Representational role-play in Guild Wars 2: creation, customization and expression of a character identity.

Abstract

When researching role-play in MMORPGs, most scholars do not define whether they mean the goal-oriented form of role-play or the acting-oriented form of role-play. Additionally, most scholars delve into a very text-focused approach or an approach that uses ethnography, but rarely both at the same time. This current research will address both of these issues by using a textual analysis and participant observation to learn how players can use Guild Wars 2’s mechanics and features to create a character identity for representational role-play. The analysis showed that a character's class and race influence a lot, since it both enables certain mechanics while limiting others. Once a character has been made, the player can customize their character primarily through armor and weapons, which can be dyed and/or hidden. To express the identity of their character, players can use the chat and emotes, of which the custom emote had the most interesting use. Through the participant observation, it became clear that players often wish to play different or multiple characters in ways that are not facilitated by dedicated mechanics, so they have to get creative with the custom emote or other mechanics. Ludic elements were also often factors that restricted a player’s creative freedom because a player is barely able to dress up their character if they play exclusively ludic. Lastly, players would sometimes take their role-play outside of the game if they could not express their creativity properly within the game.