(09-02-2015, 10:08 AM)Bearclaw Wrote:Honestly I could just as easily argue the opposite. RPing is an exercise in writing that makes you write 'on your toes' so to speak. You have to be thinking from not the perspective of 'how do I want to convey this planned story' to 'how can I write this character in a way that is realistic for their backstory and a situation that wasn't planned out'. It's different than writing alone, not necessarily pointless as a writing exercise or even outright bad.(08-26-2015, 05:31 PM)Oli! Wrote: I don't do any of that, because roleplay is just for fun and I don't take it as a serious writing exercise.
I might be in the minority for that.
I about agree with this as well. If anything, an argument could be made that roleplay is bad for writing and thus critical evaluation isn't helpful. It enables a lot of bad habits such as uncertain actions, narrow-minded perspectives, and is incredibly constraining with text limits and limited styles of posts. Self-evaluating yourself might only hurt your actual writing abilities. I sort of feel like it's how using your own self-evaluating for novel writing wouldn't help you for writing for a comic, as the mediums require different styles of writing and pacing.
If you've been having fun and other people have had fun with you, that's about all the self-evaluation you need. I just roleplay like a social hobby though, akin to tabletop games with friends.
I've found that over the years writing in a group setting has drastically improved my ability with characterization as well as in general the speed I can make myself write - something I struggled pretty heavily with until I roleplayed a lot more actively.
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Roleplay is a form of entertainment, that is for sure, but I don't think that striving to improve in any way takes away from it being 'just for fun'. Ultimately, learning to think in a more critical way about things such as 'is this the most realistic way my character would react?' or 'am I falling into a cliche trap and would something different be more interesting for myself/my rp partners?' aren't a chore but ultimately lead to more entertaining roleplay and a lot more personal enjoyment out of it for myself and others - which is really the goal.
After having rped for a long time, looking back at characters/situations/rps I wrote years ago, I often know I could have done a better job expressing them now or maybe even made the entire experience of that rp more interesting for me and people I rped with because of how I've grown over time. I think that's great and a wonderful measure of improvement! I also think that continuing to critically look at both character and writing really allow for that improvement to flourish.
I'm not pushing to improve my writing or characters or anything like that for the sake of other people's criticism, but over the years I've found being able to convey my characters and the situation's they're in in different, more multi-faceted lights as well as to create more dynamic rp and situations that I might've struggled with before.
This is about personal criticism and critique, though, not others. Ultimately if you don't like what someone's doing with rp (and honestly, I think people are perfectly allowed to feel this way) just don't rp with those people if something really bothers you.
Elitism isn't really in play here - or shouldn't be - when talking about self evaluation. Nobody's ever done growing as a writer and nobody should be in some ivory tower above less experienced players.
