"World of Warcraft" is an online computer game with over nine million players, many of them technically-minded young males. A proportion of these young males engage in spontaneous creative writing about their game adventures. They enjoy highly formulaic genres, such as the epic poem, with its complex technical requirements. This has implications for the content and methods used in mainstream classrooms to engage those boys who hold English in low esteem. Their attraction to rule-governed systems and to fantasy role playing suggests that English teachers might do well to reconsider the value of technical styles, systematic instruction, and the contrived persona, in contrast to a more Romantic emphasis on free-form writing, personal voice and self-disclosure. (Contains 5 notes.)