WWW Virtual Library ---
Role play, role-playing and MMORPG games
Resources about role play and role-playing games, in which players/actors control the actions of
fictional characters, with a large degree of freedom, for entertainment,
training, educational or therapeutic purposes.
Role-play can teach, train, empower or heal children and adults - even when no
other method would work (for example in the case of behavioral
disabilities). Role-playing is actually so powerful that it can also
transform people into monsters, as famously demonstrated in the last part of this
section.
Pen & paper RPGs differ from other games by the large freedom
of choice allowed to a player's character. In any given situation, a
character in a role-playing game should be able to take any action
that character might take in real life. Pen & paper RPGs require
human referees, known as game masters, that will also have prepared
a storyline.
The high-speed internet and the powerful servers disseminated
around it have allowed RPGs to move to a new dimension, where
hundreds of thousands of players coexist and interact in persistent
worlds. While the freedom of choice of each of the individual characters
may be
constrained and the storyline is loosened in MMORPGs
compared to pen & paper RPGs, the massive amount of players
leads to unique social interactions and things can get quite
unpredictable, in a way arguably never achieved by any other games.
