"Advanced" use of virtual worlds? (Re: [MUD-Dev] MMORPGs & MUDs)

[Miroslav Silovic]

From: "Matt Mihaly" <the_logos at achaea.com>

> Well, if you can roleplay by being yourself, doesn't that kind of
> make the term lose meaning? It means that we are all roleplaying
> 24 hours a day. I'm not going to argue that's not true, as we all
> play roles (husband, girlfriend, boss, employee, etc) but I'm not
> sure whether that's what people mean when they talk about
> roleplaying in games.

I once tried to deliberately play a character that was myself ported
to a WoD MUSH. Predictably enough, the character I created took the
life of his own, and his personality pretty quickly diverged from my
own.

Which brings us to the point: I *don't* fake my characters. They do
have their own life, and when I roleplay them (or act them, if you
prefer), I do become somebody else for the duration. I don't
logically consider what my character would do, I *know* what he
*has* to do, and the character's emotions filter through (the same
way I feel real emotions while reading a good book, for instance,
except that roleplaying can be even more intense).

Moreover, the emotions one can go through during an intense RP scene
have a far broader spectrum than the *YAY, FRAG, DUDE!* that Quake
(and text-only fragfest variants thereof, no matter how tactically
detailed) provide.

I mean, heroism, gloating, hate, and even love are easy - you can
feel them in RL, and you can go through them by playing your
character.  But there are also emotional states one can not even
approach in real life.  For example, how would it feel to Impress a
dragon in Anne McCaffrey's Pern setting?

I have a pretty good idea.

    Miro




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