Experiences Through Roleplay

I'm posting this halfway as an admin (to understand Song of Avaria's player perspective on this situation) -- and halfway just as a MU* community member, because I'm curious what others in this hobby think about having experiences in roleplay that you might not otherwise have in real life, and about the general value that roleplaying can bring to people's real lives.

A couple of the things our alpha phase players may have experienced is the sense of exclusion and xenophobia when it comes to arriving in foreign place -- as a victim of a shipwreck, you didn't have much of a choice where you washed up, and even if you planned for the ship to go in that direction, it really wasn't your first hope, but just a destination that seemed like the closest and safest port in a storm. And then, arriving, you were shut out of town, feared and scorned, and you're still treated in a racist and xenophobic manner by most inhabitants of the town. You don't understand the local language and can't figure out what most people are saying, you're getting stiffed by couriers who don't like you and beaten by locals who are unhappy with you getting ahead, people are stereotyping you based on ignorant assumptions, everyone's sneering at you, nobody trusts you to do something as simple as visit a library, you've encountered foreign illnesses, you can't rely on background knowledge of flora and fauna because nearly everything is different, you have to innovate and substitute just to try to make some of your favorite foods, you've lost a lot of your belongings, you're thrown off course regarding your original plans, you've possibly seen friends die on the way or otherwise lost people who were important to you, you're put out of touch with your family and background contacts... and in the end all you really want to do is get back to your own lives and homes, or at least just survive.

It's definitely not the same experience as being a refugee in real life, but does it give any more empathy for people who are refugees, to have experienced these sort of difficulties even through the barrier of a screen and a roleplay character?

I'm really curious what players feel about the experience, and also, I'm curious to hear about any other experiences in past games or with past characters that you feel might have changed you some in real life, as a person... what roleplay experiences might have given you a broader depth of understanding, of walking in someone else's shoes to a degree?

What benefits might there be from these kinds of experiences? The way I see it, there's the positive part of having more empathy for others with different lived experiences in real life... and then there's also some other interesting aspects, such as being able to better explore one's own personal trauma through the distance and barrier of a screen and a not-self character. There's even a third aspect of a sense of catharsis from being able to fight against unsavory themes in a game world, injustices that one might not be able to affect much in real life, such as class struggles or various other bigotries.

I think this rp experience was valuable because it allows us to go deeper into concepts we may think about in real life and act on what we can in the time era and our own imaginations.

I wrote and erased a lot about this. Quite the thought experiment… but here’s what I’ve landed on. 

Do I think experiencing things with the distance MU*s provide is a wonderful way to touch themes inaccessible or otherwise difficult for RL? Certainly! Firo has been such a -safe- way to interact with aging (early twenties are a fun time of being scared of adulthood, apparently), and in the past, I have also had a great time working through concepts around organized religion and its implications. What it means to me to believe in God - any God - ended up being colored by my interactions with a game. It was neat! No super harsh coming-to-Jesus moment, or vice versa, but yah girl is from an area with staunch opinions about religion and I'd never had the chance to really think about it. Distance, RP, and getting new perspectives are all phenomenal tools. 

Do I also think that it is hard to capture systemic issues on a platform that, for all intents and purposes, is supposed to be fun? Also yes. I’m eager to see how this evens out as story arcs lengthen and everything is less SHINY and NEW, but for now, the balance between exploring a world and telling a refugee story (for me) ticks towards the former. When I am less bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, perhaps I’ll sit down and decide whether the mist is an allegory for xenophobic fears.

The ask on empathy I found interesting! My thoughts are probably too tied into overtly RL opinions, but I will be curious to see how social issues are explored in this space! 

That's a great point... do you think the representation of xenophobia has been not-fun, from a player perspective? It's always a tricky balance to catch between like, giving characters challenges and obstacles and entertaining stuff to angst about -- and giving players grief, tedium, or irritation.

Certainly not not-fun!... though it also didn't elicit an overly empathetic response from me (when compared to other media, at least). Maybe it's a two-fold of Alpha - we gotta test the things - and that having a very first-person perspective of it when puppeting a character through the trials and tribulations. Jobs struck me as a mechanic that could have given more trouble on the front of xenophobic themes, as an example. 

Overall, I think it was a great addition to the landing. Sleep brain fog fails me on a better explanation, but I hope that made sense! I'd love to see more experienced player perspectives as well.  <3 

I think about this a lot.

