In Defense of Role-Playing

Day 4,845, 07:20 • Published in USA USA • by Elaine of the Snowy Forest

Hello to my friends and enemies,

Today I wish to present a handful of different perspectives on what roleplaying is, or can be. I want to do this because I have repeatedly seen contempt for roleplaying expressed by some players of this game, especially in the eUSA Discord but also elsewhere. In this article I will try to make the following points:

1. This is a roleplaying game that lends itself to roleplaying innately
2. The act of roleplaying isn't always as explicit as you think
3. Roleplaying allows self-exploration and expression through various characters and personas, and is never wholly separate from the self.

This is a roleplaying game. Very few of us are soldiers in real life, and even fewer of us politicians. By playing this game, we are assuming the role of citizens in a virtual country. We forge alliances and try to protect the interests of this fictionalized version of America. There are arguments, speeches, elections. We assume these roles and take up the needful tasks of running the eUSA. To publicly speak out against roleplaying has become a political act in this game, and by engaging in the political you are playing the role of a politician in this game - or at least that of a political pundit.

All of us a playing roles all the time. When I am in a leadership position in real life, I simultaneously am myself and am also playing the role of my idea of what a leader should be. When I am teaching, I assume the role of an educator and mold my behavior in accordance with what I think teachers ought to be. There's not some innate quality to our souls that marks us as these roles - rather, roles, like games, are mediums through which we exist as people. One more example: when I worked at a restaurant, I pretended to be a different version of myself. A happier, friendlier version of myself that was never inconvenienced by a customer. Someone who existed to serve and clean up after others. You can't take all of yourself to a job like that - you have to pretend to be someone a little different. You have to play a role and engage in the characterization of the self.

Lastly, even when you are role-playing, whether overtly or covertly, you can never wholly remove yourself from the what you are presenting to the world. There are parts of yourself that leak out into the characters you play - even if that character is as simple as your own idea of how you should act in a given position. However you are expressing yourself, that expression is a transmutation of your beliefs, knowledge, and personality through a given medium of a character/video game/concept. So when someone is producing something with artistic value, perhaps by playing a character/role, they must act within the bounds of their own personhood. Their very understanding of the world, what is valuable, and what it means to do various things bleeds into that character. As observers, it is often incredibly challenging to discern these qualities from the character, but they are always there.

Now, as a form of self-indulgence I will try to anticipate a reasonable objection. You may make a distinction between the roles we play in our own lives, and even the roles we inevitably play by participating in this game, with the roleplaying other people participate in on Erepublik. You might argue that there is a difference between engaging in the minimum amount of roleplaying required to play this game (political discussions relating to game mechanics, for example), and the roleplaying that I do on occasion (creating stories about a character that lives in this world). And certainly, there are differences between the two. But I would implore readers to see the latter as an extension to the former, and something that is for many people its natural conclusion. This game gives us roles to play, and it seems awfully strange for people to be upset when people play those roles.

All of that having been said, roleplaying should never be an excuse for violence - verbal or otherwise - against people. I think that it has become something of a partisan issue lately, and I have already made my opinions on that issue clear - but roleplaying shouldn't be a partisan issue.

All in all, I want to ask people to think about the roles they play in their own lives, and more specifically the kinds of roles they're being asked to play by IRL politicians, bosses, artists, and their own society.

I wish you well,

Elaine of the Snowy Forest