Quote:Write 600 words or more on something about anything in the league that interests you. It could be related to statistics, a league issue that you take seriously, or a niche part of history that doesn’t fit neatly into either of the above categories. This must be directly related to the league, so don’t wax 600 words about your team’s participation on a Werewolf server or something.
This is going to sound like an esoteric topic to talk about, but as I keep thinking about what I want to do for the offseason task this season, my mind keeps going back to this singular topic: where is the roleplay in the ISFL? When I first saw the r/nfl thread advertising the existence of the ISFL a few months ago, I was sold the premise that this was a football based roleplay, an idea that I was extremely interested in. I've been doing forum roleplays for basically as long as I've been on the internet, for twenty plus years. It's a hobby that is very much near and dear to me, as I enjoy the art of writing and trying to tell interesting stories that my friends and other internet strangers (hopefully) want to read. To me, there's nothing quite like pouring my heart out to make a small short story and hearing the positive feedback of people who felt some kind of emotion when reading it. Even if it is as simple as "hey, I really liked that piece", the idea that my passion for storytelling made a positive impact on that other person enough that they felt like they had to take time out of their day to inform me of it... it makes me feel valued in a way that I don't often do in my own life.
When I first entered the league, I tried to channel that kind of energy in my media. I wrote. A lot. This is not the first time I've used Akane in a roleplay before, so I ended up taking quite a few details from other roleplays I was in and trying to make them fit in a universe that is far more mundane. I even took one of my friend's OCs and, with a slight name change (actually using one of her assumed names in one scene and treating it as if it was her actual name), turned her into my character's agent just to make sure that I had a consistent voice to bounce off of Akane. Point is, I came in with a vague outline of where I wanted Akane's story to go, and my plan was to then use the results of the simulation and other events of the roleplay to fill in the details. But the point is, that I treated Akane as an actual character. I had an idea for a story to tell with her, and I tried crafting both traditional prose narrative, along with snippets of in-universe media, to try to sell her that she was more than just a dot on the field, but a living breathing person with her own aspirations and personality.
There are a select few people who tried doing that too. In particular, I have to commend Fangorn, who managed to turn an out of character dispute between him and his team into an inspiration for some in-universe press conferences. In retrospect, you always walk a fine line doing something like that and I wouldn't advise doing that willy nilly as real emotions are often tied into these things, but as a neutral observer I was entertained and I felt some investment in how the Running Back room in Orange County was resolved. I also am aware some of my other fellow S50 rookies put out in-universe pieces of varying stripes, especially around the prospect bowl, which I do appreciate. But the vast, and I do mean vast, amount of media that gets made for the ISFL tends to either be out of character analysis, or this middle ground where people play exaggerated versions of their own personalities. In either case, the world of the ISFL is treated less like a world, and more of a thing, a sort of device for football simulation.
Before I continue any further I want to stress, in the strongest possible terms, that not every media posts needs to be in-character per se. In fact, people who write about the going ons of the simulation, either through creating mock drafts, talking about pivotal historic moments, or just giving commentary on the direction of the season, helps tremendously in giving context. The ISFL is a large behemoth, and I just finished my first full season in it. I freely admit I just do not have the history or context for a lot of things about the league, and I rely a lot on the writing of other people (especially on the wiki) to give me a solid foundation of what the universe is like and the history that came before me.
But it does, to me, feel like more people focus on the league as a simulation of football, and less as a roleplay, and I do find that to be a bummer. I wish more people cared about their character beyond their statline, and would do more to develop them as characters. I wish people would be willing to write a bit more about their characters outside of the context of what they do on the gridiron, and instead focus more on their personal struggles, goals, and development. And most importantly, I wish more people would care more about the fiction of the universe. One of the things I always try to stress in my writing is that there is an actual world that exists outside of the games. Of course most thing are going to be facing football in some aspect, because that is the angle that we're exploring this world together, but like, at the same point, there's more to the football world irl than the games themselves. Like to give personal examples, I've talked about Akane being a closet Silverback fan growing up, as much as she had a team, to the point where she had a Blaine Falco jersey in her high school wardrobe. Many people might have expected Akane to just suddenly switch to Osaka because the team recently moved in Japan, but no, people don't normally switch their fandoms overnight, and Akane had more personal reasons to like New York other than geography (its the branding, for reference. Akane always has liked gorillas and other primates). It's small details like that, which makes the universe feel alive and lived in, and what I feel is often missing in a lot of media pieces.
I don't really know what to do about this issue, if there is really anything to do about it. The ISFL, rightfully, prides itself as being a very open space, where people can play whatever they want. It's kind of hard to enforce a sort of kayfabe in media spaces when some people are rocking the likeness of video game characters and other fundamentally jokey character concepts. At the end of the day, the ISFL isn't meant to be a roleplay centric league, and I don't think it'd be a popular move to shift it to become one. But, for example, we have rules about automatic x2 media bonuses for mock drafts, because enough people have collectively decided that is the type of content that wants to be prioritized. While I think that a x2 bonus to all prose writing might be a bit overkill and could potentially create more problems than it solves (mocks only happen in one part of the season, for example, while in-character prose could be done whenever. It'd be inherently imbalanced), I think there could be more of a push to try to create in-character storylines in the media space. A constant x2 every week would be overkill, but maybe there could be a singular week where people are encouraged to write in-character, as an experiment.
On a user end, I also think we should be encouraging more collaborative writing. Again, coming from a culture of forum RPs, its actually pretty rare for me to just write thousands of words completely by myself with zero input from other people. It's been certainly useful in terms of me having an actual plot structure to my posts, but without being able to bounce off of my fellow RPers, some of the magic of the hobby is lost. I've casually talked about my frustration of lack of RP on this site, and some of the voices more sympathetic to my arguments have talked about collaboration, but so far that has only ever led to idle chatter. There's been no movement towards actually sitting down and having Akane interact with other characters. I think that's a travesty; shared plotlines I think would go a long way to developing the fiction of the world and making it feel more lived. It also shares the burden of the long form posting it encourages between users, rather than me having to create these multithousand word posts by myself lol. Perhaps having some kind of league space where media writers can sit down, spitball ideas, and work out collabs would go a long way in helping the RP side of things flourish, without necessarily needing to bribe people to do so.
Overall, I admit again, I'm probably in the minority in actually finding this a problem in the first place. I don't want to force the league to change itself just for my own benefit, when it'd probably alienate a lot of others in the process. But at the same point, with some of the ideas I floated around, I don't think its impossible for the HO to do some token actions to encourage more roleplaying. You don't need to change the soul of the site to encourage more people to care about the fiction.