User blog:KakkoiiBishounen/KB - 10.1.11 - The Fires of RP Are Slowly Dying

When I became a member of Kongregate, the first chat room that I became a regular in was Barrens Chat. It was more chaotic then, and more prone to hostile behavior and trolling attempts by the regulars of the chat. These days, Barrens Chat seems to be more watered down and docile compared to what it used to be, but back when it was still chaotic, amidst the chaos, I got myself involved with a role playing group. Barrens RP consisted of a few of us at first, probably four or five of us, some of which still come on to Kongregate from time to time. We were just a bunch of guys playing the role of warriors in training or something to that extent. It was a little bit like playing Dungeons and Dragons, except that we didn't really follow all of the character creation rules and a lot of things we did were just acts of spur of the imagination. Over time, we began to grow, and more people showed up. We eventually got to the point of developing storylines, including a canon storyline featuring two of the more active role players as main characters. Somewhere along the way, I got bored with participating in Barrens RP. I couldn't remember whether it was the fact that it was the same people consistently being main characters, the drama that I eventually came to associate with the group, or just that I stopped clicking with some of the people in it due to their choice of actions at the time. After Barrens RP, I moved on to Role Playing #1.

Role Playing #1 was an awesome community of people who legitimately had a sense of writing and writing style. I could remember those days when it was kat, Tank, Ali, Cuddles, Roxie, Ress, Spazzy and a bunch of other notable people who felt like the core group of RP1. People would engage in these long, verbose scenarios with characters that they've developed over some span of time and people were totally cool with the differences that people had in character choice, scenario type and all those other things. Those golden days, as I like to call it, are long gone.

Today, we have role playing rooms scattered throughout Kongregate, and many of them are dying out. Atlas Park used to have a lot of regulars role players but not many of them actually role play seriously anymore if at all. Dragon's Cave used to be home to a role playing group, many of which are gone or now highly obscure. One of the supposed regulars let me know that it wasn't a role play acceptable room. Zero Axis used to be known as a role play acceptable room, though I haven't been around long enough lately to validate whether or not people still do. Role Playing - Serious used to be the place where we had the first legitimate instances of role playing elitism, as far as I've known. The room is now mainly a dead zone for role playing; people are more likely to be found chatting there. When most of the regulars from Role Playing - Serious were witnessing the room dying in front of their eyes, their solution was to migrate to RP1, bringing along the mindset that if a person did not role play well or if they were just learning, the solution would be to troll them out of the room or discourage them from role playing altogether.

There are very few places now where a person can role play on Kongregate. Some rooms still have their cliques, such as Didactic Fractals. Others are a little more welcoming to their community, such as the one in Home. For the majority, however, people who want to role play have moved from Kongregate's chat rooms to places with more accessibility and higher character limits, like Chatzy, a free high character limit chat room, or Kommunicate, a chat room game on Kongregate made by CharlesBroughton, who is in the process of turning Kommunicate into its own site.

As time passes by, less and less people seem to be attracted to the role playing rooms, possibly due to the reputation that the rooms have gathered over time. As a point of observation, I have asked people how they feel about the future of the rooms, and some have blatantly said that they don't care as long as they are having fun for themselves. I have little room for doubt when I think about these rooms and whether or not role playing will still be a welcome, popular thing on Kongregate, or if it would become socially stigmatized due to the actions of the majority of the people who represent it. Perhaps sometime in the future, we may no longer have a separated RPS and RP1, or maybe, they won't exist at all.