all-the-worlds-a-stage
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All the World's a Stage: Raiding and RP don't mix, or do they? -- A question of continuity.
All the World's a Stage is brought to you by David Bowers every Sunday evening, investigating the mysterious art of roleplaying in the World of Warcraft.The Warcraft storyline is part of a great tradition of fantasy literature, and, as with any form of storytelling, the entire span of WoW lore involves a series of events and changes. Arthas wasn't always the Lich King, Illidan used to be able to wear shoes, and your character was once a little child, with no spells or epic weapons at all. All these things fit together in a single story universe, in which the progressive changes taking place in the story made the world what it is today.But what is it today? Is Illidan now dead or alive? Is VanCleef dead or alive, for that matter? As a gaming environment, any boss you kill today has to be there for me to kill tomorrow. The WoW game world needs to remain basically unchangeable -- but over time this can stifle a roleplayer's sense of immersion in its narrative. To illustrate the impact this sort of immutability has on storytelling, let us take a page from a certain fantasy story you might have read, and see how it might work as a WoW raid instance.Welcome to Mines of Moria! This raid instance will reset in 6 days, 10 hours and 41 minutes.[Raidleader] [Gandalf]: Beware! There are older and fouler things than orcs in the deep places of the world. Follow my glowing staff! [Raidleader] [Gandalf]: ... and um... get ready to pull that first group of orcs. Kill order is skull, x, circle... Gimli, can you offtank that cave troll?
All the World's a Stage: Yes, and...?
All the World's a Stage is brought to you by David Bowers every Sunday evening, investigating the mysterious art of roleplaying in the World of Warcraft.Roleplaying is, at its heart, a form of improv. Of course there are many differences between improv and roleplaying, but when you look at the actual practice of each, you can see that they both live and breathe by the same basic principles, and they both crash and die when these principles are ignored."Improv" is an interactive performance art that requires a certain level of training and rigor. The audience pays the actors to appear on stage, and the actors shape their performance around cues from the audience. It's entirely spontaneous, and as you can imagine, it can be quite crazy for an actor, not knowing what's going to happen next. To help with this, they use a special technique they call "Yes, and...?" which lets them handle whatever sorts of situations that might come up without getting thrown off-guard. Basically it means that each actor always accepts what the others say is true, and modifies the performance to go with whatever comes up. For example, if one actor says "hello mother" to another actor, now the one he spoke to is his mother for the duration of this scene. The "mother" accepts this new reality and offers something of her own in response, such as "Where have you been all night? Your father and I have been worried sick!" Alternatively if any actor denies what another actor just said or did, that's called "blocking," (as in, "No, I'm not your mother!") and it tends to stop the scene right there unless the initial actor can roll with it and accept it in his turn (as in, "Oh. I'm sorry... My mother was standing there a moment ago... I'm blind, you see...").
All the World's a Stage: Drawing the line on ERP
All the World's a Stage is brought to you by David Bowers every Sunday evening, investigating the mysterious art of roleplaying in the World of Warcraft.There are some people out there who use online games as a venue for their erotic fantasies, from husbands and wives spending some imaginative time together online, to complete strangers flush with desire and looking for some sort of satisfaction in each other. Most of these people who try out Erotic Role-Playing (or ERP) in WoW realize the need to keep it private; they do whatever they do in private chat channels, where it stays their own affair. But there are a rare few who take ERP to an extreme: they form a guild whose whole purpose is to engage in ERP, and proceed to garner a largely negative reputation for themselves. They wear their suggestive guild name like a sign above each of their character's heads, as if to draw as much attention to themselves as possible. Their members indulge in various sexual fantasies, some of which may even be extremely distasteful and objectionable, played out in an environment where everyone is encouraged to "explore" with one another in anonymity. Obviously, the moral danger here is that young people may be tempted to wander in, way before they are mature enough to understand or deal reasonably with what they experience there. We generally assume adults to be responsible for themselves in such matters, but children may very well be confused and curious, even willing to lie about their age in order to unravel such adult secrets. Indeed, ERP is a subject matter that the vast majority of players do not want to see -- least of all parents who like their kids to grow and learn from their interactions with others within the game, or at least have a safe and fun experience. Therefore, roleplayers of any sort have a responsibility to keep the public environment clean and safe for all who play there, and for the few involved with ERP guilds to do otherwise is dangerous and unethical.
