Second Roleplay Childhood

[Astaroth]

I used to be the guy running all the really gritty, dark, high-concept games. Things with lots of nuance and complex ideas. But now I'm nearing my 17th year of online roleplaying, and I find myself drifting in another direction.

All of the ideas that sound fun now are anime-esque bullshit, fandom RP, vampires and werewolves, school RP, chat roleplay, and all the other crap that I did when I was NEW to roleplaying. And it feels exciting again, in a way I haven't gotten excited about RP since long before I took a hiatus (I was off of Iwaku for nearly a year until recently).

Is this just a natural cycle? Am I just too old/busy for investing in something complicated?

What do YOU guys like to play? How did you get started, and how long have you been playing? Have you hit YOUR second RP childhood yet?

 

[SamIO]

My take on it: Our muses are fickle! A lot of our desires are so whimsical as to lead us into intense bouts of obsession followed by long periods of disinterest. It's part of why it's so difficult to maintain roleplays with certain writers, and easier with others. But more to the point, it's also part of the reason why we experience growth. With all these phases of interest, we are forced to explore things which we previously wouldn't. This expands our field of view until, sometimes, eventually we start seeing some of our old interests in a new light. They are something new and fascinating, yet we have all these memories that inspire even more confidence in them (or, perhaps, just the opposite?), and that, I think, is why this happens. :3

 

[LogicfromLogic]

(I have to say Ozz, every time I see your text I'm a bit gruff. I'm colourblind and cannot see your texts very well XD)

Is this just a natural cycle? Am I just too old/busy for investing in something complicated?

Our tastes change with every passing year. While one year we may absolutely love vampire roleplays, we may find ourselves drifting from them to Mass Effect roleplays and more extravagant and highly detailed stories, and then back to what we used to really like. It's how the human mind works, it doesn't mean that you are getting old, it means that you are either changing or you just have a more relaxed sense of writing now. And there's nothing wrong with that.

What do YOU guys like to play? How did you get started, and how long have you been playing? Have you hit YOUR second RP childhood yet?

As a child, I used to really love soldier roleplays, or ones about Warrior Cats, InuYasha, Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood, old school monsters, Bonanza/old westerns, super heroes, Harry Potter, M*A*S*H and murder mysteries. I'm still into most of those (I don't really get into Warrior Cats as much as I used to), but not as much. I hit my first roleplay childhood as a brash young age of twelve. Now my writing has defiantly become more descriptive and better, but I still look back and enjoy the old times. I actually found this old notebook from middle school to high school that I used to roeplay with my friends with. It was a huge elaborate rp about how we were secretly witches and wizards and never got our letters, so we had to make do with a muggle school.


The grammar is terrible but I love reading it. Makes me yern for the old times.

 

[The Mood is Write]

Honestly? Everything is cyclical in a sense, but that's not a bad thing or a sign of getting 'old'. It's a sign you're still growing, still learning, and that makes you forever young. ;D

For me, I started with simple 'cluster' RPs. Throwing whatever at a setting until a story formed. Since then I've slowly gotten into crazy complex stuff, running whole worlds and controlling things, and then chilling out into being the one playing characters tossed into the worlds of others, and now I'm doing a bit of both, AND some 'cluster' RPs, because variety is the spice of life, and I've come to terms with the fact that RP isn't about feeling elite or like you're top shit. It's about having fun however makes sense on a given day! =D

 

[Blighted_Agent]

1. Hard to say without knowing your schedule, but yes, lack of free time might mean it's hard to always set aside time for something very elaborate. I do think it's cyclical - eventually (assuming you find the free time that you currently lack) you'll start craving something a little more complex.

2. I'm down with whatever, I guess? I've experienced both light-hearted and super-serious RPs. At this point it might be 10 years or so? I'm not even sure if I've left the first one, let alone started the second, haha.

 

[Brovo]

Is this just a natural cycle?

Ye--

Oh. Another necro'd thread? When does it end?!?!

Guess I'll answer more seriously anyway: Yes. It's a natural biological cycle actually, it happens on multiple levels of the human brain and it differs from person to person actually. I'll do my best to explain it, but I'm not a scientist, so... Take what I say with a grain of salt. If you want to learn the nitty gritty of how the human brain works with emotions, here's 18 pages tl;dring neurobiology, it's neat shit, but pretty thick reading.

Basically, the human brain uses various chemicals (ex: Oxytocin, Serotonin, Dopamine, et cetera) & various parts of the brain (ex: The Amygdala) to regulate your emotional states. However, because emotions are chemical compounds, they are regulated in cycles which are affected by a variety of stimuli, though most prominently genetic and environmental. (Ex: Females genetically have stronger emotional swing cycles because it's connected to their sexual reproductive system more strongly than in males. When a person hears a loud noise from an unknown entity, the amygdala kicks in and starts the fight-or-flight fear cycle, et cetera.) If an emotion was not properly regulated in a cycle, you would run the risk of overdosing on a variety of chemicals and suffering catastrophic brain failure. As it stands, there are disorders directly related to the brain failing to appropriately control its own chemical levels and thus causing a loss of rational faculties. (Ex: PTSD.)

However, because we evolved in an extremely harsh world, our brains did evolve a unique capacity for getting used to environmental stimuli. This is why when you watch a movie, if you see a jump scare, it might surprise you the first time, less the second much, less the third time, et cetera, until it has no effect. This is also why our more primitive cousins in medieval societies didn't express the same kind of outrage at the brutality of their lives that we would express today: They grew up in that environment surrounded by that extreme state, so their brains adjusted and got used to it, and thus altered the situational states which triggered certain spikes in emotions, or activity in certain regulatory parts of the brain.

This also means that when you're seeking entertainment, unless you're some oddball fanatic, you will take breaks from time to time and switch to different types of media, or engage in stories which trigger different emotional responses. The same evolved capacity to get used to a set of environmental stimuli in order to lower stress in the brain also inundates us toward particular forms of entertainment. Meaning that sometimes you may want to watch a happy story, binge watch them, get bored and switch to dark stories, binge watch them, get bored and go back to light stories, et cetera. When entertainment becomes normal, it becomes trite, and it no longer excites, and thus it loses its purpose.

That being said, the emotional cycles in each person's brain differ, and the interpretations of works differ from person to person. There is no universally understood, singular, "motion" sort to speak for these cycles. They do, however, affect entertainment consumption habits, as they're a built-in mental survival mechanism to cope with more advanced emotions than most creatures likely possess, to prevent us from, say, committing mass suicide when we're in a shitty situation.