So much that I apparently need hours and hours to actually write something. I've done a lot of write and backspace, too.

I've definitely had a thought-provoking experience in terms of the 'being a refugee' thing. Not just because of what's actually happened with my character directly, but because of the interest it sparks. I always seem to end up going down little rabbit-holes of side 'research' as I play a character, and lately one of those has indeed been the experiences of refugees worldwide. Like Firo says though there's a bit of a balance - sometimes I get a little overwhelmed and feel like, "Am I being horrible and disrespectful by 'playing' this experience as a game when real people are out there living this and worse?" And then I have to sort of step back and recontextualise and come back to reality.

For whatever reason, the language issue has been particularly striking to me. Hearing people who are learning English as they struggle to acclimate in an English-speaking country, and hearing them in their native language, and the ways that people are so creative in using what words they have available when they're not entirely fluent, hearing the amazing differences in grammar use between languages showing up in the patterns of speech whilst learning, understanding the sheer importance and comfort of being able to speak one's own native language, have all impacted me quite a bit. (This American Life has had some fabulous episodes on migrants and refugees recently, which is mostly where this has come from.)

In general, though, I do agree that RP can be an amazing tool for experiencing things beyond yourself - IF you are careful and intentional about it.

One particular example of this going wrong for me was in another game long ago now. Rather than being intentional about the kind of experience I wanted to make for myself, I simply allowed my own tendencies to guide my character's responses to events in the game, and that ended up in a very, very dark place which acted as kind of an echo chamber/accelerant for my own depression. Not the way to do it! I took a lot of trauma away from that experience, mostly because of the headspace I and my character were in.

In a more recent example, I was able to very intentionally craft a character whose responses to "bad things happening" would be very different from my own, and used that as a way to explore alternative ways of existing in the world and dealing with things, and that was actually really helpful and enlightening, both from a personal growth standpoint and an RP horizon-broadening perspective. I could change the words - literally. Rewrite the story, from what I myself would automatically do. And having that little bridge step of RP meant that it was easier to see the process, and then to envision it happening in my real world - not that I was trying to "be" this character in real life, but just simply the IDEA that I could choose to have a different response to something. Very, very cool and empowering.

Anyway, I have too many thoughts on this topic in general, I'll cease for now but might pop back again later if I think of more relevant things ;)

I have been struggling for a couple days to figure out what I wanted to say to the original questions, as I think they're interesting and contain a lot of potential for nuanced discussion! A lot of my thoughts were varying degrees of tangential-at-best and hodgepodge so I've dispensed with most of them. The main thing I kept circling back to was feeling that yes, I do think experiencing novel situations via roleplay could help build empathy, but I also think the kind of people who come to RP heavy MU*s like Song of Avaria are probably more empathetic just by nature of the pastime - immersing ourselves in a separate character whose speech, behaviors, opinions, motivations, and ethics likely do not match our own - which demands empathy. There's probably a degree of already being primed for more unfamiliar experiences as a result.

With regards to the follow up question on whether the representation of xenophobia/prejudice has been not-fun: Personally, I haven't had any issues with it, and it has never been not-fun so far! Big caveat that my bout of inactivity coincided almost exactly with everyone arriving in St. Loomis - but between being present for the initial RPT of refugees coming into town and the last couple of times I've been online recently, I think I have had a decent taste of what's being discussed. I think two major things that allow this to remain in the realm of "interesting/fun conflict for characters to chew on" is knowing that 1) it makes reasonable sense in the context of the world, and that 2) the negative experiences are usually described just enough to make a point (sometimes in a very self-aware way, as I have seen from the snooty secretary!) without being gratuitous. I feel like Number 1 is important overall, but that Number 2 is what makes the RP experience, in the moment, work very well as digestible IC obstacles without becoming problematic or descending into needless cruelty.

And, while I was writing this out, I realized that a third aspect which I believe is crucial for this to work is the community of players (members and staff alike) being able to trust and respect each other enough to allow these themes to arise in the first place while still feeling safe; and that if one were to not feel safe, that there are systems in place to raise concerns immediately and be listened to. Just from what I have seen in the last few months, I do think the community here strives hard to create and maintain that kind of quality and open communication.

