From Grand Theft Auto Online to Baldur’s Gate 3, roleplaying is more popular than ever.

You need willing players on both sides of a game of cops and robbers—otherwise, there’s no chase. Luckily, Grand Theft Auto Online has plenty of both. 

In GTA Online’s abundant “roleplay” servers, it’s common for players to embrace all sides of the criminal spectrum. Criminals pull off heists, form crime rings, and even engage in full-on undercover schemes and espionage, both against the in-game world and each other. In many cases, it’s up to other players to stop them, as the police forces put out massive bounties that provoke elaborate chases. The results are elaborate, immersive, and often exciting play sessions for all involved 

With many high-skill or just plain entertaining roleplayers out in the field, creators can rack up millions of views by sharing their adventures on YouTube and other video platforms. One YouTuber betrayed an undercover sting operation, “finessed” a million dollars from his server’s police force, and soon had a bounty for that amount put on his head, leading to a lengthy chase. In another roleplay creator’s Short with 55 million views, cops released an old man from jail, who immediately pissed on a nearby tree and threw a shoe at his former jailors. 

The diversity of GTA Online roleplay doesn’t stop with that Hollywood depiction of classic crime action. Real players choose to be anything that the game permits, from serial killers to hitmen and even driving teachers (who sometimes actually do teach in-game tricks), to bring all the possibilities of Los Santos to life, embracing all the guns, cars, shops and chaos along the way. Grand Theft Auto, for all its troubled history of representation—and whether or not its players actually agree with the in-world ethics of “cops good” or “crime bad, but cool”—is revered as one of video gaming’s greatest escapes from reality. But Rockstar’s multiplayer golden goose isn’t the first to embrace the immersive chaos of roleplay, nor will it be the last. 

Roleplaying is everywhere in gaming, especially online. It’s a part of the fabric of internet nerd culture, from forums and chat rooms to full-on roleplay servers, whether officially-sanctioned or run by players. And despite its ever-fluxing reputation, it’s held its ground as a popular and exciting form of escapism across interactive platforms, thanks to persistent communities and a desire to create. 

Playing Pretend Anywhere 

We don’t need too much of a historical rundown of “roleplaying” if we recognize it as “playing pretend.” Most of us did it as a child, and some passionate performers do it as a career. As formalized game systems, we can better trace it back to war games—certainly, if you ever played the 1950s “Diplomacy” board game, which is essentially the original World War I simulator, you likely got more into the role than you expected. Then, of course, there’s Dungeons & Dragons, because who doesn’t want to be a wizard or knight slaying an evil vampire or demon king? 

The history of text roleplay, meanwhile, is a little more difficult to track down, but anyone who’s old on the internet could tell you it’s shifted from the light to shadow and back over the years. But who knows how long young, longing couples have imagined their escapes or each other’s touch in letters?

Much of this unwritten history has to do with the progression of available platforms for roleplay, which is just about anything chatters could get their hands on. Chat room platforms would occasionally see “Inn” roleplay rooms, where more casual “line-by-line” roleplay could take place. The oldest formal one I could pin down is an ongoing one that’s shifted from what appears to be chat rooms to Discord; it claims to have celebrated its 27th year, putting its founding year as, at the latest, 1999. But since chat rooms come and go, their existence is transient. 

The more visible bump in roleplayers came with the easy availability of forums, letting players have their own little private spaces to play pretend, complete with full-on customization by way of HTML and CSS, plus some home-grown graphic design ability. Users also ran directories of these forums, created for and organized internally by categories: genre, theme, “literate” (whether they used big paragraphs), even franchise. With that newfound accessibility, in the 2000s, it was nearly impossible to maneuver through an interest in fiction and not have a brush with roleplay platforms. I recall, as a young (perhaps too young) internet participant, that even Nickelodeon’s official forums had fans “borrowing” each other’s original characters, known as OCs, for fanfic. 

The biggest hulking hub of text roleplaying is no doubt Gaia Online. Before it became a full-on dress-up site and launched official collaborations, it started as a multi-genre roleplay forum. Much like its forum siblings, Gaia offered in-post text customization through HTML. With roleplays happening thread-by-thread, it wasn’t as unwieldy to maintain as a full-fledged forum. Nowadays, the front page has been de-cluttered of its “side content,” with a re-focus on recent “Bulletin Board” forum posts—perhaps a sign that players are falling back to their roots of socialization and creativity. 

