About Roleplay.org

After spending many hours cataloguing video games for another site I was working on (I am a web developer), the concept or roleplaying intrigued me more and more. I'd heard of roleplaying in the past and also experienced it to some extent through the game Ultima Online. In the game, I met real life people who were pretending to be orcs right down to developing their own language. To me it seemed funny but as I enjoyed PVP combat, and so do orcs apparently, we had frequent run ins and it was extremely fun. They were role playing, and I was playing video games . . . or so I thought. Afterall, roleplaying is about pretending to be something you're not, right?

In fact I think it's quite simply not that simple. Over a few months I've encountered an increasing number of video games that claim to be part of the 'role playing game' niche. These games vary from science fiction, to real life simulations, to martial arts, fantasy, and on and on. At first I thought these games were simply trying to capitalize on a hot area of gaming by expanding the definition to include themselves, eventually I came to realize just how broad this roleplaying field is.

As I thought about it, I realized that even in my professional and academic life, roleplaying had long been part of it. For instance, when training to become a lifeguard in highschool, we spent our in-pool almost exclusively acting out roleplaying situations. Each situation would be set up where certain candidates were tested as a team of lifeguards on how they handled an emergency situations acted out by the rest of the lifeguarding candidates. Roleplaying victims (be it a laceration, a drunken fool, or a non-swimmer drowning in the deep end) were an absolute blast, but more importantly also tested our knowledge of how a trauma situation might potentially evolve. I didn't realize it then, but I'm sure we were learning as much roleplaying the victim as we were testing our skills guarding. Ok, so perhaps playing the part of a drunken swimmer is a bit of a stretch! :P

At any rate, I just wanted to offer a quick introduction as to why this site was created. While it's a spare time project, I'm hoping that if I get the ball rolling with some decent content it will keep doing so with the collaboration of others. You'll notice a definite bias towards roleplaying video games to start because they are the most popular and the information most abundant, however I'll not limit the site to this and be happy to include any sections that are suggested or requested.

Thanks for stopping by :)
Cheers,

Chris