SL, the "role-playing game"...is THAT what it is?

As most of us in the Forums know, there's a difference of opinion on how to characterize Second Life. But the news media seem to have settled on "role-playing game".

Last month's news about the UK couple divorcing over an 'affair' that took place inworld is a typical example: In a November 14 story, Time Magazine characterized SL as "the online role-playing game Second Life". And a Google search of "role playing game" with "Second", "Life", and "Online", has over 125,000 hits.

Let's leave aside the 'game' part and just look at 'role-playing':


Though some have said that any avatar you choose---no matter how near your real-life appearance---is by definition a 'role' that you play, I question that. If that's so, then isn't getting dressed in the real-world, and combing your hair, and moving and talking the way you do, just as much 'role-playing'?

If you define 'role-playing' that broadly, then doesn't the term become meaningless?

What I'm asking, here in Resident Answers, is: If you don't happen to be a person who plays a vampire in SL, or an anthropomorphic animal, or the opposite gender, ora a child, or a robot, or a slavemaster or slave-----if, in fact, your avatar isn't all that far from your real-life self---then ARE you 'role-playing'?

Where is the line drawn?

If just making an avatar is 'role-playing', then what in non-virtual life ISN'T role-playing (for the reasons described above)?



I guess I'm saying that it's fine to play roles in Second Life. It may even be helpful to people, to do this.

But....there are a LOT of people who DON'T play roles in SL.

So: is it fair to characterize SL as a 'role-playing' phenomenon?

visual chatroom with manipulatives

It's interesting that some people seem to define role-playing by the visuals alone. It would seem to me to be role-playing if you behaved differently than would be true to your nature, not if you merely looked differently than you usually do.

But what about people (for instance, some who focus on building or on writing scripts) who may go for hours at a time without chatting with anyone? They wouldn't consider 'chatroom' to be the best description of their SL experience, really.

(I'm just offering that for the sake of the discussion.)

Good point. You could, conceivably, make an avatar that resembled your non-virtual appearance quite closely---and yet make a conscious choice to try to conduct yourself in a completely opposite manner than in your normal non-virtual life.

Exactly.

Well, for anyone doing that, 'SL, the role-playing ____' ('game' or 'platform' or what-have-you) WOULD make sense.

But there again, many people who DON'T do that are left out of the description.

still a visual chatroom. they just choose to maximize the manipulatives and minimize the chat.

there is also a financial gain aspect, that has nothing to do with chat or manipulatives either. still just a visual chatroom.

In my conversations to my RL friends, I describe SL as a "multi-user 3D development platform".

But no matter what, my friends still ask me, "Are you still playing that stupid internet game?"

zg

Second Life is a game in the broad sense of the word; a game can be defined as a diversion for enjoyment.

Second Life has elements of role-playing to it: Many people do not create avatars and choose their behavior to reflect their real life personalities. In fact, I would suspect that very, very few people attempt to make perfect representations of their real selves.

However, "roleplaying game" is a term of art. "Roleplaying game" has it's own definition my old Webster's Dictionary: "a game in which participants adopt the roles of imaginary characters under the direction of a Game Master."

There is no Game Master in Second Life. While people may be making up characters for fun in Second Life, it is free-form, and not part of an organized or adjudicated set of rules.

So Second Life is a game. Second Life is roleplaying. But it's not a "roleplaying game."

there are also a great many people who role play in real life, and i'm not referring to Ren fair types and the like, but rather those who get up in the morning and dress for their role at work which reflects in no way their activities and interests they keep separate from their professional lives. even in this day and age there are many who would never employ someone if they knew what that person's "real" life were like.
it's also quite likely many of you just finished role playing over the holidays, "enjoying" the time with family while counting the days, hours, minutes until such time as they would leave...

Lol mine too!

Good points. But I remain curious about two things;

1) what proportion of SL Residents DO consider that their main activity in SL is 'role-playing'?, and

2) Since the media insist on labels that are short and pithy, what short, pithy alternative to 'role-playing game' (which I maintain is a poor characterizaton) could we offer them?


I've been thinking about the now-infamous kiss-off remarks made last month by Eric Reuters/Krangel:

"It’s hard to say what, if anything, Linden Lab can do to make Second Life appeal to a general audience. The very things that most appeal to Second Life’s hardcore enthusiasts are either boring or creepy for most people: Spending hundreds of hours of effort to make insignificant amounts of money selling virtual clothes, experimenting with changing your gender or species, getting into random conversations with strangers from around the world, or having pseudo-nonymous sex (and let’s not kid ourselves, sex is a huge draw into Second Life)."


There seems no question that he was saying that if you like SL, you are.....weird.

And he was definitely characterizing SL fans as role-players, in the nastiest possible sense of the term.

And I think he just managed to fail to observe that many, many people in SL pretty much NEVER do the things he lists as being the only (or main) attractions of SL. I think the 'role-playing' description ignores all these people.