Basically, roleplaying has been attempted on any site and platform that includes text. IRC servers, LiveJournal, AOL Instant Messenger (better known as AIM), MSN, Kik, the community-centric Amino semi-forum app—anywhere you could send messages to other people, it’s been done. Tumblr especially became, and still is, a hub for roleplayers to find each other and try it out, with enough of those classic customization options available to make a site your own. If it has a screen and controls, it can run Doom; if it has two colors, it can play “Bad Apple;” if it has text, you can roleplay.  

Worlds Within Worlds 

MMORPGs also became citadels for geeks wanting to strike a balance between immersion and “real gaming.” In fact, MMORPGs like Final Fantasy XI in 2002 and Star Wars Galaxies in 2003 had their fair share of roleplaying, including RP-focused guilds. It continues to be a major pillar of community—and subscription fees, where applicable—for MMORPGs, with players going so far as to maintain “dead” games such as Galaxies or City of Heroes so players can continue their immersive activities (Ed. note: God, I miss City of Heroes and pre-combat update Galaxies). A few games such as World of Warcraft go so far as to include official “Roleplay Servers,” where players maintain a social agreement to act in-universe, or at least find each other to engage in in-character regular roleplay. At one point, Blizzard agreed to enforce these otherwise-social contracts, though that seems to have been retracted.

Regardless of size or official status in many of these games, roleplay remains an intense scene with a dedicated crowd. Guilds form around themes, coalitions, or even venues, creating hubs for constant engagement and connection with other players interested in similar stories. There are stories of public events where criminals emerged and caused massive destruction to those present, with players playing along for hours as perpetrators, victims, and helpers. And Final Fantasy XIV has a weekly no-magic fighting event run in the same location and server since close to the game’s inception in 2003; its combat roll rules have become a standard across the community. 

Once again, only a little of this is officially facilitated by the games themselves. The developers can provide tags, servers, and social spaces, including player housing, but roleplaying is driven by player activity.  

Beyond the text and avatars, roleplay is a conduit for other creative avenues and even commerce. Player-made mods for certain major titles also bolster the community by allowing cosmetic add-ons, and some even let players share those cosmetic or other information about these characters. Plus, we can’t forget the massive player-run efforts in Grand Theft Auto, EVE Online and even Minecraft through roleplay servers. 

On forums and other sites, some roleplayers create or commission post and forum overlay customization, normally done through a self-taught, rudimentary mix of graphic design and HTML/CSS—and on sites such as Neopets, this spawned a whole generation of coders, as Nerdist once explored. Roleplayers also work to convey their characters beyond words, resorting to anything from photoshopping popular characters a la the Sonic the Hedgehog fandom to becoming full-on artists themselves (as I can attest from personal experience). Some simply craft their own 3D models for use in spaces such as Second Life, which now allows imported avatars from Maya or Blender, and VRChat. 

Some use roleplaying and these avenues as a route towards becoming a full-fledged artist, to sharpen their tools. But it’s likely no coincidence that roleplaying has surged in popularity in roleplay: there’s no pressure to profit, or become popular, or fork over ownership, and so on. For many, roleplaying, and the art derived from it, is how many simply embrace and express the breadth of their own imagination. And further, it’s a plus that artists who have honed their craft can especially use roleplaying to escape from the sheer capitalism that has taken over artistic expression in society. A hobby can remain a hobby. 

The Modern Spirit of Dungeons & Dragons 

Nowhere has the spirit of “just playing around” become more prominent than in today’s Dungeons & Dragons community. The storied franchise has taken many forms, from MMORPGs to novels and even cartoon series, but there’s been a huge resurgence in interest in not just the game itself, but the immersive approach to it. 

While its popularity has simmered over the past many decades, some thought it impenetrable until the likes of Critical Role, which featured voice actors doing their damndest to play pretend around the bizarre machinations of D&D’s heavily-numerical system. That roleplay aspect has always been present in D&D campaigns, but until this media showed off these theatrical aspects, the widespread reputation of TTRPGs was that they were obtuse, complex, and tedious. 

