Role players overcome stereotypes

If I were to say the word "role playing," what is the first thing that comes to mind?  Dungeons and Dragons?  World of Warcraft? Bedroom foreplay?

Back in the early days, basically before the turn of the century, role players had the stigma of being slobbish nerds who lived in their parent's basements well past the age of thirty. At the best.

In the mid 80s and early 90s, several fundamentalist groups and concerned parents linked the most popular role playing game of the time, Dungeons and Dragons, to suicides and Satanic worship, a stigma that has dogged the genre ever since.

In either case, an assumption was that role players were isolationist fringe characters.

But in the past decade, society has begun to see that loner persona is not the case with role players, thanks to a role playing community that has become much more vocal about its hobbies.

From Oct. 21 to Oct. 22, BlizzCon, the gaming convention put on by Activision-Blizzard, the company that produced World of Warcraft, drew nearly 26,000 people according to the New York Times article "Best Friends, in Fantasy and Reality."

The article continues on with descriptions of interactions between game developers and fans and even guild members who had never met before thanks to one member being deployed in Iraq. And this was a smaller convention for the genre.

San Diego, Cali.'s Comic Con expected over 125,000 attendees for this year's four-day convention according to San Diego Magazie, and Indianapolis, Ind.'s 2011 GenCon convention broke its attendance record with 36,733 attendees.

ISU's own gaming convention, ISU Con, drew in 350 people, said Kayla Graham, the president of the sponsoring organization, the ISU Role Player's Guild.

My point, then, is that this subgroup of geek culture is not what everyone assumes.  Role players are not the creepy basement-dwellers some people think they are, but rather social, outgoing people.

And not only is the loner stereotype being broken, role playing and gaming in general are becoming widely accepted by pop culture. For instance, take Felicia Day's web series "The Guild," which just finished its fifth season.

The web series breaks down several of the stereotypes—the neurotic recluse, the douche bag teenager, the socially inept oddball—and shows these people come together and become friends in real life, where they form unbreakable bonds, despite infighting that develops through rival guilds and convention nightmares.

The web series boasts 73,446 followers on Twitter and 311,391 likes on Facebook.

This shows just how much role playing has begun divesting itself of the stereotypes that have been forced upon it.

But this change in perception is not just being displayed in stereotype changes, but is also becoming a multi-billion dollar industry thanks to this increase in popularity.

Activision-Blizzard's website stated that their March 2011 quarterly earnings were up to 1.449 billion dollars, a nearly 141 million dollar increase from March 2010.

According to a June 2011 Gamasutra.com article, Activision-Blizzard announced that 11.1 million people subscribe to the game, which was a decrease from previous years.

In many ways, role playing is moving from the dark into mainstream media and pop culture.