What would you need, to feel like you had a role in SL?

With "other things" I suppose you mean roleplaying, in the context of this thread. Well, rp requires a few things, but I believe all of them can be encouraged/learned. Creativity is a bit of a broad term, I would break it down.. it consists of the ability to observe and mimic, and to take apart and put together in novel ways. To be able to visualize is important, but it's even better if one can use all the senses in this way (imagine sounds, smells, tactile sensations..). In SL you have to be able to be a bit of an author as well, as written word is the method of communication. Being able to write drama, in other words knowledge of how storylines are built, is useful. Knowing some psychology helps.

However, all of the above may help you to be a technically good roleplayer, but the most important ability is the ability to emphatize, that is, to put yourself in the position of another. This requires one to be able to be vulnerable, as well, as out of necessity you will be showing some of your own personality and your own weaknesses when playing a character *well*. This also comes down to the willingness to let go.. of fear, in its very basest form.

Classes on creative writing and drama IRL are useful for roleplaying skills as well, but the best way to learn/encourage all of the above is to roleplay. I'll offer to teach.

Bagushii, that's really interesting, but I'd put all of that together under things that you need to be able to role-play well once you have a role-playing group around. What I was really talking about was taking a particular role in SL, as a whole, not in a closed group (which can really do any role in any circumstances).

You are moving the goalposts by adding requirements. SL is a closed group to begin with. In SL you can initiate RP anywhere, in any role you want (well, don't try sexual agepl*y). The very basic requirement for RP is imagination, that's what we already have. Most prefer to have somekind of input from the environment/people, SL is the environment/people. Of course themed/controlled input is even nicer, so in SL we have RP sims. The sims can have storylines and so on, as you can see, the level of complexity increases, but the idea stays the same. If you can think of a story, you can RP. So what you need.. imagination to be able to think a story, and suspension of disbelief to want to think of something that's not "real".

Let's say you want to be a vampire, in the whole of SL, and not use the Bloodlines HUD or anything like that. You have to RP this so that you actually can interact with anyone, possibly ending up biting them, or deciding that they are not suitable to be your victims and move on. It'd be a bit tricky, but doable. You'd initiate RP with people, very casually, feeling if they are ready to RP at all. If they go along with your hints, like complex emotes, then that's a sign they are roleplayers, at least.

Then you could proceed to dropping very small clues of the type of interaction you want to have, maybe inviting them over. Then when they see your gothic castle.. they probably get the clue.. and start playing along.. and so you get it going. Or maybe you hit a clueless poseball-sex craving newbie, bite them on the ball, and leave them waving their prim dick around as clueless as before. You'd be a bit of a mindfuck, but hey, vampires are kinda evil.

The above can be applied to other roles.

I'm not really moving the goalposts, just saying that I wanted to take a more general viewpoint. I mean, what you say above, depends on your answer to the question I'm asking - you can talk at any time in any role you want, but if everyone ignores you, did you really initiate RP or did you fail to? Some people would say yes and some no, which is why I posted the poll.

/me nips Yumi's toes.

If a tree falls in a forest...

Unless we're deconstructing the semantics of "role play" it seems just silly to use that term to refer to solitary behaviors. I mean, if one plays a role with no intention of anybody else interacting--nor, perhaps, even noticing--that's a fantasy ill-suited to a social medium. I suppose, if one were really drawn to that, SL offers "props" so maybe it's a pursuit with some relevance to the platform. But calling it "role play" is square peg / round hole, to my sense.

I'm glad Czari mentioned IRC. It doesn't take a particularly advanced medium to support good role play. Indeed, relatively impoverished sensory stimuli may leave more room for imagination, and perhaps more complete "immersion" than the 3D virtual world counterpart. (Sort of like Novel > Audio Book > Film -- even if you get to wear 3D glasses for the film.)

So, if this is an exercise in establishing the minimum requirements, they're far lower than what the platform can provide. To me, it's an open question whether the platform's additional features can stimulate better role play, or make it more approachable to the masses, or merely distract.

Qie, it isn't really a case of being solitary but of people ignoring the RP or not. If Argent bites my toe, is that emote typed by himself all he needs to consider that RPd, or do I need to say Ouch? If I respond by asking him about llGetObjectDetails is it satisfactory? If I respond by banning him from my land is it satisfactory for him?

