That's the whole reason the subject is so wracked by controversy so often. There is no universally agreed standard as to what is OOC and what is IC.
I tend to think that there is no universal standard because persons with a special interest in justifying its breach place it in controversy.
Be careful! Some might think you were showing a willingness to attribute foul motive where there is none.
Heh. Cute.
It doesn't take a foul motive, though, unless you consider "maintaining the ability to use all available resources to collect and protect power" a "foul motive."
It's a motive I don't share, but that doesn't make it "foul."
But actually, that says much the same as I am saying but in a different way. My view is that it's more often the people who preach the Holy Divide who clash with one another because they're engaged in a factional war over which end of the egg should be opened at breakfast.
Aren't you trivializing it rather unnecessarily? The way I roleplay affects your roleplay; the way you roleplay affects my roleplay. We're sort of all in this together, which is what makes this such a sticky issue.
I should say so. But you immediately demonstrate how these rules can be arbitrary.
Let's keep in mind that "arbitrary" does not mean "vague." It means "random" and, usually, unreasonable.
First point: how do you know what your character knows?
Can be tricky, but usually it's just a "reasonable judgment" question. You know what your character would reasonably know. (You'd be amazed how often this comes up in real laws. Negligence, for example, is based on a "reasonable person" standard.)
Second point: knowing what your character knows, well, do you simply assert it? Because I think it's rather more in keeping with community RPing to justify it. Yet your definition throws justification out of the window. Why?
If you know, factually, that your character would know it, you probably shouldn't have to "make up" a justification. How do you know New Caldari is the capital system of the Caldari State? Uh, I learned it in school. How do you know Timmy fell down the well? Frank told me. How do you know that Ushra'Khan isn't NBSI anymore? Well, they announced it.
Maybe I'm not seeing the problem you're getting at-- could you provide an example?
It's, I'm sorry, just an arbitrary judgement. That's factually what it is. I say that as neutrally as possible. I don't place a moral tone on the word 'arbitrary'.
This is one of those spots where you don't but the whole wide world does. Might I suggest "personal judgement?" Or "vague?" Or "unclear," as the situation demands?
"Arbitrary" goes a good bit beyond any of these, meaning essentially "pulled out of a hat."
I've never understood the willingness of many to ignore foul motive just because it can't be proved to the standards of a court of law.
Meh. In my experience, people are at their worst while they're standing on supposedly high principle (myself occasionally included). They rarely act with a "bwahaha" actually in mind, though maybe some mischievous snickering.
So, I tend to assume people mean well until they demonstrate otherwise.
What smokescreen that? Some willingness to attribute... you get the point by now...
Again, not malice. This is an old issue between us, and the forum rules forbid acrimonious confrontations. There's a whole stack of reasons to dance around it.
I don't recall malice being attributed to you the player.
Me, Omerta (mostly Omerta; the theory at the time was that Yuki and Kale had put me up to it) ...
... Jade's comments on Chatsubo, when I finally read them a couple years back, were kind of a revelation.
I recall your character being challenged in an IC arena as to her motives in a particular matter.
Yep. I mishandled that, or it wouldn't even have gotten through, there. The posting was a violation of IGS rules, which do (or, at least, did; haven't checked lately) respect the "holy divide"; I just misplayed my hand by responding to the challenge and thus ratifying the otherwise forbidden action.
But that's not where most of the outrage was cropping up, turns out.
It gets abused.
Maybe sometimes.
It is brought into disrepute in the minds of people.
Cosmo, I have got to ask-- where do you get your word-choice habits? You've got a very elevated manner of speech; I mean, I talk like a dictionary (well, an American dictionary), but you go way, way beyond that. Are you classically educated?
And then even those not actually abusing it, as you may very well not have been doing, are caught up in the maelstrom.
Sometimes. It seems to me like it's worth the risk.
Periodically, we get a generational influx of new EVE RPers who all believe instinctively in the IC/OOC divide because they come from RP backgrounds where such things are, let's be honest, essentially regulated and they're immediately faced with the unregulated market in RP and RP standards that is EVE. And the whole thing erupts again.
Not sure it ever dies down. I've never found it at all difficult to find other experienced "immersionists" who take the divide seriously, at least in their own actions. The arguing may end, but that doesn't mean everyone's switched sides.
I am happy to ignore some things or pretend, for IC purposes, that certain things are not in my knowledge or better to say in the knowledge of my character. I quite agree that this is important in RP. But I'm sorry to say that I don't believe this is something that can be done at the unilateral desire of others.
Mm. "Unilateral desire of others" is another one of those subtly misleading phrases-- it makes it sound like they're just saying, "And the entire last half-hour of intense roleplay is now to be considered OOC knowledge, because I just said so."
... as opposed to, say, "Hey guys. This is my in-character blog. These are my character's private thoughts, so even though this log does actually exist somewhere in Eve, please don't use its contents in-character." Then he goes and posts something unflattering about another character, who proceeds to whang him on the head with a frying pan the next time they meet in The Last Gate, following that with a wardec.
Now, that's a sort of extreme example, of course. More likely it'll be something subtle; one that gets me in trouble is when somebody tells me about their character's background in an OOC conversation, and a year and a half later I end up inadvertently using that detail for some purpose or other. See, that's bad. It is not good. I should not be doing that. It's entirely understandable and, I hope, excusable that I end up doing that, but it is bad, and as a result I've started kinda trying to avoid situations where that could happen, such as, say, looking at stuff Aria shouldn't know.
... if someone involves my character in material, without my consent, and labels it Public OOC/Private IC, without my consent, they can pretty much whistle for my respect of the Holy Divide. It doesn't exist because they've embarked on the nonconsensual path by their choice.
Terminology again. "Involves" implies that your character is, in some way, inherently entangled in it. Like, he figures in a story or something. On the other hand, if I just write something unflattering in a blog containing my character's private thoughts, how is your character really "involved?"
Sure, there's a chance of someone coming by, reading it, and developing a negative OOC impression because of it. But then, there's also no rule preventing you from going and making your own OOC blog, and writing similarly negative impressions about the perpetrator.
They think that people who refuse to observe an imposed Holy Divide won't respect any kind of IC/OOC divide. It's balderdash.
I think it's more that they think those who refuse to observe an "imposed Holy Divide" (another bit of loaded terminology) will fail to respect it
when it matters. Say, upon stumbling across some truly damaging bit of strictly OOC information.
That is what's really at stake.
And any hue and cry about that is totally synthetic.
Granted, any kind of border is to some degree "synthetic," but that doesn't make it useless, bad, or lacking in a point. The failure of actors on TV to notice the missing "fourth wall" is synthetic. England as a nation state is synthetic. So is France.
An immersionist environment in a setting like Eve will, necessarily, be synthetic
because we have to make it. My objection to breaches of the divide is not that it is "holy." It's that it severs suspension of disbelief, forcing
this world into
that world in a most obtrusive and unwelcome way.
It taints the setting, and the fact that the setting is already heavily tainted in this way doesn't make that a good thing.
My own angle on it is that what I mark as OOC, I have marked as OOC for a reason: because that info is sufficiently unobtainable that any claim to have obtained it is functionally godmoding. That is an angle with which, at last check, CCP's IGS mods agree.
The boundary is real, and I will enforce it in my own case with the tools at my disposal. The larger game is not regulated; that is true. The IGS, however, is.