Backstage - OOC Forums
General Discussion => The Speakeasy: OOG/Off-topic Discussion => Topic started by: Katrina Oniseki on 20 Jun 2011, 08:14
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Someone recently presented me with this question when I was telling them to stop throwing around his bad attitude. I actually wasn't sure how to answer him. How do you explain that to someone who assumes that text chat does not carry connotations of attitude or tone-of-speech? I mean... you can't literally have a 'tone' when typing.. but certainly what you say can be assumed with a very different 'tone' or attitude depending on how you word it, right?
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It's nigh impossible with the multi-cultural and multi-lingual playerbase of Eve to infer attitude and tone from text alone, on any accurate level anyway. My Norwegian heritage, combined with the way we speak up in northern Norway, along with my own lack of native fluency with English has landed me neck deep in trouble more often than I can count. I sit there slackjawed when I finally realize that people think I'm having a bad tone or something while I OoC or my character IC is smiling or relaxed or whatever, and the other way around when people think I'm happy and joyful when I was aiming for curt or grouchy. I also quite often end up misinterpreting other people's text, as culture and language skills/preference differ heavily.
I'm not very good at the following, but it does help a lot:
Use more emotes.
/me smiles pleasantly while speaking.
As an example. Another would be:
/me spits the words with narrow eyes and a grimace of disgust.
And so on.
The more you emote the expression and tone in the conversation, the easier it is to read a sentence the way it was intended from the writer.
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What Mizhara said, culture plays a MASSIVE part in it.
My Britishness of having a "taking the piss", "tongue-in-cheek" attitude has got all sorts of non-Brits caught up in offence, even when none was ever intended.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tuq8ZU2Uf_0 < relevant up until 4 minutes in.
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Those are very valid points. I don't think it applies to this case, a fellow American, but that is a really really good point. I didn't consider the culture difference and language barrier.
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/me smiles pleasantly while speaking.
Of course, my initial reaction when you do that is that you're being coy, and it took me a while to realize that no, you're not, you're trying to get your point across.
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In OoC? It's me being... well... not pleasant. Context sensitive.
IC though it's another thing entirely. I keep my emotes 'truthful' as it were.
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Word choice certainly matters. Unfortunately, not everyone uses the same words in the same way, owing to individual differences ranging from language difficulties to personal history. The only way to be sure is to ask or say how the individual intended their words or you interpreted them. Hopefully they'll be polite back in explaining their intent. With a little luck, you can then avoid that miscommunication in the future. Unless, of course, they're being a complete passive-aggressive twat, intentionally or otherwise, and will lie to your face about it, but fortunately those behaviors are rare enough to assume they aren't the case without some solid evidence.
Also, a forced smile is often called a Pan Am smile. Not that everyone understands that phrase, but I find it a useful tool and certainly better than leaving it entirely up to context.
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Word choice, timing, and experience with prior behaviour tend to give me a fairly decent feel for what's going on in other people's heads even when communicating through text. but yeah.. it's far from immune to error, especially when you don't know the other party very well.
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For me personally it is the experience of the person in the past and your own mental state.
The more stressed and angry you are, the more likely it is for you to take even the slightest thing as an offense.
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Emotes.
I use emotes extensively, to the point there is sometimes or even often more descriptive narrative text than spoken words. Basically I consider emotes not like a mere emote "/me smiles.", but like a narrative tool : /me leans back in her chair and looks at the roof absentmindedly, still speaking : "blablablabla." She suddenly blinks after noticing that... etc etc
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the US is still doing the whole thing of trying to conquer the world, with us cynical Europeans going "yeah, been there, done that".
So you're RL bittervets?
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the US is still doing the whole thing of trying to conquer the world, with us cynical Europeans going "yeah, been there, done that".
So you're RL bittervets?
xD
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Yeah pretty much lol