Addon Spotlight: FlagRSP2 and MyRolePlay
FlagRSP and its descendents have long been the de facto standard addons that most roleplayes use to "flag" themselves, letting other roleplayers know at a glance not only that they're interested in roleplaying, but also sharing character descriptions and basic information about what sort of roleplaying they prefer. The original FlagRSP is defunct, but the torch has been passed to two worthy (and superior) successors: FlagRSP2 and MyRolePlay. Both use the same methods to communicate with other roleplayers, so you need only choose one and you'll be able to share information with players who use the other (be careful not to use both at the same time, however). Both addons help a lot with the problem of roleplayers being hard to find.FlagRSP2 and MyRolePlay both give you a space to write things like your character's first or last names, a character title (such as "Priestess of the Dark" or "Wacky Troublemaker"), as well as some description about what your character looks like; and of course they both enable you to see the information other people have written about their characters too. Both have "roleplaying flags," which can tell other people whether you are a "casual" or "fulltime" roleplayer, as well as whether you are in or out of character at any given moment.FlagRSP2 has a cleaner, more intuitive interface, in my opinion, and it has nice little popup windows for character information which can appear whenever you mouseover or target someone. MyRolePlay only has a popup button which you must click on to see other characters' information, but it also has two separate spaces for physical descriptions and story backgrounds, which FlagRSP2 users sometimes mix up together. MyRolePlay also uses less computer resources on my system, and keeps things running a bit smoother. I often switch between the two since I can't really decide which is best.
Breakfast Topic: Where the roleplayers at?
After writing last week about getting started with roleplaying, it became clear that a number of people want to try roleplaying, but are having trouble finding the actual roleplayers, even on RP servers. Some players have even said that "RP is dead!" Those who still don't think RP is dead often complain that it's certainly not as alive as it used to be. You might even say that RP is undead in some places, which is a wholly unspeakable extreme.So today I'd like to ask you, where does the rumor mill tell you to find the best place to roleplay? Does your server rock the house with roleplayers everywhere you look? Have you heard your friend's girlfriend talk about how one time she overheard of her cousin's roommate's elder step-sister's 7-11 store clerk say where the RP really gets immersive? Or do you think it's not a matter of servers at all? Do you have to just team up with the best RP guilds around? If so, how do you find these guilds? Server forums?I have in mind that I'll go check out some RP servers to research this topic for myself as well. I'm pretty sure my home server (Scarlet Crusade) isn't the best. There, it seems a lot of the old roleplayers went off to do other things, or got involved in other activities and got too busy to roleplay. In any case, with your help and some additional research, perhaps we can come up with practical suggestions for how to track them roleplayers down and actually play the roles!
Another way to get started with roleplaying
In last Sunday's All the World's a Stage column, we talked about one way to get started with roleplaying, using mainly a character description made of two simple words that highlight the essential qualities of your character, without too much concern for background and details just yet. The idea here is that you can start with a basic character idea, and fill in the details later on as you get involved with other roleplayers.Over at WoWBlues, however, Nairuil has a different way of getting started. She has a list of questions for you to answer that are designed to help you think of your character's background, as well as give you some helpful tips for what sorts of backgrounds would be inappropriate for WoW (such as the cliche "vampire" idea), all before you actually get started roleplaying in game.Which approach do you find more useful to you personally, and why?
