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Have you ever sent a message to someone to express interest in their request thread and then never got a response back?
Have you ever been in the planning stages of an rp/several posts into a story and suddenly, your partner drops off the face of the planet without a word?
Have you ever sent a message to an rp partner only to have them read it and ignore it, bumping their request thread and posting elsewhere like nothing happened?
Do not worry! You are not alone!
This topic comes up frequently in all role-playing communities and seems to be pretty consistent across the board.
Here are just a few started by other members of BMR ever since its founding in 2009:
2016 Common Courtesy
2016 Some food for thought...
2016 Hard to find long term rp partners
2015 Roleplays dying without notice?
2015 Naming and Shaming
2014 Why? Why Do They Do It?
2013 What am I doing wrong?
2010 Depressing
Everybody knows the pain of being in love with or excited for a story only to have the rug torn out from under them as their partner disappears or just stops responding to them. We've all had it happen at least once if we've been rping for any length of time.
It is unfair and it is generally considered rude. You've put time and effort into a story and it hurts to have it dropped without explanation. You're a human being and it hurts to be ignored, especially when you've never spoken to this person before and you just want to see if they're interested in your idea. You start to feel gaslighted into questioning everything about yourself and your approach because you literally have no answer to the question: What went wrong? Nobody disagrees with the fact that when engaged in a creative project with someone, it is preferable to get a message to let you know what is going on or if any long absences are going to occur.
So, other than complaining about it, and getting confirmation from others that yes, not only does this happen but with general frequency to literally everybody else who role-plays, what can be done?
⚘ ⚘ Nothing. ⚘ ⚘
It'd be nice if there was a net-wide memo that went out informing people of proper role-play etiquette but generally, this is not something that "nobody knows" or that they're doing out of ignorance. Like the D.A.R.E. ads of old, those who are inclined to a certain behavior are not generally going to be persuaded against that by throwing facts at them or attempting to shame them into "proper" behavior. People know how to treat others. What is happening in the minds of the perpetrators(the abandoners and non-informers) is a choice, weighing the pros and cons of "your/their partner's feelings" vs. "getting away with it." If someone has decided that they don't want to role-play with you, the fact that then, you're going to be mad/upset and feel hurt by them neglecting to communicate with you, is not going to make them feel obligated. They've already discounted your feelings from the sphere of "Things I care about" when they decided they no longer wanted to rp with you.
Well, okay, so, why not hold them accountable? How about we clean up the community? Start giving incentives to inform people of a lack of desire to rp or putting up deterrents to discourage ignoring people? How about things like reporting offenders, handing out warnings, and banning people who don't inform their partners?
Well, here it gets complicated because there are many reasons why people fail to inform their partners of absences and lack of interest.
1. It's a game. None of us that sign up to a site like this are doing this professionally. We might be writing professionally elsewhere, but anything we engage in here is for pure fun and entertainment. Some people like sites like Elliquiy where the standards are higher and the rules are stricter. Some people like a bit more freedom and looser standards since it widens the pool of partners to choose from. There's a variety here that ensures there's somebody(in lots of cases a lot of somebodies) for everybody.
Limiting this freedom with more rules, on a site like this where we don't have a stringent enrollment process that helps people feel invested in the forum and community, will likely have the adverse effect of chasing people away. People don't come here to be held accountable, especially when the anonymous nature of the forum allows so much freedom in regards to literally every other interaction. As you'll see, further below in this thread, there are reasons why people don't inform their partners of absences and it comes down to: there is no benefit to doing so.
2. It's not always on purpose. That would be pretty alienating if a family member went into the hospital or you got into an accident and when you came back to the forum, sometime in the next few months or years, your account had accrued a number of warnings or had been banned because people reported you for "not informing them of your whereabouts." I don't think I'd want to be on a forum where a generally passive-aggressive activity such as merely ignoring someone, at my leisure, would get me punished for it. We don't want to stack up the responsibilities and obligations on the side of preventing people from considering this escapism but rather like another job.
3. Why RP partners are so UNRELIABLE This is one of my favorite threads on this topic because it perfectly outlines the human responses and feelings a lot of those on the "non-responsive" side feel. Let me copy and paste the OP right here:
Despite being a list that Temptationist wrote jokingly about herself, I think these are things that are pretty universal in the role-playing community. Beyond all of the things that people cannot help happening, like tragedies, rl responsibilities, illnesses, etc. number 4 in this list strikes me as particularly worthy of note. This is what we're doing. On the one side of the coin, there are people who are very loose and casual about this hobby, letting slide grammatical errors and things like plot holes or unrealistic physics, etc. just to keep things light and fun and fill an afternoon with something other than staring blankly at a tv screen until we have to punch into work again. On the other side, there are people who like the challenge of writing but don't want all of the pressure that comes with writing on your own and writing for profit. We like the well-crafted tale, the artistic quality of verse painting a mental picture, and we kick ourselves for every typo and misplaced comma that we find in our posts AFTER we freaking posted it(and we read that shit 5 times before hitting submit!). But we cannot forget: none of this is easy.
