I mostly just built up mine as a reflex. I treated it as a writing exercise to help brainstorm for myself, and if it gained interest from others or appreciation for its format, that was fine with me. Back when I did forum RP, my character sheets had similar amounts of bloated background and bio details, so it's essentially force of habit for me. If I start writing on something that interests me, I can easily lose track of several hours just rambling. My posts on this board are evidence enough of that.Â
The tl;dr of it is that essentially, the wiki is part leisure, part reference guide, part advertisement, part style demonstrator, part interview... there's a lot of parts, but basically for me it's all those things. The rest of my post is just elaboration. All you need to know is that if your wiki succeeds in entertaining you or others, and is useful to you in any way, whether it's improving your writing or gathering other RPers to you, it has served its purpose. Before that things like stylistic consideration or level of detail are immaterial.
I come from a pretty different environment than a lot of RPers in terms of forum culture, and there was never any real fear of spoiling something because the basic assumption was that RP was collaborative writing, rather than acting or competition. Thus a certain degree of transparency was necessary; even to enter an RP thread, a person needed to draft a character sheet that supplied sufficient information to the GM to convince them that they could free a slot for you. You didn't need to spoil absolutely everything, but the basic concept of your character was almost always bare for everyone to see, and if you planned anything outrageous the GM was supposed to know and would work with you behind the scenes if they felt it fit their story. Nobody meta-gamed, period. There wasn't an atmosphere of paranoia. Generally players trusted each other, and many players were welcome to participate in a variety of events, despite clear differences between writing and storytelling proficiency. There was rarely any sense of rivalry or dispute over style or what kind of character was appropriate, since the GM decided these things. Still, there were clear favorites due to visibility and style. Obviously this is the result of playing in a small, intimate community, but there was never the xenophobia that accompanies these either. It's a cliche, but because of our clear channels of communication, we were able to entangle our characters' backgrounds and work together to move in the direction we wanted to for mutual aid. Also, there was never a sense that they were humoring you, or harbored secret disdain. We were all amateurs, and feeling superior was pointless.
Considering all these things, I can see why showing most of the character's backstory is probably irregular with FFXIV RP. There is an update coming, and I'm probably going to spoiler a lot of it for brevity's sake, but also to allow others to show as little or as much as they feel they ought to see. That being said, I wrote my wiki with the intention of being used, both for myself and for others. I write it to organize my thoughts and have a reference sheet to work with when I forget things, and I am quite forgetful. I come up with additional material for people to work with in RP to cover gaps in the lore, and to give scenarios and background info that will be useful to myself and others. I give people the benefit of the doubt to not know about things that are obscure logged on my wiki, particularly aspects of Virara's background. (Though I still appreciate surprising people, so I did keep some details closed.) Though I get the feeling it generally only gets brief glances from most people, I want to entertain them even with my wiki like a lot of the wiki (Mostly for now inactive characters, sadly) did when I was thinking of getting back into RP. It was a successful enticement for me to play with them, so I definitely think regardless of the style, an appealing wiki serves that purpose at the least.
Most important to me is that the wiki should encapsulate all the major ideas and themes I want to explore with my character on some level, or at least hint at them. There should be the basis for almost all decisions my character makes and elements of my character's ongoing plot within. That is why I often say I don't do any RP frivolously as I'm always pursuing some kind of agenda, whether it's to gather more people to her, or to foreshadow future events, or just to display elements of her personality that hint at her prior years of life.Â
Another detail that shows my bias though, is that I don't really believe in "immersion," as I see it as a catchall phrase describing a wide variety of subjective factors that a player likes about a story or narrative. Usually it centers around details that "take you out of a story," so it means that something specific to your tastes disrupted your suspension of disbelief. You see something that doesn't make sense to you personally and it distracts you. While useful in determining how to play with notches and levers to make the perfect toy for your collaborator at the time, I personally am skeptical of how useful a term it is for evaluating anything but your ability to appeal to that specific RP partner. I really try hard to never seriously use soundbite phrases when critiquing. You know the ones, you see them online all the time. "Cringeworthy," "edgy," "immersive," "forced." These qualifiers all share one thing in common, which is no two people will have the same barometer for what qualifies as the qualifier.
But it does demand a certain degree of respect; you're working with others, and pushing or pulling them too much will ruin their experience as much as it will ruin yours. Becoming aware of those boundaries is something a wiki can be a useful tool for. You get a feel for a potential partner's style before you even play with them. Writing a public work is simultaneously intimate and public; you write as if you are addressing one person, but you also are writing for a crowd, and it is impossible to satisfy a crowd fully. I've always been able to enjoy something as a consumer who takes the story as the author wishes me to understand it, and at the same time critique it from an arm's length. A lot of people take the concept very seriously, so I do my best to satisfy their individual tastes, so that they're not distracted by elements of my wiki, or my in-game RP, that they can't ignore.
