0. Prologue
    I'm not going to begin this article with, "Was ist ein roleplayer?" or anything like that. First because I couldn't go on (my German isn't what it used to be), and secondly because I would like to describe what a roleplayer does when he plays a game, rather than sinking into a boring exposition of the theory claiming that roleplay was invented by Gandalf around the year 487 of the Second Age and all that stuff.

    Instead, this article will focus on the behaviour of roleplayers in videogames, rather than pen & paper RPGs or live action roleplaying games, and will try to demonstrate why, if they definitely are a weird and fringing kind of gamers, they should be listened to instead of laughed at.

    First of all, roleplay is NOT exclusive to roleplaying games. Any game with a hero can be roleplayed. On the other hand, a RPG isn't a RPG unless it is properly roleplayed; a RPG that isn't roleplayed is no more than an adventure game with statistics. 

   There's no such thing as a roleplaying game; only the player decides whether he is going to roleplay the game, or play it a normal, just for fun, or mindless way. For instance, Fallout 2 is not a roleplaying game until the player decides to roleplay his character. Deus Ex is just a first-person shooter with RPG elements, unless the player decides to see things the way he thinks JC Denton - the main character - would. You can create the most immersive and realistic game, if the player has so much experience in videogames as Quake III Arena, you can expect him to first go for the jump button.

    Because roleplay doesn't depend on a game, on a story, or a character. It depends on the way the player goes through the game. Where there's a hero, where there's an identification to a character, there can be roleplay; a simple story, with basic, archetypal characters, is already an excellent breeding ground for it.


     1. Roleplay: what's the point ?
    Well, actually, there are two. The first one, and most obvious, is the need for epic deeds, for beautiful actions, "just like in the movies" style. It can be a huge explosion, a victory after a long struggle, a car chase ending in a gunfight in the middle of the highway, and so on. It doesn't have to end with the victory of the roleplayer, because an epic defeat, for instance after a long and painful fight, would most of the time greatly satisfy him.     

    Indeed, the roleplayer doesn't really give a damn about game mechanics, because the only thing that really matters to him is immersion. He doesn't want to win, he doesn't care. What the roleplayer wants is to be there, to be part of a universe, to feel he has a place there, as an active (or not) character, as a hero or as a non-player innkeeper, as a good guy or as a villain. He doesn't care for power, fame, money, weapons, or property. The roleplayer doesn't want to be Conan, he wants to be his rogue companion; he doesn't want to be the Major Kusaragi, he wants to be Batu.

    Why wouldn't the roleplayer want to be a semi-god? Because it wouldn't be plausible. He wouldn't fit in the picture, he would be outside of it. The roleplayer doesn't even want to be a hero, because heroes usually stand on top of everything and thus are, in a general manner, special. Roleplayers do not want to be special, they want their character to be plausible. They find the elegance in simply being there, being that anonymous wanderer that has seen many places but likes to remain silent, that illiterate peasant that has to leave his farm to get a medication for his sick wife, that old knight that can't fight anymore but has much to tell, and so on. The objective of roleplaying in general is this: fitting into the picture. Being coherent.   

    Therefore the challenge is to guess, when in an unrealistic universe, what would be a realistic behaviour, or name, or morale, in order to maintain a plausible role, a coherent place there - in order to fit in the picture. Who gives a damn about being a Sephiroth, an Illidan, a Duke Nukem, a Luke Skywalker? The easiest way to immerse oneself into an universe is to be a nobody, a soandso. Thus the roleplayer keeps modest objectives, at least at the beginning of the adventure; of course he can achieve great deeds - but later, when he has gained a valuable place in the universe he now dwells in.

    There are many ways to achieve this, and every detail counts.

    Take for instance, Dice's Battlefield 2142. Here's the plot:
    "The year is 2142, and the dawn of a new Ice age has thrown the world into a panic. The soil not covered by ice can only feed a fraction of the Earth’s population. The maths is simple and brutal: some will live, most will die. In Battlefield 2142, players choose to fight for one of two military superpowers - the European Union or the newly formed Pan Asian Coalition -in an epic battle for survival."

    Okay. Pretty serious stuff we got here. A very violent, dark, hopeless universe.

    Now, in that universe, do you want your character to be called...

    [43RI]1L0veStr4wb3rr1e$

    or

    [L0L]SuckMy$u$hi

    or

    [ESB]luk3_skyw4lker1337

    ?

    It's okay if you do, but I don't.

    I want to fit into that universe, to be a part of it, to feel like I'm really there. How can I make that happen? simple: I'm going to check out how the bots are named. Yes, the bots, those stupid AI everyone spends their time yelling at (including me most of the time). Obviously, the bots never stop roleplaying, and their names always fit in the game's scenaristic environment. D. Markus, E. Petrovsky, V. Wilson, and so on - always an initial followed by a name, just like on dog tags. So I'll do the same, and my character will be named in the same fashion.

