Exchange of Realities

I’ve never made much of a secret of favoring play-by-IM as my gaming medium. After all, it lets me self-edit so I don’t put my foot in my mouth quite as badly as I would in person (though I’ve been discovering that’s still not enough to save me); it allows for game groups scattered over half the world to come together for a good time; and logging functions mean that not only can it double as reading material when the Internet is down, but that people (especially me, I trust myself to remember but not to remember correctly without looking) can look back and remember all the little detaily bits that are going to come around and be relevant later. But I never really understood the dark side of IM chat until recently.

In this sort of space, nobody can hear you, and that’s important. Tone? Not going to make a difference, and you can bet that people will read in the tone they expect to read and not the tone you tried to give it. You can’t avoid it even with someone you’ve been exchanging messages with for years, even with emoticons; how are you going to get around it when you don’t know the person across from you from Adam?

But that’s not going to screw you up near as much as the difficulty of getting to know the people you’re gaming with. Isn’t that the thing most people like about the Internet? That on it, most people won’t know anything about them without being told. No being teased about their clothing unless they post a picture. No having to admit they don’t know what they’re doing if they can just open a window and double-check the instructions between paragraphs. If you’re afraid of people you’re own age because they sense your fear and react accordingly, who’s going to know? It’s not like they can see you.

Problem is, we’re used to people getting the other parts from contact, and often we forget to tell them about the things they need to know. Needless to say, this backfires as often as not. Worse, just like in real life, people draw their impressions from what they see, and if they aren’t seeing the stuff that counters or explicates what they do see, things end badly. And this goes double when a player has a pattern she’s used to seeing. If everyone else is asking questions in private message to not disrupt the flow, wouldn’t someone who didn’t know better assume they all knew what they were doing? Then what happens when that someone tries to avoid the things she doesn’t get yet in order to hide what she doesn’t already know? Is it too surprising when “Wow, I get this detaily-bit and you don’t?”, meant as an incredulous “OMG maybe I can keep up”, comes across as “I know something you don’t know”? And next thing you know, it’s a vicious cycle in which everyone’s reinforcing other people’s bad impressions because they haven’t realized that they themselves didn’t get something important across, or they’re scared to admit how out of their depth they feel to anyone but the one person in the group they already know, until they realize that they’ve turned into that person they couldn’t stand in that other game long ago—if they’re lucky enough to have people who are honest with them about it. High school melodrama has nothing on even friendly chatrooms. The gamebooks might tell you all sorts of things about handling in-group disagreements, but I’ve never seen one address them electronically.

The answer, of course, is communication. No big shocker, there, right? But the tough part is getting the first move made, because the nature of the beast is such that the person who needs to be the one to make the first move thinks that the first moves that she’s already made, the ones that got swallowed up by the text, is scared to do something more real. Or doesn’t even realize that the move needs to be made. Or started with the wrong move, or… you get the idea. It’s not any less her job to make it, just very difficult, and there’s a sense in which the rest of the group does need in turn to be obvious about accepting attempts to fix it; again, just because they think they’re being open doesn’t mean they’re being read as being open.

Ugly, isn’t it? But worth it, eventually, with a lot of effort.

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