Also, if other people's involvement is needed, do the people of SL provide it? I don't think SL can be evaluated as a technical platform alone when considering such things.

It's OK, Yumi, I didn't expect you to respond. There's plenty of other people willing to role-play in the forums, I'm sure you've seen it happening.

I met my wife in a free form role-playing game that I was running on an Apple-II bulletin board system in the early '80s. If a 40 character by 24 line uppercase-only text display with as much as 96 hours between a nip and a yelp is adequate for role-play... I have to really wonder just what you're doing that makes you believe SL can't mediate role-play for you.

Right, Argent, but what if no-one responded? Would you still feel like, um, a ferret? That there should be someone willing to RP with you is not a hard request. But that there should be someone for each of the thousands of users who join?

Technical comments are mainly irrelevant, if you need human interaction to RP and don't get it, it wouldn't matter if you had a holodeck.. (although technically as shown the holodeck would have been poor for RP - no avatars!)

That's what's called a leading question.
Thousands of them. The number of potential connections between people goes up faster than exponentially with the number of people, so the more people the more opportunities for any kind of interaction, including role-play.

Amen to THAT, sister!

To the OP...

Yeah... what she said.

Um.. I don't think it's a leading question as it doesn't have an embedded answer.

And, does roleplay show that growth in the same way that chat does? I am not sure. The more people there are in a group, the greater the chance that one or more will want to "just hang out" instead of roleplaying, and entropy means they usually win.

again.. all of this is personal..
when i was a little girl.. i used to run around the garden pretending to be riding a pony..
i would take both parts.. the rider and the pony...
i would break a branch off a shrub to use as a crop.. and then canter around and around.. jumping over small obstacles... steering with imaginary reins.. whinneying.. snorting... tapping with the little branch crop... bucking in reaction to it...

and be totally happy..

the only time anyone every noticed me .. was to admonish me for wrecking the shrub or to ask me if i had done my homework or cleaned my room.

some of us are happy in our roles.. without a supporting cast.. some not.. it doesnt make the other right and us wrong..

imagine if the whole bloody world was cantering in blissful solitude around the figurative garden.....
and god help the shrubberies.

<=== This Post - it has the way of the truth VV

Doesn't everyone feel like a ferret once in a while? Trouble is ten minutes later and you feel like another

wow.. ferrets are like ramen then... 30 minutes later and youre frikking starving!

That's not what the term "leading question" means. "What's a rhetorical question, anyway?"
Sure, the sociology is the same regardless of the details of the interaction. Some kinds of interaction are less common than others, but the number of connections is still combinatorial.
That's the grocery line fallacy*. You don't need everyone in the group to be role-playing to be able to role-play. If you won't react to my nibbling your toes, Anne Launay will.

*Whenever you have N lines, the odds are (N-1)/N that there's a line moving faster Than you. This doesn't mean the odds are (N-1)/N that you picked the "wrong" line, though... the odds are, in fact (N-1)/N that there's a line moving slower than yours.

No, no, the ferrets are in your trousers, and they're hungry. See the previous comments (in another thread) about the availability of food in the north of England.

What do you intend to do with the results? What is your *point*, anyway? SL as a platform enables people to roleplay, that much is certain. SL enables people to do everything that is on your poll. You won't arrive at a situation where every single roleplayer in SL ignores you until no new players arrive and/or SL ceases to exist. You said you wanted a list of personal qualities or skills that you were very interested in, now you no longer seem interested in them at all.

I'm not here to argue for arguing's sake. So I'll say this: If you look for problems, you will find problems. If you look for solutions, you will find solutions. So far you seem to be focusing on finding the problems. A lot of advice and good pointers have been given to you already, and you keep finding ways to ignore them. Did you go to an RP sim and RP, and did you get ignored? Did you try again, I mean, like, yesterday? If you did, then let's talk about what your problem is. If you think maybe there's a problem with the level of immersion you are able to achieve, or on your technical skills to rp, I can help. But if you refuse to listen, I can't.

If there are some RL circumstances which cause you distress, anxiety etc., I can symphatize, but then my advice would be to seek help. Talk therapy can help you overcome your apparently rigid thought patterns that have you emotionally stuck (emotional problems won't respond to logical arguments, and won't go away by any amount of analytical thinking).