The tl;dr of it is that essentially, the wiki is part leisure, part reference guide, part advertisement, part style demonstrator, part interview... there's a lot of parts, but basically for me it's all those things. The rest of my post is just elaboration. All you need to know is that if your wiki succeeds in entertaining you or others, and is useful to you in any way, whether it's improving your writing or gathering other RPers to you, it has served its purpose. Before that things like stylistic consideration or level of detail are immaterial.
I come from a pretty different environment than a lot of RPers in terms of forum culture, and there was never any real fear of spoiling something because the basic assumption was that RP was collaborative writing, rather than acting or competition. Thus a certain degree of transparency was necessary; even to enter an RP thread, a person needed to draft a character sheet that supplied sufficient information to the GM to convince them that they could free a slot for you. You didn't need to spoil absolutely everything, but the basic concept of your character was almost always bare for everyone to see, and if you planned anything outrageous the GM was supposed to know and would work with you behind the scenes if they felt it fit their story. Nobody meta-gamed, period. There wasn't an atmosphere of paranoia. Generally players trusted each other, and many players were welcome to participate in a variety of events, despite clear differences between writing and storytelling proficiency. There was rarely any sense of rivalry or dispute over style or what kind of character was appropriate, since the GM decided these things. Still, there were clear favorites due to visibility and style. Obviously this is the result of playing in a small, intimate community, but there was never the xenophobia that accompanies these either. It's a cliche, but because of our clear channels of communication, we were able to entangle our characters' backgrounds and work together to move in the direction we wanted to for mutual aid. Also, there was never a sense that they were humoring you, or harbored secret disdain. We were all amateurs, and feeling superior was pointless.
Considering all these things, I can see why showing most of the character's backstory is probably irregular with FFXIV RP. There is an update coming, and I'm probably going to spoiler a lot of it for brevity's sake, but also to allow others to show as little or as much as they feel they ought to see. That being said, I wrote my wiki with the intention of being used, both for myself and for others. I write it to organize my thoughts and have a reference sheet to work with when I forget things, and I am quite forgetful. I come up with additional material for people to work with in RP to cover gaps in the lore, and to give scenarios and background info that will be useful to myself and others. I give people the benefit of the doubt to not know about things that are obscure logged on my wiki, particularly aspects of Virara's background. (Though I still appreciate surprising people, so I did keep some details closed.) Though I get the feeling it generally only gets brief glances from most people, I want to entertain them even with my wiki like a lot of the wiki (Mostly for now inactive characters, sadly) did when I was thinking of getting back into RP. It was a successful enticement for me to play with them, so I definitely think regardless of the style, an appealing wiki serves that purpose at the least.
Most important to me is that the wiki should encapsulate all the major ideas and themes I want to explore with my character on some level, or at least hint at them. There should be the basis for almost all decisions my character makes and elements of my character's ongoing plot within. That is why I often say I don't do any RP frivolously as I'm always pursuing some kind of agenda, whether it's to gather more people to her, or to foreshadow future events, or just to display elements of her personality that hint at her prior years of life.Â
Another detail that shows my bias though, is that I don't really believe in "immersion," as I see it as a catchall phrase describing a wide variety of subjective factors that a player likes about a story or narrative. Usually it centers around details that "take you out of a story," so it means that something specific to your tastes disrupted your suspension of disbelief. You see something that doesn't make sense to you personally and it distracts you. While useful in determining how to play with notches and levers to make the perfect toy for your collaborator at the time, I personally am skeptical of how useful a term it is for evaluating anything but your ability to appeal to that specific RP partner. I really try hard to never seriously use soundbite phrases when critiquing. You know the ones, you see them online all the time. "Cringeworthy," "edgy," "immersive," "forced." These qualifiers all share one thing in common, which is no two people will have the same barometer for what qualifies as the qualifier.
But it does demand a certain degree of respect; you're working with others, and pushing or pulling them too much will ruin their experience as much as it will ruin yours. Becoming aware of those boundaries is something a wiki can be a useful tool for. You get a feel for a potential partner's style before you even play with them. Writing a public work is simultaneously intimate and public; you write as if you are addressing one person, but you also are writing for a crowd, and it is impossible to satisfy a crowd fully. I've always been able to enjoy something as a consumer who takes the story as the author wishes me to understand it, and at the same time critique it from an arm's length. A lot of people take the concept very seriously, so I do my best to satisfy their individual tastes, so that they're not distracted by elements of my wiki, or my in-game RP, that they can't ignore.
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AV by Kura-Ou
Wiki (Last updated 01/16)
My Balmung profile.
AV by Kura-Ou
Wiki (Last updated 01/16)
My Balmung profile.
