One of my clearest memories is back on Warcraft when I had my brief RP career there, waiting 45 minutes for someone to write a pose that took up ten or eleven full emotes to get through due to the character cap. It was almost all fluff, fairly repetitive, I was annoyed but kept moving. His character’s partner did the same so it took nearly an hour and a half for me to even be able to play.
Sure, I thought. They’re setting the scene in this imaginary place we are in. Irking but at least just the first pose.
The second round took even longer and they just ended up referencing most of the same things again, and that was pretty much the moment my Warcraft RP career died and my attitude toward people who claimed that longer writing meant better writing changed forever to the negative.
Combine this with an attempt by a lot of people to carefully address and keep alive every single conversation thread in the previous pose and make sure everything raised gets addressed, it can get exhausting.
I suspect this is part of the reason I bounce off of certain styles of games, posing and scene structures. In a collaborative work, dialogue, action and pacing are the three key elements, much more so than talking about how the wind rustles the leaves of the plants on the shelf a dozen times.
So, all that to say, I think the literate/semi-literate labels are actively harmful, not to mention insultingly inaccurate. When collaboration becomes a performative display at how good you are at writing with yourself, that’s just egotistical masturbation.
