All the World’s a Stage: The Roleplaying Spectrum

WoW Insider has cranked out a brief analysis of gamers who are either either for or against role-playing in World of Warcraft, and MMORPGs as a whole. The RP agnostic:

The majority of WoW players, in my experience, fall into a different category: they have a sense of their character as a person in one way or another, whether as just a vague characterization (e.g. “Wham! Bam! — Zygor is so cool with his giant hammer.”), as an actual personality (e.g. “Zygor only cares about battle — nothing else, except maybe chocolate, occupies his mind”), or as someone with something of a background story behind him (e.g. “Zygor is the son of a heroic tauren general who died in a desperate battle for survival against the centaurs when Zygor was just 13 years old.”).

None of this influences they way these people play the game so much as it changes they way they think and feel when they play the game. Instead of thinking only about the various strategies and dynamics of the computer battles, they also have a sense of their character participating in some kind of meaningful story; there may be no plot as such, but there is that feeling you get with stories, that something is happening, and you want to see what happening next. In a way, they are roleplaying only with themselves, and their character’s story happens almost entirely within their own mind. If you ask them whether they are a roleplayer or not, they’d say they aren’t, but if you gave them the right opportunity, they might give it a try one day. I call them RP Agnostics because of this vague sense they have that they are not a member of the roleplaying community, yet at the same time they do have roleplaying ideas of their own. These ideas may be perpetually vague, but they’re okay with that.