All the World's a Stage: Getting started with roleplaying
All the World's a Stage is brought to you by David Bowers every Sunday evening, investigating the explorative performance art of roleplaying in the World of Warcraft.For a long time now I've wanted to write an introductory guide on how to get started as a roleplayer. After all, roleplaying is something a lot of people would like to try, but really don't know how to begin. The problem with getting started is that various misconceived assumptions may sometimes block us from trying and dampen our enthusiasm. In the particular case of roleplaying, these mistaken assumptions might be along the lines of: "Roleplaying is lying to people about who you are," and "roleplaying is something weird people do," and "roleplaying is a waste of time for noobs." To the contrary, we have seen in previous articles that roleplaying is actually an exploration of who you are, a way to understand and connect with other people, and, in fact, a variant on things perfectly normal people do all the time anyway. So now -- where to actually begin? Certainly there is no perfect way to begin as a roleplayer, so today I'll outline three basic steps, which you can try and see if they work for you. I would be particularly interested in feedback from people who try out this method as first time roleplayers: if you do try it and have a great time, please come back and tell us about it; or if you try and something doesn't work, come back and tell us what went wrong. It's been a long time since I was a beginning roleplayer, and though I'll do my best to plot a path into this hobby, I only got to be a beginner once! Perhaps other beginning roleplayers will also share their experiences below, and you can see which path suits you best.
All the World's a Stage: Oh the drama! -- When to "/ignore"
All the World's a Stage is a weekly column by David Bowers, published on Sunday evenings, investigating the explorative performance art of roleplaying in the World of Warcraft.We've talked before about roleplaying as an art form, whether you think about it as acting or puppeteering, fiction or improv, there's definitely something creative going on here. But like any art form, roleplaying is best when it means something; that's to say, when it expresses something ultimately "true" about human experience, and perhaps even illumines the minds and hearts of the roleplayers in some way.Roleplayers all want to achieve that creativity, of course, but one problem often stands in our way: it's a rare work of art that really works for everyone. That's why the regular old art world is such a complete mess -- one man's fingerpainting is another man's post-modernist masterpiece. People constantly disagree about what subjects make for acceptable art, whether some art pushes extremes too far and becomes obscenity, and whether real art actually requires talent and skill. One person may curl up with their favorite Jane Austen novel and read it for the 10th time, while another may come home from the comic book store with the epic adventures of the Bone cousins. Each story conveys very different things to the reader -- but then the people who want to read these stories are looking for different things to get out them as well. Each form of storytelling speaks its own language for its own special audience.We have the same problem in roleplaying. To illustrate, imagine there's a teenage boy going through public school and not getting along with his peers very well. When he roleplays, he plays an intimidating character who likes to try to get in your face, pick a fight with you and insult you to show how very powerful he is. That power fantasy may be very annoying for you and me, but for him it really means something. That's not to say it's high-quality art by any means, but nonetheless, his feelings are important too, and he has his right to play a character on an RP server the same way we all do. It's just that for us, the "/ignore" command starts to look really tempting every time his sort comes along.
Roleplaying is like puppeteering
Jim Moreno writes quite a bit about roleplaying. For a long time he kept his own blog about the subject, and now he writes a special column about roleplaying for WoW WarCry, which precedes and in many ways inspired WoW Insider's own roleplaying column, All the World's a Stage. Jim's latest article struck me with an excellent point: roleplaying has often been compared to acting -- by myself no less -- when in fact it is closer to the art of puppeteering. He cites Jim Henson and Frank Oz as two of the best roleplayers ever, even though neither of them is known to have actually played roleplaying games. Both of them, however, used alternate physical bodies -- their puppets -- to tell stories and convey their characters to their audience, whereas regular actors would have used their own bodies and faces to portray their characters, no matter how different they are from one another. The example from Jim's article that stands out most in my mind is that of Yoda telling Luke, "There is no try, there is only do," conveying so clearly who this person Yoda is, what he stands for, what he talks, moves and looks like without ever giving a hint that the whole thing is just a "puppet with Frank Oz's hand sticking up his butt."Roleplaying, Jim says, is just the same. Instead of acting with our own bodies, we use the digital avatars that Blizzard has designed for us: we customize our characters with different abilities and appearances, but more than that, we give them actions and words that distinguish them as believable people, just like puppeteers do. A superb roleplayer can do what Frank Oz and Jim Henson did, only on a smaller scale; he can convey a sense of true depth, a human story, using a virtual puppet made of ones and zeros rather than cloth and plastics.This is just another example of how "roleplaying" is just a new form of the same basic creative endeavors that have been around for millennia. Someone who gets "freaked out" by roleplaying might as well get freaked out by Miss Piggy and the Cookie Monster, because roleplaying is basically just an adaptation of the puppeteering concept in a modern technological environment.
