Role Playing And Virtual Space

Role playing is a game, as well as an interactive fictional experience, where you take on the role of a character, and then act out what that character would do, along with others, in order to create an entirely ad libed story. Every roleplaying game needs a setting, a place where the characters can act and the action can take place. During narrative roleplaying in a chat room, this setting can be anywhere, a castle, a tavern, a hotel, or a train station. It doesn’t really matter, as long as everyone can agree on where the action is taking place.

In a single chat room, there should be a single location. It should have set limits. There should come a point where a character goes so far, they are no longer allowed to engage in that particular rooms actions. That is vital to maintaining the consistency of the narrative.

Take for example a room that is being used as a bar. If someone’s character steps outside of that bar, the people inside should have no idea what they are doing. This would of course require a ludicrous number of separate locations, and so a radius of a few miles is usually accepted. Beyond that, the characters engaging in actions should move to another room, take the action into private messaging, or simply imagine the nature of the scene that will take place. This is especially true if the character is alone.

It doesn’t make sense for characters in a tavern setting to know about the actions of another character hundreds of miles away. Further, having events take place in multiple locations, all in the same chat room can confuse what is already a difficult activity.

If multiple chat rooms are available, it’s important to use them to your advantage. You can of course create a variety of chat rooms representing different locations, and then invite the chat actors to come out and perform.

It’s like having multiple stages. When one scene shifts the actors move to the next location, meanwhile, since narrative chat roleplaying is constant, the actors in the first location can continue to play out their scene. This makes the world a fuller, rounder, more dimensional space. It enhances the reality of the activity, and helps to eliminate some of the paradoxes that can arise from having too much knowledge out of character, that you should not have in character.

Since confusion is often a problem is more heavily engaged roleplaying chat rooms, its also a good way to split up varying story lines, and distribute the population of the site better, and more effectively.

The major drawback to moving rooms as scenes shift is that you are bound to lose a significant portion of your audience. Many people want to “act” out in front of a crowd, and so will remain wherever the most people are, defying the reality and consistency of the world the others are trying to create.

The solution to this is recording of the chat log and posting it publicly. This can be done simply by cutting and pasting as you go along, or requesting a copy of a transcript be recorded by the sites administrative staff.

At its core roleplaying is a game of fantasy that seeks always to be more real. Consistency when dealing with location is key to helping remove a lot of the confusion that can arise when dealing with strictly virtual settings.