Are roleplays not allowed to have free minds anymore?

DiezAre · Joined: 28 Jul 2011 Posts: 1045 Location: Antarctica

READ MY ENTIRE OP BEFORE POSTING KTHX.
This is an observation I have made in the client, that I also see elsewere in the land of RPing.
STAY. ON. TOPIC.

I keep seeing this everywhere lately... (Not just on IMVU, but an IMVU chatroom I stumbled upon is what inspired this)

Where people seem to think that things must happen a certain way, must be played a certain way, and all people must think like them. Be it the exact format of an entrance post, a character setup, length of a post, grammar/skill level, and how people must behave-- (Outside of room rules since most of the time i see this, its a roleplayer thats behaving as such about a room or plot that is not theirs. meaning how someone absolutely MUST play their character in that room/RP DESPITE it not being their room or plot to command) And if things dont go EXACTLY their way ICly they don't like the person, are hateful, (Mixing OOC and IC) try to put them down, (IC and OOC) are hateful to the room and plot, (Yet somehow don't just leave the room or otherwise if it displeases them that much) And so forth, I think you get the picture.

Normally if I get one of these people in my RP room (Or my OOC room when I still had it.) I would kindly tell them that they are entitled to their opinions, but if the other players do not believe things are to be run as such and its not against my rules they need to shut up and deal with it. Or leave. I explain that my room is fairly open to all beliefs involving everything: Religion, magick, the spiritual side of things/supernatural, race (As in despite Edelize being a human village, they are not against having members of other races/species among them as long as they are respectful.), grammar level, Rp skill level, join date and culture. And if these people absolutely cannot fathom a roleplay that doesnt follow how they think RP need to be run and just deal with it and have fun. They need to leave. And if they continue to act like a snot... I boot them into the next century without a word.

Not everything in everyones RP is set in one particular type of stone carved by any one person or group. I don't care if they have been Rping since the big bang happened, if they are a part of some 'elite' group, or even if they just think so highly of themselves that they emit the light of day from their rear. In my opinion this kind of behaviour is disrespectful.

How do you deal with people like this? Ignore, boot, try to get them to lighten up? Do you notice it too?

... Keep in mind this thread is about people who act like this outside of their own room. In their own room their word is law. Its their room, they paid for it, they made the rules their word is law. However it is not the same if they decide to hop into another persons room or a discussion, or an OOC room that is not theirs.

It is my opinion. If you disagree with me (Or any user who posts an opinion) you are allowed. But please note the difference between discussion and ignoring all of ones points just to try and cram your opinion farther down their throats.

Also this is not a place to put down one particular person in general. Despite the semi-ranty nature of the thread.

Again I remind people to stay on topic. This thread is NOT a personal attack on anyone, because... again, its an observation I made in the client, in a room I was going to try and RP in. If it offends you for some reason, just sit back and think before slamming your keyboard in rage while foaming at the mouth.

...Stay on topic.

Any 'you's are plural.

GibbertjeDeWolf · Joined: 12 Jan 2012 Posts: 431 Location: USA - NY

DhampirofLust · Joined: 02 Jul 2010 Posts: 28 Location: USA - NY

~Applause~ Diez and Jaelie. I totally agree, and have noticed this for some time now. It makes no sense why someone would put down someone else base on him/her own opinion and ridiculing them. But mixing IC and OOC also doesn't even matter to those that do it because it is your own room. It is rp and one should present your self within a rp matter.

Lyve · Joined: 16 Jul 2006 Posts: 2746 Location: USA

I have thankfully never seen this, but if I had I would probably give them a friendly warning, and then boot. Unless you are a mod or the owner you should not be telling anyone how to rp in a room.

Actually... I think I did that once, not that I think about it, but they were really ticking me off =/ The person was posting like ten short posts in a row, not letting anyone have a chance to interact. I was nice about it, at first, but I got mad when they completely ignored my questions :D So I was not telling them how to roleplay. I was saying things like 'how did that happen?' and 'Did you know so and so is trying to interact with you?'. I never out and said 'you have to do this, or else'. I asked questions about things that confused me, and nicely pointed out the things that did not sit well with me. Nothing that would have deserved getting completely ignored for.
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RikuYasuka · Joined: 07 Nov 2009 Posts: 55 Location: USA - MI

Agreed with Diez and Jaelie. I've heard similar stories from close friends of mine and even some of their friends.

EDIT: Agreed with you also Lyve. Seems our posts went through at the same moment lol

Wow. Yup. This is why I've been watching the room hops I do 'cuz now on top of other things, this one takes the cake thus far. I'd like to know why suddenly people think Role-play is no longer an open-minded culture anymore. RP is fantasy; an escape from reality, something one enjoys doing whether it is to play with other people who share similar interests or to help them get in the mood to, say, draw or write a story or something y'know?

