I Gotta be Me: Roleplaying and the MMO

Jonathan Steinhauer takes a look at roleplaying and why he has such a hard time fitting it into the MMO genre.

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Really thoughtful article. I've had my own struggles with Roleplaying in general. I've found that MMOs don't truly support RP and are often counter to RP, but with effort you can add a layer of RP that enhances the game experience.

While most MMOs thus far have been counter-productive regarding RP, I don't think the genre is inherently opposed to RP. I think we'll see a maturation of the technology that goes into making these games beyond just graphics. I hope we'll start to see more complex story options and challenges that take the MMO genre away from purely random number generators. We need to see an evolution in Player generated content as well, so that we start to see the kind of involvement that you get with a group of players and storyteller in a traditional pen and paper RPG.

Bioware has a history of innovation in the RP market. I'm quite interested to see what they come up with for their MMO.

Great article.

I think roleplaying online has been substantively damaged by the rise of social networks and instant messaging. At one time, there was a clear distinction between "player" and "character". I am Alex, the player; my character is Archon. But with social networks, IM, and other online interaction, the avatar and the handle are synonymous with the meta-identity of the player, traveling across games and systems. Archon is simply me, online.

Thus when a person starts, say, World of Warcraft and picks a Nightblade Rogue named Tanthalas, they don't see it as assuming a role anymore than they do when they make their handle on the message boards. It's just a representation of themselves, with a bundle of powers.

When everybody is playing themselves, nobody is role-playing.

I must say that I agree, both with article and Archonīs comment, many "role-players" imagine themselves in their characterīs place, letting it have their own personality etc. This can occasionally be fun, try to figure out how oneself would act in certain situations and how weīd deal with problems that arenīt very common in our lives.

However, something that Iīve seen in all these Mary-Sues is that they refuse to take any consequences for their characters, they also tend to either rage when things does not run smothly according to their own plans or completly ignore the event(s).

This is the reason why I personally play on a heavily moderated private role-playing server, not only do we have more freedom to create plots that actually make a difference, but also be more creative with our characters. We have the opportunity to choose who we want on the server, making it possible to exclude griefers, PvPīers and others who are not there to RP. I play on the private RP servers to RP and the "vanilla" or "retail" servers to just play the game, which can be rather entertaining as well.

When the companies canīt help us even if they have more money than most of us would even imagine of seeing, at least the players can take things in their own hands and create communites with encourage and enforces a role-playing game.