I think part of the problem is trying to pinpoint a definition for something that encompasses a very wide range of possibilities. Yes, I COULD role-play, and maybe I do 15% of the time, but perhaps 20% of the time I am running a business, and 10% of the time I'm learning to make sculpties. 32% of the time I'm involved in building, say, and just working alone. I mean - those things are all commonly done. How could one term cover it all?

I think for me SL is a tool that allows me to interact with my own artwork in ways hitherto impossible. SL = an internet Swiss Army Knife.

You've never been bannned or had prims returned then?

There is an adjudicated set of rules.

The Lindens are our GMs.

/me rolls 2d10 for geekiness

I think that's true. And in fact the name given to this phenomenon, Second Life, IS the all-encompassing term that makes sense.

But the media don't seem to be able to let that stand on its own. They seem to feel the need to attach an descriptive to the phrase Second Life, and "role-playing" is the one they seem to have settled on.

And frankly---though I genuinely do see the value in playing roles and experimenting and all---the whole concept of 'role-playing' is seen by the world-at-large as NOT fully adult or respectable. There's a connotation of 'you aren't emotionally healthy' attached to it (and I'm not saying that's fair or just).

So that's a major reason for my wish that we could come up with an alternative that would be latched onto by the media, in place of 'role-playing'. (The other major reason is that I just don't think it's accurate.)

Again--I don't feel disrespect for those who spend most of their SL time in ways that would generally be considered to be 'role-playing----but I think the world at large DOES feel disrespect.

It can't. People keep trying to put a label on it, but it can't be easily categorized, so why bother? SL is different to you as is to me and different yet again to someone else. Use it as you wish and don't get hung up on what to call it. And don't get hung up on what someone else calls it.

I always maintain there is an element of roleplaying for everyone in as much as you claim your avatar is no different from the RL You, it still is not the RL You. It is an atificial environment that you project yourself into, so in essence you are playing yourself. The SL world does not behave as the Real World does, you have to react somewhat differently at times. Some take aknee jerk reaction upon hearing the term "Roleplay" and see it in the narrowest of context, and for some a negative one at that. But I try to use a broader definition of the word to mean simply a broadening of your experiences, doing things you can't or won't do in RL.

Yes, I think you are right.

It could be that they are the ones who need to catch up, and that there isn't much we can do.

I think it just boils down to people want to neatly slot Second Life with a label. But Second Life is a tad bit harder to do that with then others. I mean, is it so hard to just label it a virtual world and leave it at that? That's nothing more or less than what it is.

The uses of this virtual world are almost limitless, with the social aspect being just one of many aspects the world offers. It's rather like trying to define Earth as a role-play game when some people use it purely as a first person shooter!

When people ask me what Second Life is good for, I tell 'em, "It's like real life.. except you can chose what you want to be and what you want to do that has nothing to do with real life."

But as I said in the OP, if you go the route of 'everything about the way you dress and move and speak is role-playing', then what meaning does the term really have? Doesn't it become so broad and general as to be useless as a descriptive?

I'm not saying that drawing the line between 'role-playing' and 'not role-playing' is easy or is something that everyone will agree on.

But I think it's more useful to say "being a vampire in SL is role-playing, whereas being a maker of scripts whose avatar looks and talks pretty much like the operator, is not role-playing" than to say "they're both exactly the same, they're both role-playing".

I love it! ^_^

You don't need to bother, but we are thinking about this because we are interested in it.

If you only have one avatar, and that avatar is an intentionlly close aproximation of your real world self in both appearance and behavior, then you are not "Roleplaying" in SL. You are merely experiencing a virtual world, "as yourself". I suppose that if you had multiple accounts that fit this definition, you're still not roleplaying. For example, if you have an alt, but only use that alt for the purpose of testing permissions.

If you choose to represent yourself with a decidedly different appearance in SL than your Real self, or if you choose to behave in a manner that does not correspond to your real self, then you are role-playing. Ditto if you play as an opposite gender to your real self, or if you play multiple accounts that are dissimilar from one another in appearance and actions.

Not all "roleplaying games" rely on a rigidly-defined "Games Moderator" (GM) as the arbitrator of what happens. I spent several years as a very active member of a freestyle roleplaying group on-line, where anyone could propose a scenario in a forum thread, accept additional participants either as they happened to show up, or as an approved closed group, and then go for it with their scenario. While the person who started the thread was the "GM" for that thread, all including them had a set of loose guidelines to run by, similar to our TOS and Community Standards. So it's no different in that regard than saying a parcel owner is the "Games Moderator" for what happens on their land. And some of the RP threads were simply wide-open, with each person interscting more or less "on the honor system", and no central GM at all making judgements on what happened or not in situations.

A couple of points:

Believing something worthy of discussion =/= getting "hung up on what someone else calls it".

And:

"What someone else calls" something is not necessarily a trivial matter. For instance, a few years back, many African-American adult males made quite a point of getting across their view that being called 'boy' was a non-trivial matter. Were they wrong?