First off, an explanation – or confession, however you prefer to read it. Between 1995 and 2006, one of my main pastimes was MOOing: taking part in online text-based roleplaying games run on the MOO platform, generally ones based on Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern series.
Ever heard of Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs)? Well, they were the first online roleplaying games, purely text-based, a long time before graphical ones like World of Warcraft or Everquest. A cross between Choose Your Own Adventure novels and Dungeons & Dragons, they mostly involved running around a series of virtual rooms collecting objects, fighting monsters, and racking up points. MOOs, MUXes and MUSHes – named for their code variants – generally took this a step further and required proper characterisation and interaction with other players, which in turn created complex stories with multiple authors.
You start by creating a character. In some games you have to work out their stats (strength and so on), in others such as the ones I preferred, no virtual dice are involved (pure roleplay instead of rollplay). You then let your character loose on the virtual world, which already contains places and people and objects with which to interact. And through your interactions of poses and dialogue – your roleplaying – with other characters, your own develops, creating a history and relationships for itself through the medium of text.
It’s been a while since I’ve done any of this sort of roleplaying. I do miss it, but I’ve grown out of it, of the places and situations. But lately, I’ve been considering how MOOing changed my writing, and these are my conclusions.
1) It sapped all my creativity for a long time. In the eight years before I started MOOing, I’d been dedicated to my paper journals; I’d written a lot of poetry and the occasional short story. I stopped keeping my journal not long after first creating my first online character, and it was years before I wrote any more poetry.
2) It expanded my creativity. As well as being part of an ongoing interactive story which could take new directions at my whim or someone else’s, I was also writing descriptions for rooms and objects, exercising my descriptive and creative powers, my love of words and word forms (especially alliteration), and my ability to take criticism and work in a team. (In fact, MOOing in general gave me a lot of experience in working with other people, including interviewing and leading projects, that’s been invaluable. But isn’t relevant here, since it’s not related to writing.)
Some of my descing experience has lent itself best to poetry; other parts to learning how to pick out the most relevant parts of description to give a full but not overly-detailed impression.
3) It taught me to shun purple prose and clichés. Seeing someone describe their character’s eyes as ‘optics’ made me want to scream and spork my own eyes out. I learnt how to identify what writing styles worked and what made me wince, and I watched other people grow and learn in the same way (sadly not all of them).
4) It taught me to create characters. I fully admit that the first character I ever had was a perfected version of me, but then that made her easy to play. I did run through some of the cliches of characters (particularly the cliches on Pern M*s, where far too many characters have red hair and green eyes and never a freckle in sight), but I learnt to get over them – and when to use them to effect.
In my later years, I did a lot of writing ‘prefabricated characters’ for other people to play, and that taught me how to write believable personalities and histories and relationships, and moreover, how to condense these into a few paragraphs.
It also taught me the value of ‘voice’ – of having your characters each sound different (as well as act and speak differently).
5) It stopped me writing out my character’s thoughts, which I’ve realised particularly with this year’s NaNovel is a bit of a problem. Showing in poses what your character is thinking is a big no-no – you have to be purely factual, and let their opinions and attitudes be read from their words and actions (somewhere that adverbs come in very useful).
But of course, when writing in the third person in a novel, it’s helpful to say what the point-of-view character is thinking, and that’s something that no longer comes naturally to me. I’m getting plenty of practice in it with my current work though, and its multiple PoVs.
6) It made me unafraid to let my characters take over. When you’re creating a story with lots of other characters involved, there are lots of possible directions that things can go, and some of them might not be entirely what you’d planned. Of course, you can plan scenes with the other participants, to work towards a particular outcome, but a lot of the time, it’s just fun to see what transpires through roleplay.
And sometimes, you can learn an awful lot about your character by the way they react to something you hadn’t planned in advance; and sometimes, those reactions can take you off on a whole different path that’s incredibly interesting to follow.
So yes, there are ways in which MOOing – roleplaying in text – has constricted my writing a bit. But what it has taught me has been invaluable in advancing my writing abilities and style, and I can’t ever regret the years it took from my other writing – not least because of all the friends I found through it.
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