All the World's a Stage: And your life is a mine rich in gems
All the World's a Stage is a weekly column by David Bowers, now published on Sundays, investigating the explorative performance art of roleplaying in the World of Warcraft.For some, the whole process takes 5 minutes. They log in, click on "create new character," choose a race, a class, painstakingly compare each and every face and hairstyle, type in a name, click "accept," and they're done. Some take their time by paying a visit to the forums of each class, or asking their friends about which race is best -- but who sits down and makes up a story idea, a personality, and actual characteristics for characters these days?Roleplayers do, of course. But how? What if you'd like to try out roleplaying but you just don't know where to begin creating an actual character, rather than just an avatar for yourself in the game? Each roleplayer tends to have his or her own way, but there are are a number of things they have in common. One of the first things to remember about designing your character concept, is to make your character essentially human, relatable, based on real experiences that you know about.Mine your life. Think of what kinds of experiences you are familiar with, and which of them could be used as the foundation for another person's life, a new character with a story to tell, and a personality to engage other people's interest. Today, I'll give you a couple examples of how I tried to do this, and explain some of the pitfalls people often fall into when trying to make up an interesting character.
All the World's a Stage: It's not just about sexy butts
All the World's a Stage is a weekly column by David Bowers, investigating the explorative performance art of roleplaying in the World of Warcraft.Roleplaying the opposite sex happens. It is alluring to some, and repulsive to others -- a lot of people do it, while a lot of other people very openly proclaim (as if they know these things) that anyone who does this weird, manipulative, deceitful, and so on.People also tend to come up with various excuses for why they play a character of the opposite sex, as if they need to justify themselves according to their own gender's traditional expectations. Some men say, "if I'm going to have to stare at a characters butt for hours while I play, I'd rather it be a hot and sexy butt," while some women say, "I get all kinds of unwanted attention if I play a girl, and the only way I can get away from it is to play a boy." All that may be true in some cases, but it's hardly the whole story behind opposite-gender roleplaying.First of all, let me just say it here and now: you have every right to create whatever character you want, particularly in an actual roleplaying environment, and particularly if you intend to be faithful to the character you're creating.
All the World's a Stage: And all the orcs and humans merely players
All the World's a Stage is a new weekly column by David Bowers, investigating the explorative performance art of roleplaying in the World of Warcraft.As you know, WoW is a work of art, and roleplaying is probably the most creative aspect of the WoW experience. There are many reasons why people roleplay, and also many challenges to roleplayers, not the least of which is fitting in with all the other players who may not get why in the world you spend your time this way.To put it most simply, as roleplayers, we view our WoW experience as a creative one. We want to make each other laugh and smile and share stories about our characters. By doing this, we not only have a good time, we get that sense of inspired expression that any artist loves, whether a comics illustrator or a knitting addict. Roleplayers aren't so different from other players -- we want to do quests, dungeons, raids, and fight other players just like everyone else, but we want to do it all in a creative, story-based way.As Shakespeare has so famously put it,All the world's a stage,And all the men and women merely players:They have their exits and their entrances;And one man in his time plays many parts,
WoW is a Work of Art, part 3: All the world's a stage
We have discussed ways in which World of Warcraft is not only full of audio-visual art, but presents in itself a gaming experience that can reward players the same way that art forms like music or film can. For some, however, WoW is not only a game, but a stage. For them, the gaming element may sometimes fade into the background, when it becomes only a means to an end; they use WoW as a combination of acting and creative writing, telling stories and making performances all their own. They call it roleplaying. One kind of roleplaying that is getting a great deal of new attention these days is "machinima." For those who don't know, machinima is basically a kind of film in which people use the game's existing 3D models and environments to make their own movies, and then share these movies with everyone on the internet (or very rarely on TV). As we have seen here at WoW Insider and elsewhere, these movies are especially powerful as comedies and music videos, especially for viewers who are already familiar with the game that they're made with. But for most people who roleplay, it is not a scripted performance, but an improvised one; it is not carefully lip-synced, edited recorded and for all to see, but imagined, written out, and remembered only among those who played the parts. Someone not familiar with roleplaying might wonder why people bother with it.
