytelling," one that was both "immersive and interactive." The Dungeon Master resembles "the tribal storyteller who gathers everyone around the fire to tell stories about heroes and gods and monsters," he said. "It's a live, communal event, where anything can happen in the moment."

Mr. Lindsay-Abaire said planning D&D adventures was "some of the very first writing that I did." And the game taught him not just about plot but also about character development.

I'd be curious about people's thoughts.

I think his campaign was one he was obviously very impressed with, but I imagine his players were less so.

He's fundamentally right, although the key word here is "hearken". If you're looking at skills which can be taken from other art forms and applied to RPGs there is very little from writing or filmmaking that can be directly applied. Live performance arts offer a lot and, yes, the historical skill set closest to the modern GM is the live storyteller.

But, on the other hand, there's nothing primitive about interactive storytelling. On the contrary, it's revolutionary and unprecedented. The amount of interactivity that has been introduced into the generation of narratives in the latter half of the 20th century (whether through tabletop games, Choose Your Own adventure books, or video games) has created whole new mediums and genres that have had their potential barely scratched.

Quote from: jhkim;769912I'd be curious about people's thoughts.

I think the influence of D&D on a generation of writers is the proximate cause of the collapse of adult fantasy as a genre.

Quote from: daniel_ream;769927I think the influence of D&D on a generation of writers is the proximate cause of the collapse of adult fantasy as a genre.

I'd blame that more on the publishers... who are the power over what goes on the shelves... chasing after the crowd who love the soap opera stuff that is now 'mainstream fantasy'.
There are plenty of writers producing fantasy that doesn't fall into that ghetto... but you've gotta go hunting for them.

I remember thinking back in the 1980s that maybe the people who made the TV show Hill Street Blues had been influenced by Marvel Comics. To some extent they probably  had, just as Stan Lee and company had been influenced by other works.

Where that was an authorial weaving together of strands, frp ahd the interactive fiction definitely rooted in it (Zork, etc.), and to a lesser extent the less flexible hypertext of gamebooks (Choose Your Own Adventure, etc.), involve a participatory element that needs an appropriate medium.

What sort of thoughts does the game experience provoke, that find literary expression?

Genre fiction and fantasy elements both seem pretty much to have become the new mainstream. How much this is cause or effect relative to frp and video games -- the digital certainly owing much to Dungeons and Dragons, I think -- is perhaps debateable. Everything feeds off everything else in the total milieu.

Big business in Japan converting RPG session reports into novels.

I knew a couple of writers whos books were actually RP sessions very cleverly cleaned up and embellished on.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;769917He's fundamentally right, although the key word here is "hearken". If you're looking at skills which can be taken from other art forms and applied to RPGs there is very little from writing or filmmaking that can be directly applied. Live performance arts offer a lot and, yes, the historical skill set closest to the modern GM is the live storyteller.

But, on the other hand, there's nothing primitive about interactive storytelling. On the contrary, it's revolutionary and unprecedented. The amount of interactivity that has been introduced into the generation of narratives in the latter half of the 20th century (whether through tabletop games, Choose Your Own adventure books, or video games) has created whole new mediums and genres that have had their potential barely scratched.

I'd agree with this. I think the relation to "primitive" is that RPGs go in the opposite direction than the trend over many centuries towards mass-produced media.

I don't know about game mastering being a literary tutorial, but I certainly have noticed fascinating parallel between my game mastering and my teaching. Prepping for a class and prepping for a session activate the same parts of my brain.

You can learn a lot about narrative by playing even the most Old School of Old School Games-- namely, how 'plot' develops from the interaction of character and situation.
Just like in an RPG, if you build the plot first and railroad your characters through the required points, you'll write a bad book.
If you build the characters to have dynamic needs, create an consistent and changing environment, and note the interactions between the two, you're getting the basics of narrative down.