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The Success Of The Support Group Meme And The Lessons To Be Learned From It
I have a lot of Thoughts about the recent Support Group RP meme. Here I describe them in a 1800 word post.
So yesterday, someone posted an RP meme at![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
bakerstreet called the Support Group Meme. It was a wildly successful meme, busting through a full seven thousand comments as of the time of writing, and still going strong! I really can't think of any IC meme to get this many comments, ever. I was all over this thing my own self, and spent an hour last night just keeping pace with tags from this meme alone. It's bananas.
But not only is it popular, I and a bunch of other people have noticed that the type of RP going on here is different from what you usually see on memes. Somehow, it sidestepped a bunch of the problems that usually come with open-form fandom RP. Something about this meme was different. And I intend to figure out what, so that it can be replicated.
Whenever discussing meme RP onbakerstreet and elsewhere, a few recurring complaints always show their face.
There are other complaints that come up, of course, but I'd say these are the three major ones I see most often. And the Support Group meme avoided all of them. People were tagging cross-canon all over the place, and tagging people they don't know. Hell, I started a thread as Ken Amada from Persona 3, and I got tagged by not one but two Luke Skywalkers (one canon, one Dark Side). I knew neither of the players, they just saw that the thread suited them and they went for it. That's just one example of the way people were reaching across the canon and medium divides, and tagging total strangers. It happened all over the meme.
Further, it handily avoided the problem of people not tagging each other. While not everybody's thread got a tag, most peoples' did. Often multiple!
Something was clearly different this time. But what?
Even before I started looking critically at the meme and its results, I could tell that something was qualitatively different about the experience compared with most RP memes. I wondered what was so different, and after pondering it for a while I realized something: Nobody was throwing up the standard CHARACTER NAME | CANON | SHIPPING PREFS header on their thread. A lot of my tags, I have absolutely no idea who these characters are. And I found I didn't really care! I didn't need to know who they were to have fun with the threads, so I didn't miss the header.
While I don't think that that difference was, in and of itself, responsible for the success of the meme, I think it's connected. That difference in player difference is a reflection of the difference between this and most other memes.
So, what makes this meme different? I would say that it comes down to one thing: the integration of character and scenario. Most memes are structured as a scenario (or a set of scenarios), into which two or more players may inject their characters. Most players make an effort to incorporate their character into the setting or scenario in question, but the effort is entirely on their end, and after the fact. The scenario is a separate and preconstructed entity from the characters involved.
By comparison, in the Support Group meme, the scenario was constructed by the players themselves in order to suit their character. The provided 'scenario' was in fact a simple template for players to craft their own scenarios with. It rendered the label of character and canon redundant, because now there was a more useful piece of information to put in your subject header: character type. This had a bunch of effects.
Normally, canon and mun familiarity provide that reason. You already know each other and enjoy playing with each other, or you both have a canon in common, and that serves as a reason you can use to justify asking for their time and attention. Unfortunately, that means that threads involving one of those two relationships occur more frequently than those without, leading to problems 1 and 2. But here, features of the characters involved are set at center stage, and that serves as your reason. You see a thread marked 'VILLAINS WHO ALWAYS HAVE TO DO ALL THE DIRTY WORK', and if one of your characters is likewise a villain frequently burdened with all the dirty work, you have that point of commonality to justify your demands on the other player.
Canon and mun familiarity aren't going away or anything; They're still a factor, of course. But they are and always have been a factor that comes into play entirely independently of the meme's scenario. This just adds another layer on top of that.
But when a facet of the character is centerpieced as part of the scenario, as it is in this meme, it ensures that all players start with a bit of knowledge about the character they're tagging. It gives them something to start on, even if they don't know all the details of the other character's history and personality.
I feel that there are three central lessons to be learned from the Support Group meme:
Of course, the ubiquitous header isn't bad in itself. It doesn't hurt anything. But its presence suggests that the meme isn't giving the player anything more important for the player to advertise. As shown on the Support Group Meme, when players are given something fundamental to their character to advertise instead, they do so, with all the good effects described above. I would argue that the ubiquitous meme header is symptomatic of scenarios not properly integrated with characters.
Speaking of...
RNG memes are probably the worst offenders of this. It locks the player into one of a set of prewritten scenarios, usually with very limited flexibility. It also encourages totally disconnecting the character from the scenario by asking and encouraging players to surrender their agency to the whims of a random number generator. I understand their popularity - heck, there's plenty of nights when I feel too lazy to come up with a scene and am willing to just let the RNG decide for me - but I feel that they are a badly flawed model.