We are using our brains to problem solve in order to construct plot and responses to whatever our partners have created or done. We are using energy to creatively paint pictures with words, searching for the right sensory output to articulate the emotions of a scene, sometimes looking up in dictionaries and thesaurus for the exact word that captures it perfectly. We are making an effort to release and let go of who we are in order to pretend to be somebody else, sometimes someone very different than ourselves. And we're doing it on a sometimes unspoken time limit. It's not just us writing it in our private little word pad; someone is waiting for this shit to come out and there is the expectation for a consistent standard to be met. You're not just painting a beautiful scene and totally losing yourself in the character of Tony Stark or Sherlock or whoever for your own amusement. You are tasked with keeping someone else entertained.
And the best part: none of it means anything. I've published an rp, my partner and I edited the shit out of our posts and made it a book. Not many people come here looking for a coauthor to eventually publish with. So... what's it for then? All of this energy, all of this fun, all of this creative genius is the equivalent of racking up points in a video game. Even if each and every post in it is written like a couple of professionals, unless you do something else with it, with the contracted agreement of everyone involved, then once it's all over and you write "The End" it ends up on page 42 of the Taboo Role-plays section of the forum by the end of the year. Some people read other peoples rps but it is not the norm because the enjoyment in the game itself comes from the validation between the partners. They don't generally write with an audience in mind nor do they write to "do" anything with it.
This makes the case against taking it too seriously unless you're both on the same page as far as what you want out of the story. And that's what we're talking about when we talk about being owed a reply to our messages.
In addition to the justifications that we all feel from time to time in regards to role-play and looking at it from a realistic perspective, there's the history a lot of us have with actually giving people what they say they want: Telling them "No."
I made a thread 4 years ago discussing the phenomenon of people needing a note before you walk away: The Obligation of Saying "No." It didn't pick up off the ground as it generally doesn't when you bring up the fact that a lot of people take this way too seriously. Nobody wants to admit that when they feel personally slighted by a lack of response, that they have gotten to the point where nothing matters except continuing their little fantasy world, to the point where they themselves, the story they're participating in, and their character are all one thing. The rp dies and they feel a sense of panic.
We don't usually bring it up that the rp community is an unhealthy enabler a lot of times, particularly the adult themed ones. For instance, a thread started in BMA also 4 years ago, illustrates just this sort of discussion without many replies: Something I wonder... (about role-playing) Another thread started later that year went over something in a similar vein, talking about OOC relationships with partners and how often they venture into uncomfortable territory, especially with male role-players/those with male personas: Getting too attached?
These are just a couple of threads detailing the behind the scenes interactions that nobody wants to talk about when they're crying over being left at the rp altar, so to speak. Many of us have horror stories ranging from the mundane snooty response of "Well, I didn't want to rp with you anyway!" thanklessness of being kindly informed of a lack of interest, to the more toxic, where a partner gets abusive or creepy with the desperate nature to hang onto a partner or fix the unfixable. Whether you inform these people or not, they take it as a personal attack. You have rejected them. And as much as we'd all like to say "Oh, I'd never do that," it doesn't erase the people who do act that way. And there's enough of them out there that the rest of us have through trial and error decided it's easier to just walk away. If they do end up getting blustering and angry about it and confront you eventually, there is no doubt in my mind they'd be that way anyway when told they're basically not good enough to keep me interested.
There's another layer we have to discuss and this might be a sensitive issue but I feel it has to be brought up, if we're going to talk about it at all. Generally, there is a gender bias when it comes to this topic. These are all generalizations but we cannot deny that over all, men and women react and act differently to different situations. ...and they get treated differently. Women are more likely to be polite and respectful to their partners. Men are more likely to get a little abusive and insecure when told "I don't want to play with you." Women will generally be polite with other women. They will hesitate to inform men that they do not wish to continue, especially if they've had a prior negative experience. Men are more likely to treat women partners badly when rejected. I can count on two hands the number of friends over the years who have been stalked by male role-players and bullied by them, either in passive ways or outright harassment. Again, these are just generalities. For the most part, I think an overwhelming majority of role-players are well-adjusted and courteous, regardless of gender. But you can't generally tell by sight or history who is going to go off their rocker once you tell them "no." They often remain courteous and laid back right up until the moment you don't want to rp with them anymore. So, who wants to play roulette with that in mind?
