A sort of rambling commentary by Deborah Pickett
I am not a roleplayer. Nor, probably, will I ever be a roleplayer. I imagine that I don't have the genetic makeup for it. Somewhere or other in the human genome there is a sequence of DNA that scientists will someday label "unknown," with a footnote that it seems to cause a tendency to be quirky, a social misfit, and particularly partial to the colour black. That is the roleplayer gene, and I do not have it.
Not that I am trying to typecast roleplayers here. Roleplayers are pretty good at recognising typecasting. They do it every time they play a troll with a bad accent. But part of the humour of watching people roleplaying is seeing that typecasting turned on its head - for instance, giving the troll a French accent ("Oui, Madame, you may cross mah bridge, but ferst you must recite all seven verses of La Marseillaise"). Or something, in any case. They say that roleplaying isn't a spectator sport, and that is probably true. Still, there's a strange fascination in watching my friends become totally different people. It's addicting, in a bizarre sort of way.
I've been hanging around MURP for eight years now. That probably puts me in the category of "Old Fart Who Should Have Left University By Now". Actually, I'm in the much worse category of "Student Turned Staff". For me there is no escape from Monash. So I hang around my old familiar stomping grounds. Mostly I've watched the social dynamics of MURP from the outside, never getting involved in all the rumours and relationships, or perhaps the most important of all, rumours about relationships.
So what the hell am I, the archetype of Non-Playing Characters, doing writing about my experience of MURP when I haven't even really experienced it? Well, chances are if you're reading this, you have experienced MURP "properly", from the inside, and chances are also pretty good that this is the only way you have experienced it. You're missing as much of the picture than I am. Do you really know how the world at large perceives MURP? Do you care? No, probably not, and that is part of what makes MURP MURP.
(Did I really just write "MURP MURP"? Can't you just imagine that being a line for the Frog Prince? "`MURP MURP,' he croaked to the princess." But I digress.)
It's this kind of mind-your-own-business-and-I'll-mind-mine type attitude that I saw in many MURP members that initially drew me to it. Also it was because a bunch of my friends from school gravitated there, probably for much the same reasons as me. They, and I, were hardly normal in the Grand Societal Scheme. (Though I did get voted "Most Normal MURP Person of 1993", and then "Most Bizarrely Abnormal MURP Person of 1994", which is a coup I will probably never repeat. No one would be more surprised than me if I did.) But being normal in MURP was the exception.
It was just this kind of apathetic acceptance of anybody and anything that was MURP's strongest asset. Anyone could be part of the group, you didn't have to roleplay well, hell, you didn't have to roleplay at all, all that was required of you was that you be you.
At least, that's how it was in those heady early days. We'd form a large group of people upstairs in the Union Building, pretty much where we congregate today, and no matter how crowded the room was, there would always be a safe person-free buffer zone around us. Everyone knew to stay away from us, because we were weird. The boundary between MURP and non-MURP was as starkly obvious as that clear strip of carpet.
Within MURP, the boundaries were pretty clear too. You were either a member of MURP because you roleplayed, or you were a member of MURP because your boyfriend roleplayed. MURP has had a tradition of "Roleplayer Girlfriends". Now, the boundaries are not so obvious, and those Roleplayer Girlfriends sometimes roleplay themselves. We old-timers shake our head at this and make tut-tut noises, but it isn't really a bad thing, it's just that we have become set in our ways.
Which is odd, because MURP members have always been receptive to new ideas. In fact we are renowned for it. One member dyes their hair black, so does someone else. One member gets their tongue pierced, so does someone else. One member gets a sex change, so does someone else. It was starting to get ridiculous.
It's not surprising that all of this copy-cat behaviour caused just a little resentment. We fell into what future MURP historians will no doubt call the "Dark Ages", by which I mean that everyone wore black. Black is apparently a very popular colour in role playing circles, and being married to a Canadian I have become aware that black is also a very popular colour in Melbourne in general. So it's hardly a shock that I stand out as about the only MURP member to routinely wear pink and pale blue. Not that I am calling all MURP members Goths. Heaven forbid, for I would no doubt be ostracised and have evil rumours spread about me if I did.
Speaking of rumours, as a sort of external viewer I have been privy to rather a large number of them over the years. Some of them were obviously true, and some were . . . well, perhaps "privy" is the appropriate term after all. I'd recount some of the funnier ones here, but the sad fact is that my brain does not remember any of them. It's a terrible affliction for a MURP member to be allergic to rumour-mongering, but it is the cross I bear and it has probably helped me over the years to gain something of a reputation for impartiality. But in reality, in my own MURPish way, I don't care about the rumours. It's the people that matter.
Most of the people I remember from my earliest days at MURP have moved on. They have either become too normal, or frighteningly enough, not normal enough, for MURP. All we have to remember them by are artifacts they left behind, such as the fabled MURP edition of Talisman. But new blood has come in to replace the old, and MURP slowly changes. I doubt it will always be the way I remember it. In many ways, it already isn't. That's all right, eventually I will probably move on too. MURP will have new Old Farts to replace me, to remember different things, different people, and above all, a different MURP. You could be the next Old Fart. Remember that next time you find yourself humming La Marseillaise.