her rival. The battle ends when one participant acknowledges defeat or one is judged the victor by an unbiased arbiter after a review of all related posts. In the context of Internet-based role-play, sparring retains its traditional meaning of play or practice combat, but is limited to written interaction. It is different from role-play in that sparring usually contributes little, if nothing, to a story or character development and participants are subject only to the rules of an agreed on role-play fighting system. These fighting systems fall into three categories, speed-based, descriptive, and turn-based. Of these, the former is such that the involved parties seek to outmatch one another via superior typing speed and stratagem, and thus is usually left for websites or programs that support an instant messenger or chats. The latter has no emphasis on typing speed, but focuses wholly on strategy, and are thus usually based on forums and message boards. Both systems are further divided into explicit and implicit subsets (also called open and closed), which refer to whether the outcome of an attack is stated by the attacker or assumed to have happened in the flow of battle. There is a large rift of ideologies within the community of sparring. It comes from the basis of the spar's purpose and intent, and divides sparrers into two categories, being roleplayers and fighters. Roleplayers are grouped as "orthodox" combatants, where no "autos" are acceptable, and it is a mutually respectful practice. Orthodox matches are completely based upon the honor system, and are held more to the ability of the character than the mechanics of the system. Explicit guidelines and rules apply to the fighters, in an "unorthodox" system. Unorthodox spars tend to use hit claims, as discussed above as open and closed. Psychology of Roleplaying Although an undeveloped field, there exists some research done on people who roleplay online. One interesting facet of roleplaying online is the instance of a roleplayer acting as a character of a different gender. One study was conducted in the Journal of Computer Game Culture, which discussed this phenomenon of cross-gendered play. In the study, it was found that roleplayers would create opposite gendered characters to revel in their own embodiment as alternative beings. This was a form of conscious adoption of the 'bodies' that the player could not physically 'own.' Although this creates a tension between the avatar of the character