Introduction
"You'll never get him outta there," pronounced the raven-haired woman relaxing on an overstuffed sofa, filing her long, pointy nails. "Of course, we will - those brainless fiends know nothing of the plan - or our abilities." The elegantly dressed gentleman opened a leather-bound notebook, scribbled a few lines, then passed a note to the woman on the sofa. Her eyes widened and she quickly rose, grabbed her cape, and followed the man out the door. "Let's see how they like a little chemical warfare," he smirked, uncorking a small bottle and placing it on the floor.
A hack novelist's contribution to the net's vanity press? Not exactly. This was a scene enacted on one of the Internet's role-playing arenas, in this case, a vampire game. The players were typing their lines and describing their actions in a chat window, improvising the performance around a vague plot as they went along. This particular role play is based on Vampire: The Masquerade, a popular storytelling game ordinarily conducted in real life, but that has now migrated onto the net with considerable success. Players spend many months developing their online vampire characters and creatively participating in plots of assassination, clan war, kidnapping, and romance.
Because the never-ending plots unfold 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, the players are not always clear about the difference between IC (in character) and OOC (out of character). The theater's conventions require players to type any OOC remarks inside double parentheses, but several have told me that many participants are often neither OOC nor IC. They are somewhere in between, playing a fictionalized role as though it were their real selves, taking the vampire wars, murders, and plots of revenge rather seriously. As one vampire player explained, "Lots of people start out playing something totally different from themselves but most of us can't help bringing our own personalities into the character eventually."
"Without lies humanity would perish of despair and boredom," wrote Anatole France in the 1920s. If the converse is also true and lies bring excitement and joy, we have found one reason for the Internet's allure. The characteristics of the online world trigger a wide assortment of role plays, deceptions, half-truths, and exaggerations, partly because anonymity and the absence of visual and auditory cues allow them, and at the same time insulate us from the consequences. Even when we are not exactly anonymous on the net, the physical distance and low social presence make us feel less inhibited, less likely to be detected, and a little less under our superego's thumb.
Psychological research on patterns of lying suggest humanity is in no danger of perishing. In a diary study, college students reported telling an average of two lies a day. People out of college slowed down a bit, but still reported about one lie a day. Some were the little white lies people tell to avoid hurting another; others, however, were the self-serving lies designed to enhance the impression the person was trying to make.28 Since lying is not exactly a desirable behavior, we can imagine that these people may not have been entirely forthcoming about their lying and may have been underreporting their daily deceptions. They might also have been engaging in a bit of motivated forgetting; it is easier on your self-concept to let memories about misdeeds get a little fuzzy.
Deceptions come in many varieties. A relatively benign form is simple role play, in which you deliberately masquerade as another character and take on a new personality to match. At Mardi Gras, you might sport a Don Juan mask and black cape, and temporarily lose your usual shyness with women. In the online vampire clubs, you may become a debonair and artistic primogen of the Toreador clan, or a feral Nosferatu whose grotesque, animal-like appearance offends even the most tolerant vampires. The key ingredient in this form of lying (assuming you can separate IC from OOC) and the element that makes it fun and relatively harmless compared to other varieties, is that everyone knows it is a mask. The masquerade itself has rigid rules of play, ones we learn very early in life.