Thinking about in-world introduction profiles?

[Danweel]

Here’s a part of what @Viviane said in that other thread that I think echoes what I was thinking about in terms of our personas:

@Viviane

As CJ said above, the Forum didn’t used to have any sort of “out-of-world” areas at all. When I joined (around the time of the 3rd Assessment/post Fragment 12), the marketing was something similar to an ARG but with more story and less gaming, and given that, it just made the most sense to me to inhabit the Forum as myself, with a couple of little tweaks.

So when thinking about how I wanted to present the “character” of Viviane, I started with the premise that Magiq in the style of the AGP-verse is real, and given that, what might be different about me?

The initial question was, How did I find out about magiq ? Was I a believer or an adept who had known all along that magiq was real? Had I just been hoping for it and then found people in the Mountaineers to confirm that it was? Did I just stumble upon the group thinking it would be a fun game and then discovering it was actually real? Given those possibilities, what background knowledge or experiences would I have that would lead me to believe in the possibility of real magiq? Those were the sorts of things I wrote into my backstory, and that I keep in mind when talking about my experience of magiq in-world.

The next question was (and is) How do you react to Magiq? This is sort of the ongoing question that shapes my in-world interactions. The Monarch Papers at the time I joined was getting pretty serious narratively. The Book had been burned (or “gotten crispy” as someone said), and characters were actually in danger of losing their lives/memories/selves to a very powerful enemy. With that in mind, whenever we made a decision, I would have to think through why I would make the decisions I would make, why I felt like preserving Magiq or revealing secrets or whatever was worth the risk. Like, in this alternate universe what motivates me?

I think the most interesting thing by far has been the continuation of the story after TMP, because I’ve had to think through How would I carry on after those major events? And often times it’s easiest to create a certain amount of continuity between my real-life moods and motivations and my magiqal ones.

Incidentally, I do have trouble caring about my future self (mostly because I have no proper sense of time and limited impulse control), but I see my Magiqal self as very much me personally, in this moment, albeit with a different (and hypothetical) set of possible actions and limitations.

After reading that I also thought about those questions. How do I fit into this world? What brought me to be interacting on the forum? It’s not because I wanted to play an interesting game/help build up a world. I initially came at it wanting an avatar that exists as part of the book. What would the realities of the book - via the site - change about me? That kind of thing.