A lot of valuable stuff has been said already and it is hard to pick apart my feelings for anything worth actually adding to the discussion. One thing I keep coming back to, though, is that I actually have been a little bit dissatisfied with the degree to which playability requirements have muted the refugee/racism/xenophobia experience, at least for me. Considering the overwhelming dominance of the Western European cultural paradigm in English speaking settings in this genre, I tend to assume (perhaps wrongly, I admit) that most players find it initially easier to imagine themselves into Ruverans than Idiris. Because of that (and my increasing skepticism of and discomfort with it), I was much more interested in SoA than I would have been had it centered primarily around Ruvera, *and* I have very mixed feelings about landing in Ensor and watching people (quite naturally) attempt to assimilate at least enough to remove practical obstacles to comfort and advancement. The bias in favor of Idiri seems increasingly tenuous as I see people going about in cloaks and trousers and likewise consider doing so myself. Meanwhile overcoming language barriers is just a matter of spending social time among ourselves teaching and practicing languages, largely. It does not so much require having intercultural reactions with people who find us strange and consider us inferior. 
 

But playability is a legitimate concern. We just got off a boat where most of us couldn't even engage with half of the character sheet we had lovingly crafted, choosing each skill as a means to open an imagined realm of story for our character. And I, like everyone else, was dying for the chance to have my own room and to explore a larger world and to experience the extremely thoughtful mechanics of life in the Avaria world that we had been reading about since The Faded Zone. So perhaps there is no really good compromise between these two things and one simply must suffer. 
 

However, I also think part of the playability "conflict" is that people are differently comfortable with experiencing prejudice IG. My own idiosyncratic calculus here is that as someone who experiences a certain type of prejudice in the world (*which necessarily includes the game because the game is made up of real players who live in the world*), I derive a certain sort of satisfaction from not being the only one who has to deal with this. I am happy to be a foreign devil if my fellow players also have to deal with this because in a certain sense as a player of queer male characters for a very long time in a genre that has only recently become the least bit hospitable (I remember routinely having to watch debates on the forums of a MUD that shall remain nameless as to whether it was within the scope of the Platonic themes of the original work for there to be homosexual people on the Good side), I am always a foreign devil, wherever I go. It is actually less alienating for me if other the majority of other players are having to cope with this as well. It is difficult for me to sympathize with a hypothetical person who simply finds this inconvenient to their plans for becoming a heroic princess or what have you. It seems more fair when we are *all* having to cope with trying to do something unfamiliar and alienating.

That said, I am also aware that some people don't want to experience prejudice or alienation in the game because they experience too much in their real lives, and they would like to escape into a fantasy of being normal. I do have a lot of sympathy for this, and I think it probably describes the majority of the community for this type of game - we are not all out there playing basketball with our neighbors instead of sitting indoors glued to our computers making up stories for *some reason* after all. I would like to hear from people who feel this way about what does and does not weigh them down, and how they would like to see a balance struck between telling stories about prejudice and alienation and having a safe place to explore possibilities not offered in the real world. I suspect that what Marwa said about trust and safety really having an impact on the experience, but I am curious about the individual experiences.

One of the 'lighter' touches I keep implying through roleplay is that I suspect we're all often forced to pay more and that we're all paid less than our Ilexi equivalents might be. I don't know how true that it, but I felt it seemed to be very obvious.

In a healthy economy, we're supposed to spend 30% of our income on rent. Two adults holding mid-tier jobs might make 1400 a month, at least with the wages PCs have access to...and be spending 400 a month on rent. Which boils down to about 28% of their income.

But I'd say that not all two pairs of PCs are not quite able to make that much--certainly it's more likely that we're going to be paying more than that, or doubling or tripling up in our lodgings!

Two people working the waiter job might be making nearly 50% of their income on rent, and those working the errand-runner job are going to have a very difficult time.

All the math aside to say I just try and play it out as if my PC and others are being knowingly, perhaps-obviously short-changed--that that's how the xenophobia and exploitation of our unwilling exiles/migrants are manifesting.

Since everyone's got the 'foreigner' reputation mod and pretty much every NPC in Ruvera hates foreigners (except for a few) -- anywhere that you have to deal with a NPC (like a boss, or a shopkeeper) you'd probably be discriminated against monetarily, because they have affection established for PCs and then modify the prices according to that affection. Some PCs might still be able to be seen relatively favorably, if they have high magnetism for instance, or have spent some time developing a rapport with a particular NPC, but yeah. Unfortunately in alpha, things aren't very densely covered, so many of the jobs and shops just have VNPC workers who don't have any affection metrics towards PCs. But still, it'd be very thematic and nice roleplay to include that you're being discriminated against, because this is thematically what is happening. It might've made sense for it to be difficult/impossible for PCs to get jobs or lodging, but that'd impact playability too much.