If we were to ever have a discussion about some sort of system to deter people from abandoning role-plays, then we need to include in that discussion the ability to fire back when people are rude when told "no." You cannot put a system in place that punishes people for abandoning role-plays but then leave the social leniency intact wherein they ALSO get punished for being courteous to their partners. Both need to be handled at the same time with the same amount of proof required. If we're going to require people to inform their partners then we need to require that those people respond with the same amount of courtesy and respect when being informed.
Honestly, this topic is just to put it all down in one place. We've gotten 4 of these topics so far in 2016 and it's only July. I don't know if it's happening more frequently or if people are just finally deciding to speak up about it this year but here's all that information and previous discussions archived together for easy access.
Now, we can start talking about coping measures, because at the end of the day, until/unless we hold people accountable for their place in this community on both sides of the discussion, then all we can really do is deal with it when it happens to us. So, what do you do when any of the first three bolded scenarios happens to you?
⚘ ⚘ Nothing. ⚘ ⚘
That's right. You just let it go and move on. It is the easiest way to handle it. Send them one message and hope that they log back in and respond but even if they don't, it's not going to encourage them if you keep sending messages to them. They obviously have their reasons, any number of which have already been listed and gone over in this thread in addition to many more that we just don't know about.
You can consider this a bit of a freedom if you open your perspective to the fact that it is just a game. Even with all of that effort put it into it and how excited you are for a response, there is a weight lifted from your shoulders when you consider the fact that it could end at any time and there's nothing you could do to change that if it did. Think about the difference in approach to your writing as you let loose and have fun with it. I know that my writing comes alive when I get the chip off my shoulder and hop out of "impressive writer mode." And I never feel an ounce of regret when it dies suddenly because I lived every moment of that fantasy in the moment and it did what it was intended to do: I had fun. This makes it easier to enjoy the rp while it is alive and to move on in case it dies.
There are other ways to make your writing more meaningful, to make your words count, even with a partner. People make coauthor contracts all the time when they work on projects together. But for simple role-playing often you will be alone thinking of it in life and death terms. Hopefully, this archive will be helpful in some way to illuminating this topic further and letting you know: You are not alone!
Have you ever been in the planning stages of an rp/several posts into a story and suddenly, your partner drops off the face of the planet without a word?
Have you ever sent a message to an rp partner only to have them read it and ignore it, bumping their request thread and posting elsewhere like nothing happened?
Do not worry! You are not alone!
This topic comes up frequently in all role-playing communities and seems to be pretty consistent across the board.
Here are just a few started by other members of BMR ever since its founding in 2009:
2016 Common Courtesy
2016 Some food for thought...
2016 Hard to find long term rp partners
2015 Roleplays dying without notice?
2015 Naming and Shaming
2014 Why? Why Do They Do It?
2013 What am I doing wrong?
2010 Depressing
Everybody knows the pain of being in love with or excited for a story only to have the rug torn out from under them as their partner disappears or just stops responding to them. We've all had it happen at least once if we've been rping for any length of time.
It is unfair and it is generally considered rude. You've put time and effort into a story and it hurts to have it dropped without explanation. You're a human being and it hurts to be ignored, especially when you've never spoken to this person before and you just want to see if they're interested in your idea. You start to feel gaslighted into questioning everything about yourself and your approach because you literally have no answer to the question: What went wrong? Nobody disagrees with the fact that when engaged in a creative project with someone, it is preferable to get a message to let you know what is going on or if any long absences are going to occur.
So, other than complaining about it, and getting confirmation from others that yes, not only does this happen but with general frequency to literally everybody else who role-plays, what can be done?
⚘ ⚘ Nothing. ⚘ ⚘
It'd be nice if there was a net-wide memo that went out informing people of proper role-play etiquette but generally, this is not something that "nobody knows" or that they're doing out of ignorance. Like the D.A.R.E. ads of old, those who are inclined to a certain behavior are not generally going to be persuaded against that by throwing facts at them or attempting to shame them into "proper" behavior. People know how to treat others. What is happening in the minds of the perpetrators(the abandoners and non-informers) is a choice, weighing the pros and cons of "your/their partner's feelings" vs. "getting away with it." If someone has decided that they don't want to role-play with you, the fact that then, you're going to be mad/upset and feel hurt by them neglecting to communicate with you, is not going to make them feel obligated. They've already discounted your feelings from the sphere of "Things I care about" when they decided they no longer wanted to rp with you.
