A little eye-popping at first, isn't it? How do you feel about the statement?
If you're anything like me, you don't really care. And I don't mean it in a put-offish way, like I'm handwaving things to the side to project a cool demeanor- I mean it in the sense that, yeah, a lot of people realistically feel this way, but nothing will ever realistically come of it. The person I'm quoting has a point. You can just keep being belligerent, unfriendly, uncooperative, etc... and probably drive the writer opposing you in a duel away out of sheer frustration with your inept writing and attitude. I know it's been done with me, in my years as a role-player. It's probably been done with you too - maybe here, maybe before here, maybe soon somewhere else.
Which is why I submitted this quote, and other meta-related events from Skype and OOC threads, to an RPJ and dictated that they were to take these things into account when judging Invasions.
Why? Shouldn't it just be about the writing?
This question is very complex and leads me to the title of this blog post as my answer. I'm not well-learned or smart enough to know, but I'm assuming almost every community can be defined by a choice selection of words or phrases.
"Let my people go."
"I have a dream."
"Tear down this wall."
"We, the people."
A bit dramatic and on the nose, but it makes me wonder when pondering the question of "shouldn't it just be about the writing," with thoughts of - what are SWRP's words for this?
Lately, this past year, it feels more and more like our words are the following:
"Can you edit that?"
Maybe it's because of my chat role-play origins when we literally couldn't edit, maybe it's because the question itself seems a bit pretentious to me, or maybe it's because as a role-player I'm just more relaxed... but I can only recall one time I've ever asked someone to edit and didn't just roll with the punches. And that time, I wasn't a role-player. I was an Administrator. And I was asking a person to edit his post where he killed another writer's character against their wishes, and would not budge. Hence the rule about killing characters.
To me, it just feels like when you ask someone to edit... you're asking them to conform their version of the story to yours. And isn't that against what we're doing here? We're collaborating. No vision is the correct vision. Sure, a player might be just absolutely wrong... but do you have to stop the role-play to correct them? This line of reasoning is why a lot of Invasion reports get ignored.
I just feel like... on a global scale, we as a community are approaching duels, invasions, skirmishes, etc... "role-plays of opposition" as you will... as shouting contests and it's just very dull and unattractive. Again, see the above quote. This is what people are driven to... over a fictional game... of words on paper.
How do you go about duels... do you agree with the above quote? What do you think our community's "words" would be?
