Ah, but see Matariki, you keep your 'audience' very small, confined to you and your friends. If you didn't believe the roleplay was for the benefit of those other than yourself, then your character needn't communicate with anyone, talk with anyone, and you wouldn't make an effort to participate in greater world-building excercises. You could merrily construct such concepts in an introverted manner, hoarding the results of your efforts like a pile of dragon's gold.
I get the impression that you think the people doing RP are like actors and everyone else is the audience, and the actors should publish it so that everyone else can appreciate their story; and that Matariki (and indeed myself, and quite a few other people in GRD, and perhaps the wider EM) think that the people doing the RP are the audience, so that if nobody other than the people directly involved finds out, that's not a downside. And if people outside the ones that were there find out, they're likely to do so via rumour and personal recountings which are prone to error and misunderstandings1.
If it would make sense for Matariki or Ulf to go and talk to some other person we've met, then they will, and that person too becomes both actor and audience. The bits of the universe we create are gradually exposed like it would be in the real world. If you have contact with people from Atamahara, you'll find out about bits of Atamahara as it would make sense. You don't have anything to do with Atamahara? you don't need to know.2.
It also seems that you are (or perhaps it's just I am) conflating two things; the discussion about things in the world which anyone could find out (see for example the Voluvala thread http://backstage.eve-inspiracy.com/index.php?topic=1373.0 ) and discussion about what people are doing in that world, or about their private affairs which are more difficult for people to find out about.
It does not make sense to me to post stuff on IGS which Ulf wouldn't want public. I have actually posted on IGS, but only when it made sense to do so IC.
1, 2 I consider these features, not bugs.
Perhaps I wasn't quite clear, I don't think you came away with the perspective I intended, in any case.
Clearly, the participants in a given roleplaying situation, are, indeed, actors, by definition. Those not directly impacted by that event are the 'audience'. In roleplay the actors and the audience are defined and redefined dynamically. Silent readers of a forum or blog may put their ships and pilots on the line and participate in a war, for instance, because they were motivated by the roleplaying going on. That's called breaking the fourth wall.
I draw the distinction between actors and audience, because, in some case, not everybody is involved in everything always. Sometimes, people just want only actors. But the audience doesn't need to exist right now at this instant. Some future audience, people reading forum archives, for instance, will come across it an appreciate the roleplay that occurred.
Electus Matari and Gradient are well-known for having highly insulated roleplaying environments, and that isn't a bad thing at all, really. But I believe, still, that you're not roleplaying for your own selfish reasons. I doubt very much any of this is treated with same as a random day dream about 'how great would it be if there was a society or civilization like this". Eve online roleplay is about interaction with other players, primarily because the game is about interactions with other players. And thus the dynamic of actors/audience is introduced.
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Topic: Fictional endeavors and imbalance. (Read 5152 times)