WoW is a Work of Art, part 2: Blizzard's masterpiece
As you read the word, "art," what do you think of? Van Gogh? Beethoven? Academy Awards for Best Picture? What is it that established mediums of art, such as painting, music, and film have in common? In many ways, World of Warcraft is a combination of all these media, and yet it is something of it's own too. WoW has vast landscapes to explore, interesting characters with their own meaningful stories, and powerful music to thrill you or spook you or make you feel awe. Not only does WoW combine these elements together in a deeply satisfying way, it stands out as a carefully balanced masterwork of the "game" as a creative human expression. In other words, WoW is basically a web of overlapping problems to overcome alone or as a team, for which all the visual, musical and story elements are metaphors that open the doors into this central element of the game's experience. Not only is it fundamentally interactive, exploratory, and progressive, but your choices, from the way your character looks to the way you chose to play him or her, all represent your own investment in filling out the open space the game has made for you and the community of players. You and your friends are the final keystone in the edifice of the WoW work of art -- your progressive interaction with the game and your cooperation with others is designed from the beginning to be the main stimulating force on your mind and spirit, just as looking or listening is with other forms of art. Of course art is a subjective thing, like beauty itself. One person may be profoundly inspired and uplifted by her WoW experience, while another may be left shaking his head and wondering why he wasted his time. In their own way, both are right; art is never art without a certain kind of participation by the one looking at it, listening to it, or engaging with it in some way. The perceiver of the art always has to be open to the special impact that art can have on your mind or spirit, and be willing to make that leap of faith into the work of art and see what its creators intended. For some to be unappreciative of one art form or another is commonplace and natural -- people have their unique likes and dislikes after all -- but the fact that a certain work of art touches some people, perhaps many, in a profound way is what sets it aside from mere entertainment.
WoW is a Work of Art, part 1: A journey into Azeroth
The day I walked into the store to buy World of Warcraft, I had been taking care of my mother as she underwent chemotherapy for brain cancer, and I desperately needed something to do that wasn't cooking, cleaning, sorting pills, or running errands. I needed something that would connect me with people while at the same time letting me stay at home and care for someone I loved.When I picked up a box with a pretty, yet severe night elf woman's face on the cover, I wasn't thinking, "I want to get to level 60 and start raiding Molten Core for epic gear!" or even "I'm going to be a PvP god!" Instead, I was hoping to create characters with a personal background, with feelings and ideas all their own, and act them out in an imaginary world where no one knew who I really was, a world in which our purpose was to share creatively and interact as a team, not to make money or exchange gossip.In short, I wanted to roleplay. But what I got was something much more than even a roleplaying experience, more than me and my characters, more than an endless stream of quests and rewards, experience and reputation, monsters and loot. I found myself in a world filled with its own people -- real people -- and a series of problems for these people to overcome together in order to progress and travel even deeper into this world. At every stage, I found something new opening up to me, whether it was access to more abilities of my own, more ways to interact with others, more vast landscapes to please my eye, or more stories to capture my imagination.