I've not personally had this issue in my RP rooms or OOC room as of yet ~knocks on several pieces of wood~ and I do hope I get neither 'cuz, well, for one to try and push their opinion on another in such a way that,

"My opinion is RIGHT; you are to accept my beliefs and follow me, blah, blah, blah, rant, rant, rant..."

Is, well, a small form of on-setting harassment. I personally am not one for any type of harassment, especially if it is something like this: differing views/beliefs/opinions, etc... It is one thing for someone to voice their opinion on things, explain why they think such; it is another to see that another person's opinion on the same thing is totally different and decide that their opinion is wrong and they must think the other way.

This goes hand-in-hand with the Elitist topic from awhile ago because then it was people who "Are the BEST at RP" only 'cuz they had been playing RPGs, table-top, etc... for [enter x amount of years here] and they believe that gives them the "Absolute knowledge of anything that coincides with role-playing" so their way is the correct way, blah, blah, blah.

I think because of this new downward spiral that this is why RP on IMVU has fallen again, but this time deeper and farther than 4 years ago (as I had observed myself).

But with this, maybe said person(s) have been taught in such a way or they have had enough with others putting them down so they followed suit and now put others down like this to make themselves feel better...?
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Where has all the Role-play gone? I miss it badly...

Guest_xXBitebackXx · Joined: 12 Feb 2012 Posts: 95 Location: USA

"just sit back and think before slamming your keyboard in rage while foaming at the mouth."

I loled so hard i'm foaming at the mouth! *Slams keyboard in rage*

Anyway. Yeah, in other rooms. People can have their own opinions. I mean, if they say they have a queen or what not in a room that says "NO QUEENS", Then it is no longer a matter of opinion change, it's just adhereing to the rules.
((Allow me to make it clear by queens, I mean monarchy. ))
But, if you are a zombie with green flesh.
And another comes in with blue flesh, saying all zombies are blue, because of this.
That's just an opinion. It's not like they are REAL creatures anyway.

Gaussdril · Joined: 24 Mar 2007 Posts: 27 Location: USA - PA

I have to honestly say i agree quite abit with the entire discussion of this thread. I've seen it happen a number of times in a number of different rooms. I think the only thing worse then someone behaving this way in a room is when they take what happoened in that room and carry it elsewhere. Announcing that in one of their room forays they found someone who didn't rp something in the "right way" and they carry it to their group of friends to share a laugh or they drag it onto a forum somewhere and publically announce how wrong that person was/is. Its disappointing, and sadly i've seen it everywhere i've been htat had chat rp and forums. Heck i've seen it in forums that had no chat, talking about a different site altogether. Isn't it bad enough that most of us who publically talk about rping get ridiculed by those who don't? do we really need to do it to each other?

DiezAre · Joined: 28 Jul 2011 Posts: 1045 Location: Antarctica

So far I have to applaud everyones respondes. So well-written. Agree completely.

And lyve: i dont see that as being the same thing. You were just trying to solve an issue over trying to force then to RP your way cause your way is 't3h onleh waiii'

IshikaruTanaka · Joined: 16 Oct 2006 Posts: 391 Location: Japan

One thing I've seen can be called "Oldbie Syndrome", where people decide that because they've been text-RPing for more than 5 years, they are the experts or end-all-be-all of what's the best way to RP. My favorite are the ones who point to AOL, Prodigy, GEnie, or CompuServe as the "first" text-based RP and as such, their rules are the oldest and grandest.

Let's see...

CompuServe was operating as early as 1969 but strictly in a B2B fashion. It didn't start its true "consumer public internet" operations until around 1989, and really came into its own by the early 1990s or so.

Prodigy was founded in 1984 and came to prominence much the same as CompuServe.

AOL was founded in 1983 for the Atari 2600 but started its true PC operations in 1988.

GEnie was founded in 1985 and had a reputation for top notch games, some even text-based, though mostly known for their graphical multiplayer games.

It seems most of these early services really came into their own around the early 1990s.

Now contrast that with ARPANET, the first true public, non-military internet, originally established between two Calfornia universities; UCLA's School of Engineering and Applied Science and the Culler-Fried Interactive Mathematics center at the University of California at Santa Barbara. More sites were added until by 1971, 15 university departments were interconnected via ARPANET. (Source)

The first MUD or Multi-User Dungeon, was coded in 1978, based off of early single-player fantasy-themed text-based roleplaying games. So if you really want to play the game of Oldbie Syndrome, AOLers and the like are mere children in comparison to the grandparents that are MUDders of the day.