We may never see another meme this big and successful; I strongly doubt![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
monkeytailed expected this one to explode like it did. It seemed to hit a sweet spot that a lot of other meme creators have tried and failed to find, and I think that in so doing, it provided an outlet for an appetite that had long gone unsatisfied. Followups are unlikely to engender quite as much noise and excitement, even if they learn from it. But I think that incorporating the principles described above, and using a model where players construct their own scenarios with their characters' motivations and personalities fully integrated, can help prevent some of the common problems seemingly inherent to open RP meme roleplay, and offer players a more rewarding experience as a whole.
Of course, that's all just my perspective. Other people may feel differently. My biggest hope is that the RP community will look at this meme and learn from it, because it clearly has a lot to teach us.
1. Introduction
So yesterday, someone posted an RP meme at
bakerstreet called the Support Group Meme. It was a wildly successful meme, busting through a full seven thousand comments as of the time of writing, and still going strong! I really can't think of any IC meme to get this many comments, ever. I was all over this thing my own self, and spent an hour last night just keeping pace with tags from this meme alone. It's bananas.But not only is it popular, I and a bunch of other people have noticed that the type of RP going on here is different from what you usually see on memes. Somehow, it sidestepped a bunch of the problems that usually come with open-form fandom RP. Something about this meme was different. And I intend to figure out what, so that it can be replicated.
2. What's Wrong With Most Memes?
Whenever discussing meme RP on
bakerstreet and elsewhere, a few recurring complaints always show their face.1. People only tag canonmates.
Homestuck characters tag other Homestucks, Korra characters tag other Korra characters, etc. This is often particularly intense across the so-called Medium Divide between live-action characters and animated characters. The result is that characters from obscure canons or unpopular canons tend to receive few tags, OCs even fewer, and observers often wonder why players don't just go to a fandom-specific Dressing Room if they aren't interested in cross-canon play (you know, if those DRs hadn't been almost entirely supplanted by the rise of open memes). This can be pretty frustrating for people who feel they're not getting tags as a result of this phenomenon.2. People only tag people they know.
Pretty self-explanatory. We've all, I think, seen the complaints about players who don't respond to tags except from their friends. Here, the observer's question is 'why not just take it to a musebox'. There's a hesitance to tag people you don't know, and that leads some memes to be very circular.3. People just don't tag other people.
I can't count how many memes I've seen where the first two or three pages were nothing but people posting an icon with their character's name, and waiting for someone else to respond. Whole pages of empty threads. These are all people who clearly want to RP, but are foiled by other people's hesitance to approach them. Obviously, this ties into numbers one and two.There are other complaints that come up, of course, but I'd say these are the three major ones I see most often. And the Support Group meme avoided all of them. People were tagging cross-canon all over the place, and tagging people they don't know. Hell, I started a thread as Ken Amada from Persona 3, and I got tagged by not one but two Luke Skywalkers (one canon, one Dark Side). I knew neither of the players, they just saw that the thread suited them and they went for it. That's just one example of the way people were reaching across the canon and medium divides, and tagging total strangers. It happened all over the meme.
Further, it handily avoided the problem of people not tagging each other. While not everybody's thread got a tag, most peoples' did. Often multiple!
Something was clearly different this time. But what?
3. What Went Right This Time
Even before I started looking critically at the meme and its results, I could tell that something was qualitatively different about the experience compared with most RP memes. I wondered what was so different, and after pondering it for a while I realized something: Nobody was throwing up the standard CHARACTER NAME | CANON | SHIPPING PREFS header on their thread. A lot of my tags, I have absolutely no idea who these characters are. And I found I didn't really care! I didn't need to know who they were to have fun with the threads, so I didn't miss the header.
While I don't think that that difference was, in and of itself, responsible for the success of the meme, I think it's connected. That difference in player difference is a reflection of the difference between this and most other memes.
So, what makes this meme different? I would say that it comes down to one thing: the integration of character and scenario. Most memes are structured as a scenario (or a set of scenarios), into which two or more players may inject their characters. Most players make an effort to incorporate their character into the setting or scenario in question, but the effort is entirely on their end, and after the fact. The scenario is a separate and preconstructed entity from the characters involved.
By comparison, in the Support Group meme, the scenario was constructed by the players themselves in order to suit their character. The provided 'scenario' was in fact a simple template for players to craft their own scenarios with. It rendered the label of character and canon redundant, because now there was a more useful piece of information to put in your subject header: character type. This had a bunch of effects.
