Play-Bys
So you've just joined an Online Roleplaying site, and you want people to pay attention to you and your unique character. What do you do? The best way to keep other roleplayers from ignoring you is to choose a play-by for your character. Play-bys take an eccentric but benign activity and turn it into something very, very creepy. Play-bys are solid evidence for the theory that people roleplay to escape their pathetic lives.
What are Play-Bys?
Play-bys are models, celebrities, hipsters, and scene kids that roleplayers use to physically represent their characters. Many roleplay sites require members to have play-bys while also listing a 'no perfect characters' rule, making them giant hypocrites. Once a roleplayer selects a play-by for her character, she will mine the internets for photographs of that particular person and molest them with grunge brushes, song lyrics, and whatever pretentious character name the roleplayer dug out of babynames.com. Said roleplayer will post the play-by on her character's profile, and all of the other site's members will ooh and aah over how sexy and cool the character looks. Many internet scholars theorize that the attractiveness of a roleplayer is inversely proportional to the attractiveness of her average character, which means that sites that require or encourage play-bys are overloaded with some of the ugliest women on the planet.
Why So Creepy?
Most roleplay sites are escapist traps, which means that their members force their creations to do everything that they can't do in real life. Roleplayers make their characters have sex, go outside, and even socialize with other people. Many roleplayers have gay and mental illness fetishes and create schizophrenic pretty-boy characters with horrific pasts. Imagine accidentally stumbling onto a high school roleplay site only to find some fatty using your pictures to represent a character who is plowing some man in a back alley. While play-by supporters argue that most people would be flattered to see their pictures being used, anybody without delusional disorder knows that all but the most desperate of attention whores would be horrified to find people associating them with such twisted faggotry.
Play-By Drama
Play-Bys are a massive source of drama in the places that use them. Most roleplays have 'face claim' boards where grubby-fingered roleplayers fight over the celebrities and models they so desperately want to be. A newcomer to a particular site may become butthurt if her favorite scene king's likeness is already being used. Meanwhile, the debate of allow play-bys vs. ban play-bys rages on in the greater roleplay community. Some rational people have banned play-bys from their sites altogether on the grounds that it violates the 'no perfect characters' rule, while others support play-bys on the grounds that they act as a visual aids for their characters. The real reason that they support play-bys, of course, is because they prefer pictures to go along with their textual masturbation-fodder.
Play-Bys and You
If you ever come across a roleplay site that encourages play-by use, here is what you can do:
- Laugh at all the members for being incredibly ugly
- Try to contact the individuals whose pictures are being used and notify them that their pictures were stolen
- Educate the members about the implications of using somebody's image to enact your fantasies
- Exit the site