Well, okay, so, why not hold them accountable? How about we clean up the community? Start giving incentives to inform people of a lack of desire to rp or putting up deterrents to discourage ignoring people? How about things like reporting offenders, handing out warnings, and banning people who don't inform their partners?
Well, here it gets complicated because there are many reasons why people fail to inform their partners of absences and lack of interest.
1. It's a game. None of us that sign up to a site like this are doing this professionally. We might be writing professionally elsewhere, but anything we engage in here is for pure fun and entertainment. Some people like sites like Elliquiy where the standards are higher and the rules are stricter. Some people like a bit more freedom and looser standards since it widens the pool of partners to choose from. There's a variety here that ensures there's somebody(in lots of cases a lot of somebodies) for everybody.
Limiting this freedom with more rules, on a site like this where we don't have a stringent enrollment process that helps people feel invested in the forum and community, will likely have the adverse effect of chasing people away. People don't come here to be held accountable, especially when the anonymous nature of the forum allows so much freedom in regards to literally every other interaction. As you'll see, further below in this thread, there are reasons why people don't inform their partners of absences and it comes down to: there is no benefit to doing so.
2. It's not always on purpose. That would be pretty alienating if a family member went into the hospital or you got into an accident and when you came back to the forum, sometime in the next few months or years, your account had accrued a number of warnings or had been banned because people reported you for "not informing them of your whereabouts." I don't think I'd want to be on a forum where a generally passive-aggressive activity such as merely ignoring someone, at my leisure, would get me punished for it. We don't want to stack up the responsibilities and obligations on the side of preventing people from considering this escapism but rather like another job.
3. Why RP partners are so UNRELIABLE This is one of my favorite threads on this topic because it perfectly outlines the human responses and feelings a lot of those on the "non-responsive" side feel. Let me copy and paste the OP right here:
Despite being a list that Temptationist wrote jokingly about herself, I think these are things that are pretty universal in the role-playing community. Beyond all of the things that people cannot help happening, like tragedies, rl responsibilities, illnesses, etc. number 4 in this list strikes me as particularly worthy of note. This is what we're doing. On the one side of the coin, there are people who are very loose and casual about this hobby, letting slide grammatical errors and things like plot holes or unrealistic physics, etc. just to keep things light and fun and fill an afternoon with something other than staring blankly at a tv screen until we have to punch into work again. On the other side, there are people who like the challenge of writing but don't want all of the pressure that comes with writing on your own and writing for profit. We like the well-crafted tale, the artistic quality of verse painting a mental picture, and we kick ourselves for every typo and misplaced comma that we find in our posts AFTER we freaking posted it(and we read that shit 5 times before hitting submit!). But we cannot forget: none of this is easy.
We are using our brains to problem solve in order to construct plot and responses to whatever our partners have created or done. We are using energy to creatively paint pictures with words, searching for the right sensory output to articulate the emotions of a scene, sometimes looking up in dictionaries and thesaurus for the exact word that captures it perfectly. We are making an effort to release and let go of who we are in order to pretend to be somebody else, sometimes someone very different than ourselves. And we're doing it on a sometimes unspoken time limit. It's not just us writing it in our private little word pad; someone is waiting for this shit to come out and there is the expectation for a consistent standard to be met. You're not just painting a beautiful scene and totally losing yourself in the character of Tony Stark or Sherlock or whoever for your own amusement. You are tasked with keeping someone else entertained.
And the best part: none of it means anything. I've published an rp, my partner and I edited the shit out of our posts and made it a book. Not many people come here looking for a coauthor to eventually publish with. So... what's it for then? All of this energy, all of this fun, all of this creative genius is the equivalent of racking up points in a video game. Even if each and every post in it is written like a couple of professionals, unless you do something else with it, with the contracted agreement of everyone involved, then once it's all over and you write "The End" it ends up on page 42 of the Taboo Role-plays section of the forum by the end of the year. Some people read other peoples rps but it is not the norm because the enjoyment in the game itself comes from the validation between the partners. They don't generally write with an audience in mind nor do they write to "do" anything with it.
This makes the case against taking it too seriously unless you're both on the same page as far as what you want out of the story. And that's what we're talking about when we talk about being owed a reply to our messages.
In addition to the justifications that we all feel from time to time in regards to role-play and looking at it from a realistic perspective, there's the history a lot of us have with actually giving people what they say they want: Telling them "No."
