Since a few years back the rpg genre of games had grown famous with games like Mass Effect , The Witcher, or Skyrim… but where does these games come from and what is the roleplay that people are talking about in these games?

Everything starts with a random guy writing an unknown book: J.R.R Tolkien writing the Lord of The Rings, then people started to be fascinated by the Fantasy Genre and the first games started to be created. These games were turn-based tabletop strategy games, also known as wargames, that were starting to be popular with young people.

But facing one reality, what are the soldier’s behavior in some places? Are they taking covers? Are they eating?
Then the players were starting to say “my soldier is doing this, and that, and that, etc…” until they played only one character, creating their story, their background, what they liked, disliked, and believed.
Roleplay was born then, when Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson wrote several books, having inside monsters and rules on how to create a character and a story to go with it, directly inspired by the Lord of the Rings.
The famous game named Dungeons and Dragons was born: mixing theater skills, dice games, and imagination experience, as you can have in books or movies.

Now, role games are still dominated by DnD, for 97% of the games played in the world are games of Dungeons and Dragons.
Still, you can find different ways of playing a role game, you can find Books called ” books where you are the hero” and you can find also video games harboring the tag RPG for Role Play Game.
They are divided in two categories:

• The ones where you follow a character already written like Shepard in Mass Effect, Geralt in the Witcher series, V in Cyberpun, or your character in the Borderlands Series
  
• The other is a more Sandbox one represented by your character in Skyrim (and the elder scroll series in general), your Dark Souls character, your avatar in Baldur’s Gate, or in the Pillars of eternity series of games.

These two have a different approach to storytelling.
You can consider the first one like a book, or a movie where you can put yourself in the shoes of the character you follow and complete their story. The other considers that your character can be whatever YOU want, you can choose most of the things on your character and restart the game to see what would happen if you tried another mindset for them.

The role game is a completely new genre of game (the first one is coming from 1971) and had for a long time been frowned upon by the puritan USA. A game where you can do magic spells and speak to Daemons, Angels, and everything was considered devious by the conservative authorities.
But the oldest version and the one we are interested in is a tabletop game where people gather around the table for several hours and play as a character (sometimes cosplayed as their character) to follow the adventures of their group, their character, how they evolve, etc…

Today, we see role games in another way. First of all, it creates a time where people can talk, exchange and explore themes, they can laugh, in short they have social interactions.
Another thing too is, in most of the roleplay games that you can play on the table, you follow a story, a scenario, and the feeling of success after a difficult time.
Also, some doctors in Psychology acknowledge the benefits of roleplay, since it teaches failure, success, and makes people put themselves in the shoes of others, to see different mindsets and cultural ideas.