Critical Role, plus the many “real play” games such as Dimension 20 that ran with that influence, unlocked a wider, more mainstream desire to not only tap into the creative potential of D&D and other TTRPG systems, but bend them to players’ own desired level of narrative immersion, whether through unique characters or whole new homebrewed settings.  Despite not being a Critical Role person myself, its popularity drew me in to do a brief stint as a Dungeon Master, a beginner DM among beginner players, and much of my focus was working around that desire for mutual creativity. 

At the climax of that popularity arrived Baldur’s Gate 3, at once a marvel and a darling of both Dungeons & Dragons fans and the larger gaming community. Baldur’s Gate always had a reputation between both groups for being a classic, but the third iteration managed to break into the mainstream for its sheer scale and versatility in its interactions and, yes, romance (which drew in a recently-outspoken queer D&D community). It’s like having a Dungeon Master, but professional game developers took on the countless nights that a DM would normally tackle at the cost of that up-front development. 

Baldur’s Gate 3 became a hit for many of the same reasons that all genres of roleplayers have endured for many years: Baldur’s Gate 3’s appeal is the same as that of many other roleplaying games and experiences: it’s an immersive conduit for make-believe, offering what players perceive as countless opportunities and outcomes and rarely boxing the player in. The outcome of a BG3 playthrough acts as an extension of the player’s imagination and desire to build something unique and exciting—entirely for its own sake. 

And in today’s world, “for its own sake” is a motivation that artists and their appreciators are hoping to encourage once more. After all, it’s the era of generative algorithmic imaging (“gen AI,” if you will). It’s one thing to have the results of a brainstorm in your hand, but that act of brainstorm—the journey of tapping into every crevice of your imagination—is a joyous labor of creation with satisfaction that no shortcut will ever match, whether it’s just through sharing character ideas in Discord or creating full-fledged art projects. Hand-guided creation is an act as old as civilization, and roleplay is just another iteration. 

Anyone Can Play Pretend 

Despite its persistence and history, roleplaying still finds difficulty emerging as a widely-popular and acceptable hobby due to widely-held stigmas online, both within and outside of its communities. 

To be blunt, roleplaying has a “horny” “shut-in” reputation (you can mix or match those labels) that many of the best roleplaying communities can’t shake—it’s a “chronically online” activity. Unfortunately, there’s some truth to the concern that it can be a lightning rod for people who spend worrying amounts of time in the hobby, which can lead to rifts in socialization. Search any forum of an MMORPG, and you’ll have people asking and answering about “real roleplay,” or navigate long enough and you’ll read about some “drama” or controversy. 

Regardless of how much this actually represents the scene, even a small number of odd characters are enough to make roleplay taboo and discourage people from seeing the potential of some creative back-and-forth. When it comes to social situations, the best anyone can do is about the same as any other hobby space: set clear communication, boundaries, and expectations. 

And as for erotic roleplay, I don’t have any issues with erotic roleplay (Ed. note: Nor do any of us at Skybox. Get freaky with it, folks)—this is just how things have shaken out. Thankfully in general, as sexuality becomes less taboo in the public eye, so does erotic roleplay as well. It’s not a hundred percent as it stands, though, and MMORPGs are still considered “PG-16” spaces; plus, there’s always the issue of sex pests. 

Increasingly, those who are clear-eyed and curious might see past the reputation because they intrinsically understand the fuller potential of roleplay. These are whole worlds, built by other artists, that would be so cool to immerse yourself in! The immersive experience has become so widely popular around the world for that reason: Universal Studios’s Epic Universe, Star Wars Galaxy’s Edge, Meow Wolf, escape rooms, Sleep No More. If given a chance, almost everyone would escape to another world for a bit. 

It’s in human nature to wave off a balcony and hope someone waves back, to dance with each other in a club, to sit at a table and share a meal. Many hobbies are perfectly fine alone—fanfiction’s massive popularity dates back to the Sherlock Holmes era, and has earned its flowers in recent years—but there are little sparks of anticipation and unexpected delight that come with a collaborative effort. Sometimes, joy can come from playing cops and robbers with total strangers online.