So I've always kind of lived under a rock when it comes to beef on this site. I don't really care about it enough to get involved. It seems pretty simple to me that you don't bully people, even if online platforms make it seem less serious and more trivial.

The debate over 'literate roleplaying' has become a sort of petty feud, when it should have remained a debate. So why are we as a community getting so riled up about it? Here are my thoughts:

1. I have been on and off this site for five years now. I love roleplaying, and it can be incredibly rewarding. But I've also noticed that sometimes I can get too sucked in. I get angry when I don't get a role I want, or find my screen time has skyrocketed to something shocking because of the amount of time I've spent needlessly refreshing the notifications button for something to come up.

Honestly, I should have stopped roleplaying and left this site years ago. I'm old enough now, and most people my age would laugh if they found out what this app was for me. It sounds embarrassing to say, but Wattpad is addictive. Usually addictions have their downsides - you get too invested and you realise sometimes it is making you more unhappy than if you went without it. When people are addicted, they can become nasty and vindictive when they wouldn't do any such thing in real life or in their right minds. Reality is distorted online. Things are fed to us through narrow tunnels, and amplified, so they seem a much bigger deal.

I'm sure most of you are lovely people. Just remember to be generous and kind on here too.

2. What does 'literate' actually mean? There is no one answer in a roleplaying context.

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My definition has always been as such:

Someone who writes at the very least half a comment reply, who uses fully formed sentences in a confident and complex style. Each word has its valid place in the reply, and it can be crafted in to something quite beautiful and unique.

For me, it is not about length. I usually prefer both to read and write 3/4 of a comment to 2, rather than any longer. Extra long comments better be really fucking brilliant writing or quite frankly I can't be bothered to read it. Quality over quantity is key.

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So now we've got that out of the way, let's talk about what that means in relation to the debate. It is my preference. It is not right or wrong, and not better than another style that uses proper writing. Some of you might love to spend your time scrolling through 5+ comment responses, but I don't.

Some people reading this will probably call me, based on the above semi-literate. At first even I found this annoyed me a bit. My immediate response was:

"Who the hell are these kids to tell me that I'm not 'literate'? I go to one of the world's top universities and consider myself capable of writing well."

This is the sort of unhelpful, angry response that we need to examine carefully before we press the send button. Quite frankly the university I go to is irrelevant on this website, and it's another example of how we try to place ourselves in a superior position to make us feel more secure.

Now I'm am learning that being thought of by some as semi-literate is absolutely fine. But what you need to be really careful of, both as the receiver and the giver of this label, is that you are not implying the "more literate" style is better.

Superiority is what is upsetting people at the moment.

Let's take a breather and look at some wider sources, since there is no one roleplayer's dictionary. These are taken from the Cambridge English dictionary and the Merriam Webster dictionary.

A. "Literate: able to read and write"

B. "Literate also means having a good education or showing it in your writing"

C. "To be Literate is to be educated and cultured"

A. On the basis of this statement, almost all role-players here are literate rather than illiterate. This is the most widely used meaning of the term. By not deeming some roleplay styles, even if they are more simple as 'non-literate', some may take this to be implying that they are illiterate. Given that roleplaying is based on writing, I think you can understand why people would get offended by this.

B. This is where things start to become a little more blurred. What qualifies as "a good education?" Is it the money that goes in, the grades, the prestige? All of those things have ramifications, and implies an exclusionist attitude. That creates divisions and leads to more problems. Furthermore, your education does not necessarily correlate to the quality of your writing. You could have gone to the best and most prestigious school in the country and got decent grades in your subjects, but that doesn't mean you are a writer.

C. Culture is generally something you explore yourself. It is about broadening your scopes and experiencing a plethora of different things. But there is also a classist undertone in being cultured, as for monetary and social contract reasons it can be reserved for the rich. However, I like the inclusion of culture. It implies continual learning and an appreciation of a wider pool of things. But culture alone does not make one a writer.

3. So, none of these definitions seem good or nuanced enough. We also can't seem to agree on one ourselves, so we need to find another way to talk about the way we roleplay that is not going to be offensive or problematic.

What I think we need is a change of rhetoric. Literate, semi-literate, illiterate is not working for us clearly. But it is still useful to classify your preferences so people know what sort of things they're signing up to. Here is where your input would be useful. What words would you suggest? I'll add them to this list.

Some ideas are:
1. Multiple/ multiple comment responses (multi for short)
Moderate/medium length response roleplay (medi)
Singular/minimum response roleplay for the shortest responses rather than non-literate

2. Long, medium, short

3. Complex, average, basic (I'm not a huge fan of this one because shorter replies can still be complex)

4. Warnings such as 'time consuming' or 'quick responses'

5. What are your thoughts and ideas?

The bottom line at the end of the day is remember to be kind, open and generous with people on here. Online communications are tricky, and apologising needs to be normalised because mistakes are easily made. Peace.