Turns out, you can’t stop a gamer from roleplaying – even when they aren’t given a role

By Duncan Geere

Fighter, mage or rogue? The holy trinity of RPG archetypes is etched into the soul of most gamers. So much so that they’ll pick one and stick with it, even when it’s not demanded of them.

That’s according to human-computer interaction researchers from North Carolina State University, who built an entire RPG to test their theories about roleplaying.

You can play it here if you like – it’s a pretty simple browser-based RPG where you’re tasked with saving a kingdom. The only difference from most games is that you play as a weird grey prism rather than a dashing hero. That’s so that players couldn’t infer anything about the physical attributes of their character.

Assigned Roles

“We wanted to know how, if at all, having a role influenced player behavior,” said Ignacio Domínguez, lead author of a paper on the work. “We also wanted to know if it mattered whether the role was assigned versus selected by the player.

They got 210 different people to play the game and tracked what they did. Seventy-eight of them were assigned as a fighter, mage or rogue, 91 were allowed to choose a role, and 41 were given no role – they simply began playing.

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Source:: techradar.com – Gaming