Yahoo! Role-Playing
Role-Playing in Yahoo! came AbOUT in many different ways with many different players and goals. Back in 1997, there were clusters of gamers who gathered around Yahoo! Clubs which offered a free message board, chatroom, and member list that promoted play by email games as well as play by chat games (even if they weren't called that at the time). Over time, Yahoo expanded and in late 1997 had chatrooms for all users to mingle within and in the different sections the players frequented they made their own rules. The first of these many groups was named simply "Kelindils Site" which was run by a core group of players and placed Yahoo roleplaying on a path that it could not turn off it. Thereafter, roleplaying in this manner was referred to as "text-based". In time, Kelindil's site lost momentum and its management was taken over by another member of its "staff". (see "Ayenee.Org" below).
During the Kelindil era, the need for a name for the realm emerged. One regular player under the forum name "Aglaranna_" suggested the phonetic transcription of the abbreviation A & E (for Arts & Entertainment), so the word "Ayenee" was born. Two or three years thereafter, Ayenee as a community was split into two separate predominant paths, one being "Ayenee.Org," handled by those to whom the original handlers of the Kelindil site had entrusted. The other was "Ayenee.Com," a splinter site that was larger but less governed.
However, other realms did exist in other areas of Yahoo chatting. For instance, in Teen was Tenaria, in Arts & Entertainment (now Entertainment & Arts) they had Ayenee, in Games was Eden, and so on and on. In nearly every default section of Yahoo Chat there was at least a singular group or realm that was considered the main body of Role players for that section. Adult categories had it's own roleplaying realm, located in the Adult/Role Playing category. Mostly catering to the over 18 crowd, the majority of these plots involved Gor, [...] and Fringe groups such as Furries. As such, most roleplayers shunned this category.
Some realms never made the ProgresS expected and other realms would take their place with over a thousand members at their peak. Sometimes, there were several realms that occupied the same areas but with different rules. For example in Science there was both Ecniecs and Mordor. In Games there was Hell and Eden. Ultimately however with Yahoo's decision, in the early 2000s ( June 18, 2005 to be exact), to stop user-created rooms, Yahoo roleplaying faded from view and took its place on webforums. This change, while harmful to the Yahoo chat roleplaying community and the "unruled" Ayenee, helped the organized Ayenee sites because it allowed players to take refuge once more in another place- especially one they were familiar with.
Role-players were never limited to any one single realm however, and a player could have a few characters in each of the realms, or they could even have characters travel from one realm to another (similar to Knights traveling from one kingdom/realm to another). However, whatever realm they were in, the rules/guidelines were the ones which took precedence, and in Ayenee the Order of the High Knights of Ayenee enforced these. Before this, the Justicars of the Ayenee boards determined rule infractions. In Eden, the Eden Guardians.
IMany realms were devised or created by players or their associates for Yahoo! Role-Playing purposes. However, it was certainly the case that many chatters who role-played did not adhere to realm guidelines or rules. Many, indeed, knew not of their existence, or simply chose to ignore what they felt were glorified cliques. The very freeform nature of Yahoo! Role-Playing—the fact that anyone can log-in and play by their own merits—has remained both the foremost charm of Yahoo! Role-Playing, and the bane of many a players’ attempt to structuralize.
Not all communities have implied worldly or realm structure. One such community was E&A Profiles (now FantasyRole.org), which took the approach of appealing to all gamers of the Yahoo! Entertainment and Arts section irrespective of their characters’ realm or origin. But, again, this as with all institutions is viewed with distaste by players who do not want to embed their Out of Character persona in a community, and would rather persevere the raw pursuit of anonymity and escape.
Players bred an impressive array of characters, over vastly differing genres, often spawning unlikely interaction scenarios. Film, comic, movie and game trends tended to influence players to create characters based on each respective medium. For example, it would not have been uncommon to witness a Lord of the Rings or D&D inspired wizard/mage character class interacting with a Star Wars Jedi Master or Sith Lord. Then came OIC.
By the year 2006, almost all Yahoo chatroom roleplaying had faded except for in Japanese Anime, Role Playing Games, and some lingering in Teen(Tenaria). With the constant revisions of its already unstable Messenger "chat applet", and their lackadaisical approach to handling bots, spammers, and online harassment, the environment Yahoo provides has been endlessly criticized by both those who still use it and those who used to.