Heresy

What is reality? Laying awake last night full of emotions about several different issues I was facing about friends and guildies last night - issues both painful and wonderful, tragic and amusing, frustrating and rewarding..... I got to thinking about something Ghanka and I had once discussed when in fact we were still speaking to each other....and that was "what was real" and "what was not real" within the context of friendships, relationships, arguments and other such stuff in MMPORG environments.

Let me first say I am not talking about RP. I'm talking about people, OOC, IRL, the humans behind the pixels. Pixels do not interest me. Oh sure its fun to make my character look cool and I may even occasionally enjoy a moment of being in Durnholde making my undead female rogue look like a half-naked, machine-gun-toting murderess, and I still have a soft spot for the old pvp warlock set, scythe and all - but the bottom line is I never look at that and think its real, nor do I feel anything real as a result of watching it.

It is the minds behind the characters, creative and fully operational that interest me. And in the..oh, year and a half or so that I've played Defias and gotten to know some of those minds, I've found it all too easy to care about them.

People in this game - not the characters (though admittedly I've been fortunate enough to experience moments of RP that ran the emotional gamut) - are what affect me. For better or worse, it has to be said, as I don't always have in place that emotional shield that is sometimes so necessary for dealing with a world of individuals that are as diverse as any other random gathering of humans. I tend to feel things too deeply and too often anyway, and it takes a good deal of battering before I finally have learned to throw up at least SOME kind of wall, some sort of filter or discernment so that I'm a bit better at what I let in, versus what I don't.

Even so, people in this game have made me cry, feel such loyalty and protectiveness as to want to beat the shit out of the offending party, laugh so hard I couldn't breathe, worry so much that I can't sleep, get so angry I shook, disgusted enough to shudder, annoyed enough to avoid, get frustrated enough to want to fling the computer out the window, feel so worn out that I sleep late and even get turned on to the point I wanted to chew on my mouse out of sheer unexpressed lust.

Again - this is real emotion, over real people. I'm not talking about roleplay.

Roleplay is fun and creative and touching in the way a movie can be but right now it just isn't a big priority for me in terms of my emotional needs. Real life is pounding me emotionally right now, so roleplay is less an escape and more a burden for me, I just don't have the energy to be deep into it, at least not right now. I follow the rules, I write my stories but .....for the time being? I don't care about so-and-so's character and how they ate some other character's leg before they became the master of Dalaran and sexed up the Apothecary to get ..blah blah etc, blah blah.

Not right now. Ok? Not right now.

Roleplay got me thru some dark times, gave me a place to play and feel. But now real life is demanding that energy from me and that's where it needs to be spent.

In short: got real life shit on my mind. The catch is 75% of it involves people in this game, because after all this time, sue me, you get close to some of them. Maybe its the sign of our times, but after 1 1/2 years of knowing some of these people, some in real life and a couple rather intimately, they become a part of your life - distant geographically perhaps - but nevertheless..they're there.

So is it real? Are these 'real' friendships? "Real" relationships, 'real emotions'? In the case of those that I've never even met?

Oxford Dictionary defines reality as follows:

(Full entry for reality: "reality • noun (pl. realities) 1 the state of things as they actually exist, as opposed to an idealistic or notional idea of them. 2 a thing that is actually experienced or seen. 3 the quality of being lifelike. 4 the state or quality of having existence or substance.")

So - a thing that is actually experienced - well that clarifies the 'real emotions' part. Emotions are experential; if you feel them, they're real. Its in, I think, the identification of emotions that some people screw up. What you feel is real - what you call it....well that's where you have to be more careful, isn't it.

As for real friendships and relationships - I think it gets more complicated. Some of the people in this game I've known either a long time, or pretty well. Intense levels of trust exist between us, maybe more than they would had we initially met in person because at the very essence of long-distance friendships or relationships are conversations and communication; the ability to express yourself to another person, be it about heroic Shadow Labs, the nature of addiction, describing how someone kisses or getting the mats for the mongoose enchant. At the heart of all of this is the ability to communicate, which is the cornerstone of any typed or spoken correspondence.

If two people communicate long enough, and well enough, I think there is a valid argument that the resulting friendship or relationship is AS real as one created in any other environment. Where you might run into trouble is that since no OTHER factor (location, age, appearances, careers, etc) figures into the friendsihp/relationship, its too easy to ignore those other factors and fall into an emotional place that - otherwise- you'd never dream of going.

So is it real? Yeah, I think so.

Is it wise? Not always.

This is where a person's own ability to discern, judge, discriminate, trust their own assessment of people and situations must come into play. This is where I used to fail miserably and still strive to improve.

People tend to think of me as very warm - or somewhat cold - depending on when and how they've met me. I think that's because the warmth comes out of a degree of familiarity and trust that I cannot invent; while "has to be earned" is probably the wrong phrase, its not entirely off-base, even if the "earning" is just through time. I might joke, for instance, with Stanner or Thickhorn on a level I'd never consider with someone I've known a shorter period of time, or that whom, for whatever reason, such joking would make me feel uncomfortable. Which is why, perhaps, one person can /lick emote me and I chuckle and wink and another might do it and piss me off. One might say "sweetie" and I feel a rush of affection and acknowledgement from someone I'm close to, and have been for some time.....but another makes me want to deck him in the face for assuming a familiarity that is not yet there, hasn't been offered or earned.

Word of advice, while we're on the subject of the word "sweetie".....

Careful how you use it.

The word "sweetie" is fine when it comes from the mouth of a 65 year old grandmother with a huge bosom who's holding out a plate of cookies, because that means "pile onto grandma, grab cookies and get hugged until you suffocate". When "sweetie" comes from someone you barely know - say the guy selling me the automotive battery at the AutoZone on Burnet Road in 2001 - don't be surprised if I bite his fucking head off.

Sweetie, like licks - is earned. Not your right to take, but mine to accept. And it goes two ways, because it is sort of an unspoken agreement, I don't have the right to force my sweeties or licks on you either.

Gaa, I just realised I've totally digressed here - my apologies, but in essence these online relationships can create genuine and 'real' emotions - have the same pecking orders and boundaries of a sort, and that's what I'm trying to illustrate here.

Just because I am words on a screen to you doesn't give you any more right in real life to /lick me than it would if I walked by you on the street and had no idea whom you were. Knowing who - or who is not - okay to treat in such a manner comes down to paying attention, sensitivity to other people's natures and beahviour and respecting those natures and behaviour. Just as in the living and breathing 'real world', social skills do play a part in a MMPORG environment especially when you're talking about a guild as small and as personal to some of us as this one is.

Not everyone has such boundaries, and that can result in either a person making gross errors in judgement on a regular basis, either by how they treat others or how much they let others into their lives.

In essence, boundaries that should be in place for healthy real life relationships and friendships should be just as stalwart in online ones - maybe even more so, because the picture is never complete, and its only with a LOT of time, and communication, that those missing pieces can be sketched in somehow. And if you really care about the people, love them even as I do - because some of these guys, I can say I love them, as the dearest, most insane friends a girl could hope for - you owe them that full attention, you owe them a true picture of yourself and you should be able to trust that they will give the same.

Whether online or in real life, that is an often rarely acheived but nevertheless valuable goal, I should hope, on any level, be it friends or partners.

It ain't easy, true enough, especially when you consider so many of us are here because we feel we can't, shouldn't or simply don't want to be - somewhere else.

All the same - is it reality?

In my eyes - you're damn right it is.

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"I wrote the story myself. It's about a girl who lost her reputation and never missed it." - Mae West
Fireflower's Words of Wisdom: http://i200.photobucket.com/albums/a...ompilation.jpg