Me and Mistsparrow had a really fascinating (to me) conversation that actually prompted this topic, where we reflected that the majority of us MUD-players really are first-world types, and right now we're (the majority of us) living in first-world conditions. So if first-world Americans ended up as refugees in some backwater third-world place, we'd probably act like entitled Karens and heroes with white savior complexes, regardless of local suspicions and sentiments. It's been oddly fitting to see MUD-players who come from that RL culture act the part in-game, as first-world Sirdabi Caliphate citizens landing on a third-world shore in what basically amounts to the Dark Ages. It's just this weird case of parallelism and unexpected serendipity that we didn't really foretell, and it's given us some interesting insights into playing the ignorant backwater xenophobes that we didn't anticipate, either. It really works beautifully though, I've been enjoying every interaction, and it's also interesting to see how different PCs choose to distinguish themselves in different ways, which ones are sincerely empathic, and which sorts of bigotry and unsavoriness they uniquely find irredeemably revolting, and so on. Really great explorations and characterizations going on.

We really had been a little sad about how we'd centered this world on a non-Eurocentric place and then decided to spend so much of alpha in a more typical European-fantasy setting, and considered how some of our players might be pretty disappointed by this turn. But hopefully, it won't last forever. Ultimately it's really an issue of building out the world some more. St Loomis, being relatively small, was just more easy than Omrazir to "finish" enough for alpha. But Omrazir is going to be the main hub of the game once things settle, and we are requiring that all alpha players roll in as part of the storyline of passengers from the Sirdabi Caliphate. (That requirement is for many many reasons but one of them is that we do want to keep things centered on this story for now.)

(As a side point, I don't think you, pof Esfandiar, are wrong in your assumptions about most players finding it easier to imagine themselves into Ruverans. We had anticipated a little bit of pushback, maybe, against the requirement to make a character from the Sirdabi Caliphate, but there's actually been a lot more than I thought -- from people making entirely European characters down to names and ivory-hued colorings and just ignoring their heritages, and then deciding not to play when those elements were fixed, to those who asked for specific exceptions so that they could make more European characters and then lost interest when the exception was denied, to people who decided explicitly to wait for beta after discovering this limitation, etc. It's been frankly a little concerning to me how the general white-person aesthetic is apparently so favored by some players that they just refuse to RP as someone brown, and ultimately, I'm not unhappy with perhaps accidentally weeding these potential players out of the base.)

Regarding troubling themes versus playability... there's definitely a balance to be struck, and I respect that some people may really hate dealing with racism in a game. This is why we try to include some of the unsavory themes right on the label: for example, there's homophobia in this world. We don't want to trigger people who are really bothered by the existence of this bigotry; but we do want to give PCs the chance to rail against any thematic injustice they'd like.

I completely understand the distinction between "I enjoy playing a character that fights against this injustice that I really hate IRL" and "I am so personally traumatized by this theme that I just do not want to encounter it in my game time at all, because it would be genuinely unsettling to me". There are some themes in this setting that I am actually unsettled by, but thankfully not so much so that I would choose not to play, and they are thankfully more avoidable than the generic problems like xenophobia and classism. Honestly, I really find it valuable to play thematic villains in a self-aware (yet realistically rounded) way -- because these ugly bigotries exist both in the real world and in-game, and the whole point of having the unsettling themes in the game is so that players can enjoy the narrative of conflict against those themes. That said, there are very few truly 100% evil forces, and no culture or people in the game world can be considered entirely villainous just due to their thematic injustices. The people of St Loomis might be xenophobes, but that doesn't make them evil. Xenophobia in itself is an evil, though, and one that is hopefully interesting to confront in RP. If someone does come up against a more niche unsavory theme that unsettles them, there's always XCards! (A yellow xcard is a great way to ask a fellow player to just dial that back a bit.)

Last thing I want to mention to maybe come back to later... the idea of how sometimes certain types of RP might actually exacerbate some of our own personal issues. I think I've encountered that myself in some instances, and I have to think about it some more before I can give a considered response.