When one spends a significant amount of time in an open-world, online metaverse like Second Life, sooner or later there will come an opportunity to express thoughts, feelings, impressions and actions through text in a roleplay context. The craft of conveying this in a terse, detailed, emotionally involving whole is called emoting, and that will be the topic of this post.

For some, emoting is as arcane as alchemy, whilst for others it will come as naturally and easily as breathing. Ultimately, though, crafting an effective emote comes down to exercising one’s creativity in imagining how a scene would play out if it was written.

In short, the craft of emoting is not just about picturing the physical environment, but also about imbuing the character performing the action with thoughts, actions and emotions that complete the picture and give a vivid, textual description of what is happening in the visual scene. This may seem reductive and simplistic, but there is more to emoting than it meets the eye. It can be as broad as one likes; on the other hand, an emote can be painstakingly crafted, textured with many layers of physical and emotional detail.

This does not mean that one must necessarily be hyper-detailed about everything: One may describe the setting in broad strokes, whilst focusing more on the emotional and physical reactions of the character. Conversely, the emotional description may not be as detailed, preferring the visuality of the scene to the actions and reactions of the character.

Emoting is limitless in its capabilities, bound only by what one’s roleplay partner considers to be acceptable or not; however, there are two fundamental roleplay etiquette tenets that one should always remember whilst crafting emotes.

First, never arrogate to yourself the task of describing actions and thoughts meant for your roleplaying partner. This practice, a major fault to roleplay etiquette called godmodding, is an improper way of emoting that is very common amongst certain kinds of role-players who like to steer both their and their roleplay partner’s actions in a desired direction instead of allowing an organic flow. The risk here is that the godmodder irritates their partner, who, seeing that they are an ornament, may decide to end the scene, leaving the godmodder to elucubrate over their fantasies in solitude.

For the second point, there is a brief, but needed interlude I must make.

Roleplaying is only effective if one can separate one’s thoughts and actions from those of one’s character. This is the In Character / Out-Of-Character boundary (In jargon, IC / OOC); and it is generally a safety measure, meant to preserve one’s emotional and mental well-being from being affected by actions that one’s character might enjoy, but one might not approve of. In this sense, emoting is like acting, in that one needs to wear one’s character’s persona, whilst keeping one’s truth separate.

We must remember that in Second Life, as well as in any open world metaverse, one’s avatar is one’s character. It reflects how you portray yourself to the online world. Therefore, a bit of the IC / OOC separation is inevitably lost. It becomes easy to forget this, and sometimes it happens that one might use information about one’s roleplay partner that one knows out of character but does not know in character to steer what happens in character. This practice, called metagaming, is also a major fault of roleplay etiquette. The risk one runs when one metagames is that one will not find roleplay partners at all – not to mention being banned from the venue one roleplays in.

With the necessary technicalities about roleplaying etiquette out of the way, now I can speak more about the basic things one needs to bear in mind when emoting.

First, try not to use a series of one-liners. It may have worked for SMS texting, but Second Life is not like SMS texting – if it was, we would have only 140 characters to play with; instead, we have (going by memory) 10000 characters in Firestorm to use. That is plenty of room to spread one’s figurative emoting legs. Another point about one-liners is,

One-liners
can be
extremely
irritating
to read.

Second life, like the old-school IRC chat, has a slash command that is extremely useful in crafting emotes: the message command (/me). When you start a chat line with /me in Second Life, you are signaling to the viewer that you are sending a message. You will see there is an immediate difference in how the text is presented: instead of appearing as “John Doe: Says ‘Come here’” you will see “John Doe says ‘come here’”. It is an easy to miss, cosmetic difference, but it can be useful to separate actions (performed with the /me command at the beginning of the line) from dialog (performed without the leading /me command.)

Second, try not to use shorthand. Write out things, spelling them properly. Not everybody has the same English proficiency. For instance, English may not be your roleplay partner’s native language; in that case, be mindful of that and write out the words (bc mb ur rp pair cant ndrstnd wn u wrt w qwik txt ltt)*.

Third, be sure to have a way of communicating with your roleplay partner in an out-of-character way (for instance, through IM, or using the standard, ((double-bracketed comments)) if roleplaying in open chat.)

Fourth, communicate your intent. If you need to briefly step away from your keyboard, signal a ((brb)) when you go, and a ((back)) when you return; if your absence might prolong itself, signal an ((afk)) and an estimated time of your being away from the keyboard when you go, and a ((back)) when you return.

Communication is crucial in Second Life, because body language and other visual clues we give with our bodies are missing from it. Precisely because the layer of micro gestures and boy language is absent, it is very easy to stumble onto the domain of emotional and mental assault in Second Life; therefore, one must exercise great care in making one’s intent clearly known through descripting the body language or by wording one’s actions in such a way that one’s intent is unambiguous.

Knowing your roleplay partner’s limits is also important. What you might feel is acceptable could be unacceptable to your partner. That is why safe words exist. Pay attention to your partner’s reactions, and if the safe word is said, immediately stop the scene, then unbind and check on your partner. She needs your support now, so provide it. There is no ifs or buts about it. Caring for your partner after the safe word is said is imperative.

Last, but not least, give your partner time to write out their response. Roleplay is a dialog, made of action and reaction; if you do not offer an opportunity for your partner to react, it becomes a monologue.

I will not insult your intelligence by giving you examples of how you should craft your own emotes. I have given you the building blocks. As for what you do with those building blocks… Well, that is a task I leave to you.

*: Because maybe your roleplay pair can’t understand when you write in quick text all the time.