Out-of-character (OOC) is a role-playing term, referring to words or actions made by the player or the avatar but not by the character. It is opposed to in-character.
As the distinction of player and character is a key of the role-play, mixing up both level of speech or actions is frowned on by the community.
Thus sometimes out of character talk is necessary:
- tagging the dialogue, either
- pre-pending
OOC:
- surround the text by brackets:
[ ... ]
- surround the text by parenthesis:
(( ... ))
- pre-pending
- using Instant Message (IM) which are secret between the sender and the receiver.
It is usually recommended to keep OOC talk to the minimum.