Back around the time when the game’s first expansion was a going concern, there was a post on the World of Warcraft forums about how the post author did not understand how or why you would roleplay in the game. As he saw it, it’s not like you could ever act like you personally fought through any of the raids or dungeon; lots of people have done that, and all of the large-scale problems are going to be addressed or not based on the expansions we get. So what’s the point?
At the time, the forumgoers had fun telling him he was wrong in what was mostly a condescending fashion (I mean, they were the WoW forums, did you expect otherwise?), but I think it’s a question worth engaging in good faith. Not because the poster in question necessarily was doing so, but because I also suspect that a lot of people think of roleplaying in much more narrow terms than they should. Roleplaying encompasses a lot of different playstyles, maybe even more than you’re thinking… and you might even be engaging without really thinking you are.
Let’s start with a very basic definition of roleplaying as a concept because my point here is that roleplaying is a pretty broad activity. Roleplaying, in context, refers to the idea that your character has some life external to being a mechanical playing piece. How much can vary a lot from player to player, but the important point is that you’re accepting the idea that there is a non-mechanical layer to the game.
For example, let’s say you decide to start playing Guild Wars 2. You know very little about the setting beyond “some fantasy stuff,” but you just start toying around with the character creator, and you decide you really want to play a Charr. You’ve got no idea of what Charr names sound like, but you give her a name that sounds neat to you: Permea Burnhand. And she’s a Mesmer, an idea you like because it seems neat to you that Permea looks aggressive and savage but she’s actually refined and graceful.
So you make a point of giving her elegant outfits dyed soft colors, you favor more graceful weapons, and… that’s it. That is the extent of roleplaying you do. But you are, in fact, roleplaying. Just with yourself.
My point here is not to suggest that somehow this is a lesser form of roleplay so much as a less concentrated one. You aren’t really into the idea of sitting around talking about the experiences that Permea has had with other people in-character. But in your mind, Permea is a character. She isn’t a terribly well-defined character, sure, but that added layer of her having preferences and traits and such makes it more fun to play.
Because now certain outfits are going to matter more to you. You’re going to have feelings about Permea. The stories that exist in your head about her are going to stick with you even if you play for only a little while. And that’s equally true if Permea becomes a character you play for years and take pride in playing.
We all know that humans tend to see faces in things where they don’t exist (it’s called pareidolia), but we’re also just kind of generally bad at abstracting things past a certain point. We humanize our appliances; we assign our furniture personality traits. We’ll look in the sky and say that it looks “angry” when a storm is coming, even though that logically doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Storms don’t happen because of emotional values! (Except on Roshar.) Our instinct is to identify with things.
And that’s true even when things are pretty heavily abstracted. Statistically, Mario is the most famous video game character in the world, but if you take a step back, you’ll note that he’s barely a character. He’s a little dude that jumps on things. There’s not a lot of personality there, and yet we project personality onto him because he’s a human-looking individual with whom we instinctively identify.
I’m sure you’ve seen memes about Mario being cruel and abandoning Yoshi to fall into a pit even though, realistically speaking, it’s a perfectly valid use of game mechanics and the Yoshi who fell into a pit is not dead. He was never alive. You know that; Yoshi doesn’t act on his own, and he doesn’t have an independent will, and yet we still ask how you could abandon your dinosaur buddy.
So in the broadest strokes, we roleplay because it’s more fun to imagine a person going through all of these events than Player Avatar #448298117. And you can argue – convincingly, even – that this doesn’t matter all that much to you. You might even not consider it really roleplaying because it’s just giving a character a name and having some thoughts about who that character is as a person.
But to that I would say… what do you think roleplaying is in the first place?
Roleplaying is another way to engage with the MMORPGs we’re playing, same as crafting, or PvP or high-end PvE or anything else the game has in place. And sure, you can argue that there aren’t mechanical elements to roleplaying, but even that isn’t totally true. If you’ve ever really wanted a piece of equipment to use as a cosmetic because it looks cool? If you’ve spent more than one second hitting “random” on the City of Heroes costume creator? You know that there is a mechanical layer to this. It’s just not one that is parsed out via stats much of the time.
It is, to be fair, something of a meta-layer in that regard. You are engaging with the game’s system with an eye toward roleplaying, and that is woven through crafting and PvE and earning money and exploration and so forth. But it’s hardly the only meta-layer; people who are impelled to go faster and get clears before others are also interacting with the game on something of a meta level.
Some people spend nearly all of their free time diving deep into character scenes, sitting in roleplaying venues, discussing how their characters feel and often exploring elaborate storylines years in the making. Others spend a lot of time thinking about their characters but spend less time just talking in that character voice. And yes, some people don’t really think about it beyond “I want to play this guy, and I want him to look cool, and these things look cool to me.”
But a lot of times that goes a little bit further and you wind up identifying with your guy. Sure, maybe it’s not always deep. But it’s real, and it matters to you. And that’s why people roleplay. Because even if you have no intention of telling that story to other people, to you, it matters more that Permea Burnhand is going on an adventure in the Janthir Wilds and wants a pretty dress. Oh, sure, there’s more story going on, but that part resonates with you when you log in.
No, Permea Burnhand is not one of my characters. Feel free to make her if you want, though.
If you’re an old hand at roleplaying in MMOs, you can look to Eliot Lefebvre’s Storyboard as an irregular column addressing the common peaks and pitfalls possible in this specialized art of interaction. If you’ve never tried it before, you can look at it as a peek into how the other half lives. That’s something everyone can enjoy, just like roleplaying itself.
