What roleplayers look like
Oldish news now, but a pre-press copy (Word doc) of the latest study using EQ2 data is out.
The paper combines the big trove of server-side data and quant analysis of our other EQII papers, with a full-on second step of participant observation and ethnographic interviewing. The result, we hope, is a pretty deep look into who role players are, why they play, and what makes them tick. The chocolate and peanut butter of combined qual-quant methods we think gives the paper good generalizability, but with depth to boot. As always, there were some obvious findings and some unexpected stuff…
The focus of the study here is to specifically examine roleplayers — they give the genre its name, but as has long been noted, are a minority of users. The paper has a great overview of the history and theory behind RP for its intro that is worth the download in it own right.
Some of the big findings:
- There aren’t that many hardcore RP’ers: 5% or so. But they don’t care whether they are on an RP server or not, they RP regardless of server label.
- They tend to be slightly younger, there’s a higher percentage of females, and they are slightly less well educated — but it appears RP isn’t about identity experimentation related to age.
- Instead, it seems that a more common characteristic was belonging to a minority group of some sort: religious, sexual, racial…
- As was previously reported and the subject of some controversy, roleplayers seem to have a notably worse incidence of reports of physical and mental issues, including ADD, learning disabilities, loneliness, physical disabilities, substance addiction, etc.
- However, these had nothing to do with the amount of time played, and in fact, RPers play less hours per week.
- Why do it? Creativity, immersion, skill-building. And in many cases, it was a coping mechanism for the problems mentioned earlier — a way of using RP as a way to ameliorate depression or anxiety, and not the cause.
- Interestingly, RPers seem to have a higher rate of turning online social connections into real world ones. The quote from the paper is “…a qualitative difference in the practices of roleplaying that makes the social interactions different — and likely richer…”
The paper doesn’t arrive at firm conclusions on that last bit, but engages in some speculation, and invites further research.
This may be a real irony of role playing—people whose main practice is pretending to be someone else may be also engaging in opening up so much through this practice that they are driving the very self-disclosure that leads to true social bonds.
This lines up with a very very old interview I gave back in the LegendMUD days:
People tend to think that muds alter how people perceive one another. That gender and race and handicaps cease to matter. It is a noble vision, sure, one shared in general by these frontier netters. In truth, muds reveal the self in rather disturbing ways. We all construct ‘faces’ and masks to deal with others. Usually in interpersonal relationships, the masks can slip, they evolve and react, and they have body language and cues. On a mud, on the net, whatever—they cannot. And people see specifically this: what you choose to represent yourself as, and THAT is more revealing of your true nature than gender, race, age, or anything else.
10 Responses to “What roleplayers look like”
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Huh. 5% is a heck of a lot higher than I expected…
Another possibility could very well be that because hardcore roleplayers are effectively such a minority population, that they develop stronger community bonds in game, and the stronger the community bonds, the more likely they are to translate out of game; in game relationships are more sticky, since you’ve got a much smaller pool of people that you’ll be interacting with in the activity you enjoy the most, and you’ll keep going back to the same faces.
It definitely does need more research, and a decent way to try to control for that variable would be to see how hardcore raiding guilds or other relative minority populations tend to do when it comes to taking bonds out of game. This is something where I’d love to see comparison stats to a game more like pre-NGE SWG, to see if the game mechanics are a factor as well; SWG formed stronger in game communities due to the way it was structured than EQ2 does, if SWG players tended to form out of game relationships more often than EQ2 players, that could also point at something.
I bet these kinds of players could have viral spill-over in a social game.
[…] under: Uncategorized — Dave @ 1:41 pm Tags: player populations, players Raph Koster has a new piece on the Williams paper that I mentioned last week, where he hits on Williams’ points. One of the […]
There is a somewhat larger proportion of situational roleplayers, and roleplayers who don’t self-identify as such because of the stigma attached to role-playing by some non-RP gamers.
Roleplay communities, in general, accept, celebrate and reward people based on their contribution to the community, not on extraneous factors such as race, gender, orientation or physical/mental handicaps. Consequently, RP communities are very attractive to people unfairly oppressed and marginalized by their mainstream culture, not as a crutch or escape, but as a viable, vibrant alternative culture.
Social treadmills are less time-consuming than achievement treadmills 🙂
Roleplay is art. While artists have a somewhat higher incidence of a complex of behaviors that is loosely referred to as the “artistic temperment”, most are not unduly inconvenienced by such and in fact find the broadened perception engendered by the creative act to be useful in initiating and enjoying social interactions.
I think that’s more true of people who don’t (usually) self-identify as roleplayers, but who use the mask of anonymity to indulge their appetite to hurt and humiliate other people. In a handful of cases, roleplaying may be cited as an excuse to engage in hurtful behavior, but the behavior is almost always non-consensual harassment outside the RP context.
[…] the study is over 40 pages long and packed with information, Raph Koster has broken down the big findings on his website — namely the fact that hardcore RPers only make up 5% of the player population […]
It would be interesting to see the same analysis applied to actors where the mask worn is often outlined by others and the actor fills in the spaces.
Interesting question, len. I was trained as an actor, and at one point was roleplaying an actor performing roles in the context of a roleplaying game.
I’d say the biggest difference between the two is in casting. If you’re a white woman in a wheelchair, you’re not likely to be cast as the title character in a stage production of Othello. But you can cast yourself in that role or one very much like it online. It’s remarkably liberating.
So if somebody did the same workup on a cross-section of actors, I think they’d find strong parallels in motivations and psychology, but a very different demographic makeup.
I’d say the same, Sam, having also been trained for acting. Acting comes with a training that is contributing to the actor’s construction of the role both physically and mentally, and as you note, the physical constraints aren’t there. Also, though, I think there would be significant differences in motivations and psychology that would be revealed in willing immersion in the role. Good actors are taught to turn that off and save some of that energy for showtime. They are less likely to show up dressed as a cheech wizard or go to conference in costume. Speculating, their social environment and business environment will include more aspects of their craft than roleplayers and that will change the emphasis. There are the obvious differences in scripting, how audience viewpoints (say camera angles) affect perceptions, the role of the audience, the role of the live stage itself.
Oh, wow, it’s good to see some research on this topic.
The findings about the formation of real-life social bonds are very consistent with my own anecdotal observations. The act of roleplaying is an inherently creative act, and we always reveal aspects of ourselves through our creations, no matter how antithetical to ourselves they may be.
I can understand why marginalized people might roleplay, but I am utterly baffled as to why they would roleplay in an MMO, where they will only be marginalized again. No matter the extent to which one’s roleplaying community attempts to isolate itself and protect its own, one is still going to be abused and belittled by players who simply don’t get it. In my experience, even many hard-core RP-MUD veterans find MMO-roleplayers self-destructively quixotic in their stubborn attempts to roleplay in an environment that is socially and often mechanically hostile to the practice.
My best guess is that this is where they first discovered this kind of roleplaying. They don’t know what they are missing. Or maybe they just like MMOs. Or maybe this is just where their friends went. Or maybe all the good RP-MUDs are gone now. Yikes.