    Weird? Most certainly. Part of the fun? Definitely!

    Anyway, we saw that roleplayers aren't at all interested in winning, unless that victory is epic enough to satisfy their needs for immersion; but again, they don't want something grand, something heroic - they don't want an exploding planet or a superhero stopping a meteor with their bare hands. Instead they want something coherent, plausible; they want situations.

    For instance, let's say a roleplayer kills an enemy standing atop of a flight of stairs. The body of the poor guy is going to slowly fall off every step of the staircase, the one after the other, before ending its course at the feet of the player. Epic, beautiful, just-like-in-the-movies situation - and, most important, plausible.

    A roleplayer wants his avatar to have human dimensions and emotions, and non-superhuman behaviour and capabilities. To him, there's nothing as boring as a superhuman avatar. Why? Because he needs to identify himself to his character; he needs - he wants - his character to resemble him. He wants his character to feel pain, to be afraid, in a word to be fallible, because that's what makes him human, that's what makes him plausible. And in the humanity of his avatar is its poetry, as well as a reflection of the player's own humanity.

    So again, the roleplayer doesn't give a rat's ass about winning or being the best or having huge guns or swords, and this is very, VERY important. In the roleplayer's world, winning is for losers. Winning is for people who don't get it, who don't get it at all. If you thought that because you did everything you could to take your MMORPG character all the way to level 292 you were a roleplayer, then I'm sorry - you are a RPG player, and maybe a good one, but you're not a roleplayer. Oh, and since a RPG isn't a RPG unless it is properly roleplayed, ... well... that makes you... well... let me see...

    Anyway, remember - the most beautiful equipment you ever had was the boiled leather one you had gotten at level 3.


     2. Masochism is good, enjoy it
    To achieve his objectives of realism and plausibleness, the roleplayer creates for himself new contraints, thus becoming a bit of a masochist. Indeed, most of the time, the game's rules are not fit to his ideal, and keep bluntly reminding him he's only playing a game. Let me give you some examples.

    Let us say a roleplayer plays a first-person shooter with his friends. When his avatar runs out of ammunition, it automatically reloads. This is not a satisfying solution; our roleplayer wants to reload his gun HIMSELF. Why bother? Because he wants to be as close to his avatar as possible. Because in real life, he would have to reload his gun himself.

    But if our little friend deactivates the automatic reloading function, he will instantly suffer from a great tactical disadvantage (since the computer takes care of automatically reloading other players' weapons); this being said, he'll feel more immerged into the game, since he'll have to carefully watch how many bullets he has left so he knows when his weapon is gonna go click-click, which he must avoid at all costs if he is to survive.

    But there are unsolvable cases. For instance, in Counter Strike, you have to reload in a bullet-by-bullet fashion, and not in a magazine-by-magazine way, which is unrealistic. Another unsolvable case, in World of Warcraft, your character doesn't need to eat or drink. And in Oblivion, you can swim with your steel armor on.



    So, when you want to roleplay the game, to get it realistic, when you want to be immerged in it, what do you do ? Well, it's simple: you deny the rules of the game. Instead, you bend them, modify them, and create new ones. In Counter Strike, don't reload till your magazine is empty. In World of Warcraft, force your character to take lunch breaks. If he can't, if he has no food, he starves and cannot fight anymore. I knew a fire mage that, for scenaristic reasons, was unable to cast a single fireball for MONTHS. A FIRE MAGE. Yes.

    I have this great friend that one day decided he wanted to play a Diablo 2 sorceress that wouldn't wield any magic but instead would fight enemies with swords. So my friend had her quit magic and start slashing monsters with weapons she could barely handle; of course, because the statistics forbade it, this couldn't work, and the sorceress died a great many times. But my friend didn't care, because he had his sword-wielding sorceress, and it was cool. Needless to say that in multiplayer games she was completely useless.

    Roleplay can be as simple as deciding that your character doesn't want to hurt anybody. I can remember someone watching me play Crysis, shadow amongst shadows, avoiding any enemy contact (and I was rather good at it) and mumbling something like, "Man, this is boring as shit. I mean, it sucks. Why don't you, like, I dunno, kill them all?"

     In Half-Life, you can have all your weapons with you at the same time. Crowbar, shotgun, submachine gun, rocket launcher, everything. What do you do then ? Deny the rules. No, you don't have a rocket launcher. It's in your inventory but you don't have it. Because 1) it's unrealistic, 2) this is not what you feel YOUR Gordon Freeman would do (he's got more style than that, rocket launchers are for Rambo) and 3) he's a scientist, since when do scientists know how to use rocket launchers?

       

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