It is largely so that I can learn about the claims being made about SL, and the kind of personal qualities that influence experiences in SL. What made me interested in this question were the posts on one of the other threads saying that people were role-playing by just hanging out generically in bars and clubs (because, their roles did that too). So you might have a vampire, a ninja, and a wizard all just dancing at a generic SL club like anyone else because all three would IC have good reasons to act incognito. So if there were many people who were happy with that form of "role-playing", that requires no engagement from others, then that alone would explain the advertising and promoting of "role-playing" in SL by many people.



Alone it does not, because the platform doesn't include the people. In fact, there's even some sign that it might inhibit roleplay. I only thought of this last night - nobody seems to object to being bitten by a ferret, but will hugely protest at a vampire even asking permission to bite them. Why? Because the vampire is using the platform features, and the direct result of that is that the requests become spam.



That is certainly possible. Here are but a few ways it can happen:
- You are hanging out in the wrong areas (and remember, having geography at all, or having geography that matches with the social world, are both just platform design decisions in SL);
- You've been banned from critical areas;
- Others want to role-play, but not to role-play what you want to;
- Other areas that are more popular or more platform supported are pulling in RPers, some of whom may be 100% happy, but others who may just be "settling".

That last one is especially a problem, heaven help you if you want to play fantasy at the moment and aren't interested in Avilion or Harry Potter, for instance.



And as I mentioned.. I'm not so much talking about an "RP sim" as on Second Life as a whole. The reason I say that is because "RP sims", being usually closed groups of people, can make up their own social rules (and usually suffer from a great deal of drama as a result). What I am looking for is the implicit and unspoken social rules that apply across the whole of SL, not the rules that a sim builder writes on a notecard by their door. Most RP sims put me off anyway as I wll generally avoid any RP sim that has closed membership and drops visitors in a mall.

Again, I don't see that this was a rhetorical or leading question. If you had never had anyone reacting to your ferrety emotes would you still feel happy as a ferret? Bear in mind that this does not mean there is no-one anywhere who would be prepared to, only that you haven't met them. (And as the number of people goes up the odds of any given set of people meeting goes down)



Right, but if that one person in the group is going to take offense to toe-nibbling, and that could lead to the group being disrupted or a ban, then you can't do it, and that probability goes up too - and moreover, that means you also can't do it if you're not sure, in advance, that no-one would take offense - because by the time they have done so it is too late. As the number of people goes up the harder it is to have that certainty about each of the increasing numbers.

It wan't a rhetorical question, it was a leading question. Are you mixing the two up?

OBJECTION! YOUR HONOR, COUNSEL IS LEADING THE WITNESS!
People are always going to be offended by things you say or do, and that has nothing to do with role-play, that has to do with people being people. I have friends I can't talk about computers to, who object to some of my avatars, who I have religious disagreements with, this is all part of the way interactions between people work. So this is a constant factor in all group interactions, it doesn't change the combinatorial factor that grows as the size of the community grows, it just changes the constant factor that's related to the effectiveness of each communication.
The only way to have certainty in your relationships is to stick to imaginary friends.

Sure, people can be offended by any view, but role-playing tends to be looked at a bit differently because it isn't seen as something there's a right to. Most people, even if they disagree with your religious views, will at least accept your right to have them; or to wear an avatar, or to be interested in computers. For role-play that isn't there because it's seen, by those who aren't involved/interested, as purely selfish. "If you get to be a ferret I get to be an exterminator, WHACK!" (And if that seems far-fetched, just look at all the "if you get to be a vampire I get to be Buffy" posts)

But at least they aren't ignoring you, which you made out to be the worst option before, if I understood correctly. Are you really looking for a solution, or a problem here?

Would it help if someone would point out a fantasy rp sim that wasn't Harry Potter or Avilion? Or are you just looking for a problem or an argument?

Now you say you are interested in social rules that govern behaviors over the whole of SL. Well, rp, like all human interaction, is reciprocal. If you want to rp with people, you have to be ready to give them all the things you have on your list, too. Are you really?

But it's not wrong to say SL is an rp platform, as it offers a means of communication, plus plenty of possibilities for visual and aural cues. RL is still probably the best one, as it allows for things such as live action and freeform. You might want to take a look at the old Vampire the Masquerade live action rp ruleset, they have some ideas about how to include people unaware of the rp going on in the play, for feeding on them and such.