((In Real Life))
The easiest way to say something without dropping character was to do this:
ShadowBlade54644: ((Says something in real life))
So that was IRL. Any actual communications between Muns.
A Mun is the actual person behind the screen name. For instance I would have been Kevin-Mun. In many cases, this was the most I knew of the real person behind the people I was RPing with.
I never really though too hard about it at the time of AIM RP because it was clear what it meant, but out of curiosity I looked it up on Wikipedia, and it comes from the word Mundane. It even stated that this was used in text based roleplaying, with no particular reference to us, but it was still amusing to me. Of course we couldn't have been the only ones to use this terminology but to me it still feels like it was just ours.
In a sense, knowing my peers almost exclusively in character blurred the lines of reality for me. I knew that there was real people in a chair somewhere interacting with me through text, but I didn't know them at all. I purely knew the character that they were playing though. Strangely, the people I knew the least were the ones who played characters that mine had romances with.
Looking back on those types of things, it seems very strange. Who knows who some of them may actually have been, and from time to time I'm curious about that.
If it had not been for the return of DrUbAcCa, I don't know if I'd have joined the RP in Gaming Chat with Darrian and Deedlit, but even before I was in Gaming Chat, I was certainly RPing with her. Maybe that was what made it seem as though I had to involve myself.
DrUbAcCa was the bounty I'd had during the days of AOL's "Pilot's Downtime" RP chatroom, long before the Gaming Chat thing came together. It was a quick loss against an experienced roleplayer. A friend and myself had hunted her down, but we didn't know that it was a female. I believe that our posts were voided on that basis. We were attacking a man, and she wasn't one, so she trounced us quickly and escaped.
I had again forgotten it was a woman when I found her on AIM right before the time I'd started RPing in Gaming Chat. I tracked her down in an IM window with the intent to finish what I'd started in Pilot's Downtime years before.
I reintroduced myself, and she had remembered the altercation from years before. She explained her position at the time, and it had turned out that the bounty that had been placed on her head was by a jealous ex-boyfriend. I apologized and she accepted. Soon after I stumbled upon Gaming Chat, and fought Darrian Nightshade.
After the fight, I returned to DrUbAcCa, wounded and hurting. She cleaned me up, decided to be in love with me and so we were an item. So, I was 15, and having my first true in-character experience with cyber-sex... sort of. Cyber sex by proxy perhaps? After all, it was in character. For all I knew DrUbAcCa was some married woman in real life, or even a man. With a character between us, and no knowledge of who the person on either end of the keyboard was, did it really matter?
I can only assume that there are videogames now that render this type of thing graphically, and it seems ridiculous, but something about typing it out made it somewhat personal.
It was validating though. I had a character unique to the current AIM RP establishment, a reputation as someone who took shit from nobody, and a beautiful woman on my arm. The world of AIM RP was my oyster, as as it would turn out, it truly was... at least for a little while.