No, the game started in the middle of SEPTEMBER, LAST year.

*sighs* Cease and desist with the verbal bashing... Marina posted her oppinion, and her post on this subject acctually makes perfect sense to me...

I guess in some way it has for me, I'm not nearly as shy as I used to be, and I think part of it is from role playing (If you don't see me as shy just take Yuniko's word on it, I was, and still am a wee bit OOC). I'm not as confident as Yukari is but I am more so than I used to be.

Its nice to hear a positive story for a change.

Isn't there a theory about the reasons that people play MUDS, and one of the primary ones being to learn and grow in some subconsciously guided direction? I wish I could say I'd been as successful.

Erm, I just tried to ask my friend who's going for Psychology at the college I attend, she's a 400 level student (senior).  She said the following:

"What are MUDS?"  So I had to explain to her what they were and she just went all glazed eyed.  So then I explained it to her what it was and where they came from, and she said, "Oh!  You mean relevant study inducers?"

  So I geuss there were originally meant to study how human beings reacted in situations.  Going to go find out where that began and post it.

The celebration of identity is the fundamental, critical, absolutely core point of virtual worlds .
...
For the great majority of players, virtual worlds encourage them to present different sides of themselves in a safe environment; challenges arise in the virtual world which enable them to reflect (consciously or otherwise) on their responses to those challenges, leading them to develop a greater understanding of themselves; over time, this brings about a gradual merging of the virtual side and the real side, as the player becomes increasingly attuned to their persona.

Every so often you see a post about how people just 'roleplay' themselves, or how people show through in their characters, or how people take 'OOC' issues 'IC'

Today I was thinking about starting up an alt that was a lot of things that I wasn't, just for the RP challenge.

Now, I try to be a lot of things that I think are good things to be, and I started to ponder: If I started a character that was irritible, didn't mind hurting other people (or even enjoyed it), or was nasty, violent and insulting, or any of those things that some people RP, even though they themselves may not be that way, would it start to rub off on me?

I wonder if people have had this experience when they play characters that are really different than they are. Do your characters start to rub off on you at all, take on a life of their own, just a little bit?

Kalo and I are so different, it's scary.  I tend to be dark and sadistic, and not a soul on Earth could call Kalo such.  He's sweet, innocent, and childish - perhaps the last of which is our only similarity.

I guess in some way it has for me, I'm not nearly as shy as I used to be, and I think part of it is from role playing (If you don't see me as shy just take Yuniko's word on it, I was, and still am a wee bit OOC). I'm not as confident as Yukari is but I am more so than I used to be.

I dunno, I kinda got a bit of a sadistic impression from Kalo when he rants about squishing the sicklings if we can't heal them.

My favourite discourse comes from Richard Bartle, who co-wrote the first virtual world, MUD, and its successor, MUD II. In his book "Designing Virtual Worlds" (yes, I was tempted), he says:

Thus perhaps it is not to your detriment to be affected by the journey of your character.