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

To be frank, it's more sex role playing and fantasy creature role playing or dress up than anything.

I don't think one can play being a tax account or a therapist for example.

We all have nuturing and advice tendencies, but I think one should draw the line at roleplaying someone's psychologist or tax account on the internet no matter what the graphics display or not.

Disclaimer: Haven't read the whole thread cause I'm lazy/tired


Well, I feel that I role-play a woman in RL, as nature saw it fit to shape me like one. In SL i role-play a man, simply because I can. The role that is closest to the real me is the one I play in SL. Hoping to be "playing" it in RL one day. Will I still see it as a role then? Hm, maybe, I don't know. As I see it people will show different sides of their personality on different arenas in RL. Some feel it as playing a role, some don't.
This was besides the point of the thread I think, but felt like adding it still.

No, I don't think it is fair. RP holds a different meaning to people, and for someone who just puts on an avie and uses SL as a wicked cool chat room it's just that. *shrugs*

That's not a "free thing". That's one of the things that pays for the stuff that I do buy. Like the squirrel avatar you see in that picture.

Building, in short, is more along the lines of "how do I make money" than "what do I spend money on". Where do you think the "things" you buy come from? The prim well in ANWR?

Funny, I know people who make a living playing those kinds of roles in SL.

And as it turns out, I have a rather serious-looking giant anteater avatar.

I have someone in my extended family who is 89 years old. I don't think SL could let me know what it's like to be in his bones if I donned an 89-year-old looking avatar.

SL cannot replicate pain for example.

Nor could being in a game called Nascar with your avatar being smashed to bits in a car accident replicate what it's actually like to deal with after being in a terrible car crash.

There are just some things SL cannot replicate no matter if under the guise called role playing or not.

SL tries to include or induce the psyche into certain things, but it won't succeed. Just my opinion. SL could induce the psyche, however, for escapism or fantasy or thought of art, jmo again.

I think you have the wrong end of the stick there.

Huh?

Well, I was being a wee bit facetious.

^_^

edit: but stand corrected, now that I read Argent's latest post (!)

I thought so. I should correct my post to "I don't think it's wise nor do I even see a point in someone role playing your tax account on the internet no matter with graphics or no graphics".

Role playing a psychologist could be done in SL, but I think that would put an awful lot of burden on the person playing the psychologist, especially if they are not qualified. I think that's also asking a bit much such as asking them to be there when a crisis arises. They just may not be able to be there online in such an event. So, it's not a logical avenue to take that road.

Sometimes i think the SL me is more "me" than the real me. It is the me i choose to be without RL external or societal constraints. Ive also found that the connections i make with people in sl often reveal their true self rather quickly even if they are attempting to be someone or something else. regardless of the avatar package, to me sl boils people down to their true essence and i cant think of any thing more real than that and def not role playing.

Huh? For this 89-year-old person being able to pee after 16 hours is a miracle and makes up most of his day, not to mention other things I cannot understand. I still believe in that saying "we can't know anyone until we walk a mile in their shoes". SL cannot provide that mile. It can provide escapism through role play and it's mostly sexual, let's get real here.

But even certain actors and actresses go through a much more rigorous change of psyche by trying to live as that character when off screen. Acting is an art to depict how a character changes through life experiences. That's what a good script and character development will do. I can't equate bad typo emoting or copy and paste emoting with great acting skills nor a masterpiece movie script.

What I mean is this: I don't think that the analogy that you were responding to meant that SL would let the poster, as a girl, understand what being her mother was like. Rather it was an example of the dimorphism between the roles that nature impose on us as we age and the person that we feel ourselves to be.

Thank you, Argent.

Yes I understand this, but I think an 89-year-old man or woman and their physical pain wouldn't be much different.

I thought this was a very good post and I understand some of what Jojogirl is saying and these are some aspects of SL which are very cool in that we might discover certain aspects of our personality without societal constraints.

Also, I'd like to say that I think there are some positives to role play on SL in that it's in the moment and live and depends on the people there online in that moment and sometimes it's just a heck of a lot of fun. It can get boring if the play acting is just a copy and paste job, but it's hard to keep things original and creative all the time. But when it isn't this copy/paste thing, SL has that very unique role playing aspect which is just in the moment, live, and it was a special unique thing to be a part of and everyone had a good time and it was good to laugh especially when we are willing to let our guard down and laugh at ourselves with others.

It has been my experience, helping and talking to new users, that most no longer see building as a way to make money, but a novelty activity.



Do they play them? Or are they them?

Wouldn't be much different than WHAT? What is it you think I said?

That's almost the exact wording that starts my 1st life tab. Except, for me, it's not sometimes. I think the truly real "me" only comes out in SL. (^_^)y

First, it's not "no longer" anything, most people have always wanted to make money by "fish mining" instead of actually doing something for real, because they think SL is the kind of so-called role-playing game they're used to. It's not, it's a real role-playing game, and you have to really play the role you're presenting yourself as.

Second: the fact that newbies don't know anything about what it takes to get anywhere in SL doesn't mean they're right. In fact, they're wrong. The reality is that everything you buy in world was BUILT by someone, and all the money in world that isn't spent on rent for land is spent on something someone BUILT, and a significant percentage of that rent is paid for by the people you're buying that stuff from, out of those sales.
Mu.

I play a sorcerer whose arcane knowledge allows him to do things that amaze the people around him with how cool they are. I do this by having arcane knowledge that allows me to to do cool things. Am I playing a sorcerer, or am I a sorcerer? The arcane language I use is called LSL rather than Black Speech of Cytorrak only because I'm doing it in SL instead of Marvel Comics.

SL is a world controlled by magic and those that write the scripts are the wizards!

Yes, however all of those statements are about people in the past. New users tend to see the work/reward balance involved in business building, especially in starting from scratch, as not worth it. It isn't character flaw or laziness either, simply efficient allocation of their time. And yes, this makes some of them sad.



So is the tax advisor using a skill set that is nothing to do with tax, and just calling the stuff they know "tax law"? I hope not!

Um, yes, because you know I don't have a bloody time machine to see what people joining now are going to create new businesses, now do I? But they're going to do it, I can guarantee it, no matter how much negativism you sow about the poor damn newbies NOW who somehow have so MANY more problems than the poor damn newbies six months or a year ago who have, in the mean time, created and sold new products nobody had ever heard of before they thought of them.
That's *their* problem. That's not *my* problem, and that's not *your* problem. But, you know, the ones who run into you and get hammered with the kind of negativism you shed on the forums aren't well served by you. The ones who run into me and get shown cool stuff and directed to the ivory tower, well, I'm not going to apologize for thinking that more of them are likely to make cool stuff in the future.
No, they may call it being a Grand Vizier or court economist. And the programmer in SL calling himself a sorcerer is using the same programming skill set in SL as they use outside SL. Role play isn't something that just happens, you have to work at it.

unless your a vampire with a really cool HUD

FTW!

It IS my problem, because it affects me in the fields I am still a relative newbie at. And, I do encourage people when I meet them. But, in the Show and Tell events I run, there has been a marked change from people entering things they planned to sell, to people entering things that were just random fun or that they plan to give away. And I blame that on the rising cost of marketing, which is a fault with the world (marketing itself is only a band-aid over the problem that capitalist free markets quickly become too complex for consumers to make fully informed decisions - but in SL, LL controls the bandwidth of our perception, it's the OpenGL display list)



Your example wasn't of someone calling themselves a Grand Vizier, it was of someone calling themselves a tax advisor. It seems you agree that they are not really playing a role.