[SnowTroll]

I really don't think this statement is an accurate one. It's not the text transmission aspect of roleplaying that people find weird, creepy, or stupid. It's the actual act of playing make believe, whether it's done through text over the internet, by a group of geeky guys sitting around a table rolling dice, or by a group of even geekier guys dressing up in constumes, talking in fake accents, and running around in a park on the weekend.

When we send text messages, that's just an e-mail. An electronic text conversation. It's not so different from a phone call, just computerized. I, a real person, am sending you, a real person, a communication containing inforamtion I, the real person, want you, the real person, to know. Roleplaying isn't an offshoot of that, nor a natural extension we can expect to see from that. I'd buy that people would think that online chat rooms are pretty logically related to text messaging. That's just another type of communication. But the second you throw in acting like fictional characters in a fantasy world and typing as if we're them, it gets weird to people.

Even actors who play roles for a living get a break. Because a) It's a productive job they're getting paid for, and b) They're not really "getting into" it, just going through a script someone else wrote. As soon as we get to the part where rpg players are just making stuff up together and improvising without a script, not as part of an acting warm-up for a real life job, we're suddenly weird geeks with a strange hobby. The part where we really get into it and aren't just doing it because we have to to pay the bills seems to bother people, and more generally, so does the part where we're all getting together to pretend something with no real benefit (Melopene might be on to something with the intangible aspect), just for fun, like we're children playing with sticks and treehouse forts.