If you are roleplaying yourself it's a challenge regardless for several reasons: (1) people don't have enough bandwidth in a game to truly roleplay themselves in the same way they do in person -- neither bandwidth about their surroundings nor bandwidth to portray their own character well. Everyone needs to abstract and stylize their behavior in RP.

Second, people discover things about themselves when they try to RP themselves (having been in Second Life since 2005) about how people perceive them and how they perceive themselves. If you are playing with people you know IRL, they will actually *tell* you, "You don't do things like that!" or "You totally would have done..." It's pretty funny. God *help* you if you tell people that you are RPing yourself and then they meet you in person later. It's very likely that your "self" that you RP will be idealized or stylized in such a way that the dissonance will throw people off badly.

I think RPing yourself is an opportunity for exploring your own light and shadows. RPing yourself as a bad guy can purge some anger more thoroughly than therapy (if you're lucky, although it can also ruin a game for you). RPing yourself in a heroic situation can make you assess your inner resources.

Ultimately all games have these elements in RP, but when you actually place your core self in an avatar, they leap out.

I'm not sure if I've done enough roleplaying to form an accurate opinion yet(my current experience is pretty much of 1 online roleplay that died after 10 pages or so and many moral choice video games), but I'll try.

Typically when I make a character I've found them to have a strong resemblance to me. Love of green, no jewelry or buttons, skinny with short hair... And I generally have them lean towards the good side of the spectrum, shifting gears normally just to see what it's like.

But when I played in that RP, the similarities became even more obvious and numerous. It was male, similar age, similar area of residence, nothing special about him, my favorite animal(don't ask), in college... It got to the point that it was so similar it became somewhat unnerving due to the nature of the RP(all the characters died in the beginning, like I said, don't ask :P). He even died in a way that I could very realistically die.

Due to this realization of how creepy it would be to roleplay as myself in this situation I began sabotaging him, giving him a normal social life(seriously), making him slightly more irritable, knowledge about cars, etc. But was it worth it? Was I overreacting because I was new to the experience and didn't want to see myself in such a negative situation? Or did I make the right decision, and it would have been boring/hard to roleplay as one's self?

I'm not sure. But I do think that roleplaying as yourself is just as hard as any other character. When I was playing as him I still had to stop and think on how I would react to the situations, considering I wasn't technically in them. They were more in common with me suddenly being thrust into them with no context. I had time to think everything over calmly from my computer. Meanwhile, the characters were confused, dazed, and mostly affected by emotions.

Unsettling, difficult... like I said, I might lack the experience to truly have a strong opinion either way, so I'll end by saying that I think most people roleplay as themselves more than they think they do.

This is a nice one. Its a good thread actually. Thanks for the share... Jaguar X Type Parts