Roleplay makes me sick.

Roleplay is making me more sick by the minute. How people roleplay just makes me wanna die or something. How come it always involves a disease, force marriage, or love in it always? I am not against love or anything like that, but how people pretend to be people they're not makes me just throw up. They may see them as a role model or something along those lines, but they shouldn't pretend to put themselves in the situations that they're "role model" goes through. They shouldn't pretend to date someone they can't, or pretend to date a fantasy character that doesn't exists. Eh, anyways. Fight me back on this, cause why not?

Roleplaying to me is a healthy way to escape from the reality that often leaves people stressed or depressed. It promotes expression that many people cannot exhibit in their normal lives. Though it involves things like disease, forced marriage, love, or other experiences most people do not encounter, in a way it helps people to understand what being in that situation might feel for people actually in those positions and can lead to less ignorance and more empathism. My opponent seems to express concern for the bizarre fantasies or unrealistic circumstances people might put themselves in, but I feel the opposite about said circumstances because these days, expressed imagination is uncommon, and roleplaying allows people to step out of their comfort zones in order to think outside of the box they've made around themselves with technology and lack of social lives people seem to have. I have experience with roleplaying online as fantasy characters and this has no effects on me at all in life. In fact, roleplaying has seemed to benefit my creativity, understanding of human interaction, and my writing skills.

Online roleplay, personally, doesn't increase personal experience or health. PERSONAL interaction would be shown as personally roleplaying, and even then that would be with your friends. This whole debate is around opinion, though. I don't think it stops depression in any way at all. I would like an example of a way it stops depression in the next round. Online dating is being prohibited in many states of the U.S as it says so in this article:
http://www.ibls.com...

When you roleplay, you're usually with your friend. If you're not, then you act like you're outside of your own body. Therefore not showing personal traits to make true friends.

Though I agree that roleplaying might not actually allow people to make friends in real life, I feel as though you aren't understanding the concept of roleplaying correctly. The goal of roleplaying, in my experience and many others', is not to make friends. Rather, it's for the sake of playing a character that is NOT who you are in real life. A person does NOT want to pretend to be themselves when they roleplay; that's the point of it. True friends are not gained from roleplay because personal traits are not showing and this is intentional. Furthermore, not all roleplaying is with your friends, even in real life. It could be with total strangers and in most cases is. My main point is that people don't intend to make friends that see them for who they are; when you roleplay, you don't want to be seen as who you are, and are playing a character for that purpose.

In addition, I'm slightly confused as to why online dating is relevant to your argument and might like a more detailed explanation. However, in regards to what you mentioned about that, the article you shared deals with dating websites. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the purpose of dating websites is so that people might acquire real-life relationships, and has nothing to do with roleplaying. Roleplaying does not occur very often on these websites either, I'd assume because that's not the purpose of those websites. As you mentioned earlier, people are playing fantasy characters; they're not being themselves. Therefore, online dating shouldn't be able to apply to roleplaying because roleplaying's purpose is not to act like yourself, so real relationships that most people have or think they have online aren't applicable to roleplaying.

As for your curiosity with my claim that roleplaying helps depression, I merely meant it as an adjective to describe sadness or dissatisfaction with one's life. Roleplaying allows people to pretend to be someone they're not and allow them to ponder decisions in a different mindset than their own. Some people find a sort of freedom in this process that aids as a distraction for their real life, even if they cannot escape it inevitably.

If you are not to make friends and have a fun experience, then what makes you want to roleplay? Online dating is relevant because of the amount of online dating I see during roleplay when I experimented with my sister and online roleplay games. If you can't meet people and create a new foundation of friends, then I do not see it as a social thing to be doing.

I can see why people might enjoy roleplay, but I, however, don't. I can't understand the point, or why people do it. Playing such roleplay games develop nothing at all. I can't see the point, like I said earlier. If you try to roleplay/pretend to be Taylor Swift for say, then I don't see a reason. If you want to act like you're famous, then why not try to be? Why not just go out and actually do what you've wanted to do? Pretending isn't getting you anywhere.

Wherever this argument goes, I want to thank you for putting up a good fight.

-Em

I don't believe I stated that roleplaying was not for the fun experience because I believe the foundation or initial motivation for roleplaying is to have the fun, out-of-reality experience in the first place. I understand what you mean by online dating now because you were talking about RPGs, which I didn't initially catch onto. Even though you have proved that there is online dating, this does not prove that their activity is meant to reflect on their personal lives; the point of roleplaying is acting as someone you aren't which may give shyer people the confidence to do things they may not have the courage to do in real life such as date, even if they don't know the person in real life.

To conclude, you may see roleplaying as pretending and something like a waste of time, but I disagree. This may seem depressing and unbelievable to you, but people who feel as though they don't have the ability or the confidence to achieve great things such as the celebrity, Taylor Swift find comfort in knowing that they can, at least for a while, escape from the disappointing reality they believe that they live in order to put themselves in the shoes as someone as famous as her whilst being aware that it's something they probably cannot or don't want to actually be in their real life. People do it because they want to interact with others as someone different than who they are in order to have new experiences and escape from reality for a while. Others might go on vacations or exercise to "get away" from their problems, but roleplayers prefer to act like someone they're not for a while. It's quite refreshing to some.

Thank you for debating me. (: