In defense of roleplaying

My first experience with roleplaying was when I was new to WoW and a friend of mine convinced me to role a character on the RP-PvP realm he was on. I had no idea what roleplaying was, so it was a bit of a culture shock. Seeing those people who acted like no one I had ever met in real life was a bit disarming, especially when they criticized me for not being like them. I didn't stay for very long, especially after my friend left the server.

After that, I rolled a character on a PvE server, and that's where I stayed. I somehow found out just what roleplaying was, and I viewed it as just as odd as other people did. I laughed along with all the other non-roleplayers when I watched videos of LARPing, and I never gave a thought as to why roleplayers roleplayed in the first place. There were a few times where I considered rolling and alt on an RP server, since I thought it would make the game more immersive and thus more enjoyable, but those ideas never came to fruition. I always thought of WoW as just a game, nothing more, and roleplaying didn't fit in with that perception.

Recently, however, I gave some thought to the issue, and I realized that there is one very redeemable aspect of roleplaying. For all of its geekiness, roleplaying allows players to accomplish something they can't usually do in WoW, or in most video games out there: it allows them to flex their creative muscles.

Of all of the negative accusations lobbed at video games (they encourage violence, they promote obesity, they destroy children's minds, etc.), I am surprised that this one never gets any press. Video games are like movies that you control, but unlike movies, you are completely immersed in the game, and thus video games don't lend themselves to critical interpretation. That is the one thing that makes watching a movie a possibly creative act (critical interpretation), and it's something video games lack. The fact is that by playing a video, you are being sucked into the game maker's creative imagination, with no way to express your own creativity. Some games break this mold (Animal Crossing comes to mind), but those games tend to be labeled as "fluffy" and "lacking substance," so game developers tend to shy away from making them.

Then again, maybe anti-video game lobbyists refuse to use the destruction of creativity as an argument against video games because it is a reasonable argument. Zing!

The fact that games that foster creativity tend to be labeled as lacking substance is what truly scares me, because it means that we as a gaming community have indeed been negatively affected by games. Now, I am not saying that all gamers have been negatively affected, and if you are a gamer who can appreciate a free-form game like Animal Crossing (even if you don't enjoy it), then this does not apply to you. If, however, you were one of the many gamers who labeled it as an empty experience, then you may have already lost your creativity to video games. Or perhaps you haven't lost your creativity, and video games have simply taken away your will to use it when playing a game. Truly, that's no better. An unwillingness to exercise a certain skill is, for all intents and purposes, the same as not having that skill.

What does all of this have to do with roleplaying? Roleplaying is creative. When you roleplay, you come up with a back story for your character, a personality for him/her, etc., and when you roleplay with other people, you are forced to think through that personality and adapt and apply it to new situations. That is an expression of both methodical creativity and spontaneous creativity, making roleplaying an especially creative endeavor.

The only thing that can save the video gaming community from its creative dearth.

What makes roleplaying more creative than other expressions of creativity is that it takes a medium that by its nature does not foster creativity and finds some creative expression within it. The purpose of a video game is to engross you in the world created by the game's designer, and thus you cannot negotiate your own meaning from a game. The act of making a game can be seen as just as creative as other forms of artwork, but the viewer of a painting or a movie or a sculpture can interpret the artwork in his or her own way. This kind of audience interaction is not facilitated by video games. That is, of course, unless the players are roleplayers as well.

Does that mean that anyone who does not engage in roleplaying is a member of the masses of uncreative sheeple? Not at all. Everyone has their own way of engaging in creative thought, and just because a certain way doesn't appeal to them does not mean that they are not creative. Many people play WoW to relax from the stresses of the day, to give their brain a break, and I think I can speak for most people when I say that it is perfectly reasonable to expect those people to not wish to roleplay. However, to those of you who do, keep up the good work. You have my reverence and my respect.