Agent Rosalie, 26, is an open character in the 'Working for the FBI' roleplay world. Image: Roleplay Gateway
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The question of whether something online is ‘real’ or not remains blurry. Somewhere between the Instagrammed cupcakes that no one actually eats, the dubious viral children and the tiger tamers on Tinder, we smudged the line between fact and fiction. Social media thrives on self-delusion: even Facebook, for all its regime of innocuous Likes, encourages us to present only the positives in life: the sunsets, the restaurant meals, the group-hangs at the beach. The issue is that we all lie online: anyone who’s tried online dating knows that.Now, we find ourselves at a curious cultural moment: that of fantasy games going mainstream. Facebook has become host to countless role-playing communities, with one for every conceivable fandom.Facebook has become host to countless role-playing communities, with one for every conceivable fandom.
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Image: Screenshot of Sherlock Mafia RP Facebook page
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Formatting and spelling are valued, as are the word counts which ‘literate’ role-playing communities enforce (“Your starters and replies MUST be at least five sentences long” states the group “Literate Roleplay!☆彡”). Posts are gently overwritten in that very internet way: players include accents, vocal tics, even animal noises. The fourth wall is occasionally broken with messages enclosed in brackets, politely asking for permission to take part.Role-players disapprove of ‘god modding,’ when a player writes an invincible character who is boringly immune to attacks. Another common complaint is failure to finish games: players drop off, life gets in the way, and communities diminish. As with blogs where the author apologizes for being ‘so busy’ only to disappear several posts later, Facebook is littered with communities which have streamed off into nothingness, sounding boards full of unheard ‘prompts’ and bitter announcements that the page owner is thinking of giving up.Roleplay Gateway, a site which claims to be 50,000 strong, features a chart of its most popular role-plays. Those which thrive consistently are not always predictable: Harry Potter plots do well, as do Skyrim and Hunger Games role-plays, and various factions of vampires and werewolves from Twilight. One of the more surprising themes is WWE wrestling, a hyperbolic world unto itself which is detailed in this Reddit post (expect multiple marriages to WWE Divas, family feuds, and a prison term for a man named ‘Nitro’).For all its eccentricity, role-playing appears to come naturally to those who do it. And yet it goes against everything Facebook wants of us—a service that even manages to harvest shadow profiles on people that haven’t signed up. To join the social network but then act out of character confounds the patterns Facebook aims to record. In a small way it disrupts the slow, pernicious blandness that social media encourages, letting our alter egos spill out messily around the edges.It gives rise to a new age of consensual catfishing, one in which we are finally at ease with the fact that our online presence has always been a little bit fake.To join the social network but then act out of character confounds the patterns Facebook aims to record.