1. It gave people a reason to tag other people.
This is purely anecdotal, but I think one of the reasons why cross-canon tagging and tagging strangers, even in a setting where everyone is literally putting their characters out there for anyone to tag, is difficult comes down to simple social hesitancy to bother people. One feels the need to have a reason to tag someone. Just as you probably feel you need a reason in order to speak to people on the street. It's irrational in this context, but it's there nonetheless.Normally, canon and mun familiarity provide that reason. You already know each other and enjoy playing with each other, or you both have a canon in common, and that serves as a reason you can use to justify asking for their time and attention. Unfortunately, that means that threads involving one of those two relationships occur more frequently than those without, leading to problems 1 and 2. But here, features of the characters involved are set at center stage, and that serves as your reason. You see a thread marked 'VILLAINS WHO ALWAYS HAVE TO DO ALL THE DIRTY WORK', and if one of your characters is likewise a villain frequently burdened with all the dirty work, you have that point of commonality to justify your demands on the other player.
Canon and mun familiarity aren't going away or anything; They're still a factor, of course. But they are and always have been a factor that comes into play entirely independently of the meme's scenario. This just adds another layer on top of that.
2. It ensures that all threads start with some knowledge of the character being tagged.
I'm always a lot more hesitant to go into a thread blind, because I don't know what to post to complement the other character. This is, incidentally, a factor that I think really hurts OCs in the open meme RP scene.But when a facet of the character is centerpieced as part of the scenario, as it is in this meme, it ensures that all players start with a bit of knowledge about the character they're tagging. It gives them something to start on, even if they don't know all the details of the other character's history and personality.
3. It changes the player's criteria when looking for threads to tag.
Instead of looking for characters to tag, players are instead looking for scenarios they feel their characters are well-suited for. It seems like a small difference, but I think it's actually quite a powerful one. It's a total change in the way participants seek out their partners, and the evidence suggests quite strongly that it's one that empowers them to tag people they might not otherwise be willing to.4. What Can We Learn From It
I feel that there are three central lessons to be learned from the Support Group meme:
1. The ubiquitous meme thread header is the enemy.
Shipping prefs have their place, of course, but the character name and canon are useless. That's information that should already be on your journal to begin with, and let's be honest with ourselves: thanks to icons, anybody who is going to tag you because of your character/canon info almost always already knows exactly who you are (unless you're a book character, or are using a PB for some other reason, I suppose, but that's a relatively small portion of the DWRP scene).Of course, the ubiquitous header isn't bad in itself. It doesn't hurt anything. But its presence suggests that the meme isn't giving the player anything more important for the player to advertise. As shown on the Support Group Meme, when players are given something fundamental to their character to advertise instead, they do so, with all the good effects described above. I would argue that the ubiquitous meme header is symptomatic of scenarios not properly integrated with characters.
Speaking of...
2. Integrate character and scenario in your memes.
Instead of providing them with a pre-constructed scenario, provide them with the building blocks with which to build their own scenarios.RNG memes are probably the worst offenders of this. It locks the player into one of a set of prewritten scenarios, usually with very limited flexibility. It also encourages totally disconnecting the character from the scenario by asking and encouraging players to surrender their agency to the whims of a random number generator. I understand their popularity - heck, there's plenty of nights when I feel too lazy to come up with a scene and am willing to just let the RNG decide for me - but I feel that they are a badly flawed model.
3. Encourage players to organize themselves according to meaningful criteria.
I strongly feel that a large part of the meme's success is that it told the players to leave the name of their support group in the header. This one seemingly innocuous decision replaced the mostly-useless standard header with information of real value, and as discussed in section three, the sharing of that information broke down barriers that normally prevent tagging cross-canon and with strangers, and empowered players to make their scenarios their own.5. Conclusion
We may never see another meme this big and successful; I strongly doubt
monkeytailed expected this one to explode like it did. It seemed to hit a sweet spot that a lot of other meme creators have tried and failed to find, and I think that in so doing, it provided an outlet for an appetite that had long gone unsatisfied. Followups are unlikely to engender quite as much noise and excitement, even if they learn from it. But I think that incorporating the principles described above, and using a model where players construct their own scenarios with their characters' motivations and personalities fully integrated, can help prevent some of the common problems seemingly inherent to open RP meme roleplay, and offer players a more rewarding experience as a whole.Of course, that's all just my perspective. Other people may feel differently. My biggest hope is that the RP community will look at this meme and learn from it, because it clearly has a lot to teach us.