I made a thread 4 years ago discussing the phenomenon of people needing a note before you walk away: The Obligation of Saying "No." It didn't pick up off the ground as it generally doesn't when you bring up the fact that a lot of people take this way too seriously. Nobody wants to admit that when they feel personally slighted by a lack of response, that they have gotten to the point where nothing matters except continuing their little fantasy world, to the point where they themselves, the story they're participating in, and their character are all one thing. The rp dies and they feel a sense of panic.
We don't usually bring it up that the rp community is an unhealthy enabler a lot of times, particularly the adult themed ones. For instance, a thread started in BMA also 4 years ago, illustrates just this sort of discussion without many replies: Something I wonder... (about role-playing) Another thread started later that year went over something in a similar vein, talking about OOC relationships with partners and how often they venture into uncomfortable territory, especially with male role-players/those with male personas: Getting too attached?
These are just a couple of threads detailing the behind the scenes interactions that nobody wants to talk about when they're crying over being left at the rp altar, so to speak. Many of us have horror stories ranging from the mundane snooty response of "Well, I didn't want to rp with you anyway!" thanklessness of being kindly informed of a lack of interest, to the more toxic, where a partner gets abusive or creepy with the desperate nature to hang onto a partner or fix the unfixable. Whether you inform these people or not, they take it as a personal attack. You have rejected them. And as much as we'd all like to say "Oh, I'd never do that," it doesn't erase the people who do act that way. And there's enough of them out there that the rest of us have through trial and error decided it's easier to just walk away. If they do end up getting blustering and angry about it and confront you eventually, there is no doubt in my mind they'd be that way anyway when told they're basically not good enough to keep me interested.
There's another layer we have to discuss and this might be a sensitive issue but I feel it has to be brought up, if we're going to talk about it at all. Generally, there is a gender bias when it comes to this topic. These are all generalizations but we cannot deny that over all, men and women react and act differently to different situations. ...and they get treated differently. Women are more likely to be polite and respectful to their partners. Men are more likely to get a little abusive and insecure when told "I don't want to play with you." Women will generally be polite with other women. They will hesitate to inform men that they do not wish to continue, especially if they've had a prior negative experience. Men are more likely to treat women partners badly when rejected. I can count on two hands the number of friends over the years who have been stalked by male role-players and bullied by them, either in passive ways or outright harassment. Again, these are just generalities. For the most part, I think an overwhelming majority of role-players are well-adjusted and courteous, regardless of gender. But you can't generally tell by sight or history who is going to go off their rocker once you tell them "no." They often remain courteous and laid back right up until the moment you don't want to rp with them anymore. So, who wants to play roulette with that in mind?
If we were to ever have a discussion about some sort of system to deter people from abandoning role-plays, then we need to include in that discussion the ability to fire back when people are rude when told "no." You cannot put a system in place that punishes people for abandoning role-plays but then leave the social leniency intact wherein they ALSO get punished for being courteous to their partners. Both need to be handled at the same time with the same amount of proof required. If we're going to require people to inform their partners then we need to require that those people respond with the same amount of courtesy and respect when being informed.
Honestly, this topic is just to put it all down in one place. We've gotten 4 of these topics so far in 2016 and it's only July. I don't know if it's happening more frequently or if people are just finally deciding to speak up about it this year but here's all that information and previous discussions archived together for easy access.
Now, we can start talking about coping measures, because at the end of the day, until/unless we hold people accountable for their place in this community on both sides of the discussion, then all we can really do is deal with it when it happens to us. So, what do you do when any of the first three bolded scenarios happens to you?
⚘ ⚘ Nothing. ⚘ ⚘
That's right. You just let it go and move on. It is the easiest way to handle it. Send them one message and hope that they log back in and respond but even if they don't, it's not going to encourage them if you keep sending messages to them. They obviously have their reasons, any number of which have already been listed and gone over in this thread in addition to many more that we just don't know about.
You can consider this a bit of a freedom if you open your perspective to the fact that it is just a game. Even with all of that effort put it into it and how excited you are for a response, there is a weight lifted from your shoulders when you consider the fact that it could end at any time and there's nothing you could do to change that if it did. Think about the difference in approach to your writing as you let loose and have fun with it. I know that my writing comes alive when I get the chip off my shoulder and hop out of "impressive writer mode." And I never feel an ounce of regret when it dies suddenly because I lived every moment of that fantasy in the moment and it did what it was intended to do: I had fun. This makes it easier to enjoy the rp while it is alive and to move on in case it dies.
There are other ways to make your writing more meaningful, to make your words count, even with a partner. People make coauthor contracts all the time when they work on projects together. But for simple role-playing often you will be alone thinking of it in life and death terms. Hopefully, this archive will be helpful in some way to illuminating this topic further and letting you know: You are not alone!