Myself, I'm physically not old enough to have been an early MUDder, but by university, I was MUDding, and later moving on to more advanced code bases such as TinyMUCK, PennMUSH, TinyMUSH, TinyMUX, and so on. I was even coding these systems, once I'd learned their softcode. I have never hardcoded a MU* (The * represents any text-based game in the MUD system of coded games) but was coding advanced globals systems for TinyMUX, and had run two TinyMUXes, one a dead Dragon Riders of Pern game killed by copyright issues with the author's lawyers, and another not yet open due to no time to finish coding it.

To my knowledge, I'm the oldbiest oldbie currently posting in this forum, in so far as having not just played in these games but even learning how to code their very systems, and still you don't see me strutting about with this stuff. I played Yahoo Chat's Ayenee and yet I almost never talk about it. Why? Because IMVU IS NOT MUD, IS NOT AYENEE, IS NOT RHYDIN, IS NOT COMPUSERVE, IS NOT... you get the idea.

Let IMVU be IMVU, please. That's why I love it. If I wanted to be on a TinyMUX, I'd log into one. If I wanted to play at the Red Dragon Inn, I'd log into it. I want to play on IMVU, so I log into IMVU.

It's good to take lessons learned from past RPing and use them to build forward and make new worlds, but this by no means makes these past lessons law. They are merely good ideas, as I said in another post somewhere, that we have all latched onto to give us a relevant and shared platform to work from. Don't let this platform stifle creativity, however.

The hallmark of IMVU is creativity. Look at the product catalog if you don't believe that.

And before anyone accuses me of this, please think on how long I've been on IMVU and how long I've been posting in the forum before I truly laid out my credentials like this. I'm absolutely not bragging. It's not a brag to say I've been a Grade AAA, number one, hardcore nerd. That's not "cool", really. ;D I'm not better than anyone because I've been doing this longer. If anything, it means I'm lamer than most because I didn't have cooler things to do than MUDding and whatnot. ;D
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DiezAre · Joined: 28 Jul 2011 Posts: 1045 Location: Antarctica

-roaring applause for ishi-

LOVE it.

GibbertjeDeWolf · Joined: 12 Jan 2012 Posts: 431 Location: USA - NY

It's always refreshing to see someone like Ishi here who doesn't wield all their experience as a weapon against those with different interests, ideas, or styles of RP Smile

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"We're only human/Seperated by our thoughts/So hang on to them,  or you'll find you might get caught/Caught up in the 'Hey! Monkey See and Monkey Do!'/Must they get brainwashed by what's surrounding you?!" -- Skye Sweetnam

DiezAre · Joined: 28 Jul 2011 Posts: 1045 Location: Antarctica

Would be neat if more people would look up to people like Ishi in that kind of aspect. xD

IshikaruTanaka · Joined: 16 Oct 2006 Posts: 391 Location: Japan

To quote Disney's Goofy, "Aw gawrsh!" *^_^*
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Prince of Purple! - Hard Candy Products | Bishounen Kingdom | IMVU Explained!

XxMissSnowyxX · Joined: 24 Mar 2010 Posts: 2235 Location: Antarctica

I think the biggest issue is that IMVU is so free flow and you have people who have done something one way so long that they have forgotten that IMVU is so diverse and that the world of IMVU and RPing doesn't revolve around what they think is right and wrong.

I see it a lot when I am RPing in one of the rooms that I frequent quite often. Someone was I guess kind of unnerved by how random the room was going, but everyone that was in there was having fun, other than the person who was unnerved. But it wasn't because of the context of what was being discussed at the time, it was the fact the room wasn't being "serious enough."

I think as a whole we might all have been guilty of this at one point or another, just some of us were able to overcome our "self righteous elitist" thinking and step back and say "It's not worth getting all worked up over, RPing is supposed to be fun."

Dealing with people who think their way is the only way, I try and lighten the mood, because if everyone starts going into a who can jump further match, it just won't solve anything and it ruins the fun for everyone.

I do worry about the people who act a certain way outside of the room. You have this person or that person who plays some kind of "royalty" and they expect people to grovel at their feet. Sure if they were in their room or in another room linked to their RP that title might mean something, but outside, they are just like anyone else.

If not for the royalty people, the other people that worry me are the "Families" I get if they go into another RP room.. sure be all the family that you want to be, but if you are not in an RP room.. stop mixing IC and OOC XD
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EtherialNeko · Joined: 15 Sep 2009 Posts: 1444 Location: United Kingdom

*Waves a little Ishi fan flag*
...wait, i'm everyones fan aren't I?
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