When is role playing an innocent expression of playfulness, and when does it cross over to something that is born of and reinforces either personal psychological trauma or dubious social norms?
Role playing is something we do from a very early age. Pretending to be someone else, particularly an archetypal grown-up, is a staple of childhood play. Those games can be both innocent and highly loaded.
One example is the classic kids’ game of Cops and Robbers. This seems an obvious case of innocent role play. Has a parent ever worried that playing the role of a criminal is prepping their small child to be a career felon? There is an obvious social subtext to the game, ostensibly teaching children that crime is wrong, but only the squarest of worry warts would become alarmed if the improvised script developing in the backyard occasionally ends with the bandits getting away with it. After all, it’s just play.
But then there is the other classic role play game of American children: Cowboys and Indians. This one is much more problematic. Well, not for the kids, of course. To them this is no different than Cops and Robbers. It’s just two groups, one them highly favored, the other one an underdog and a bit of a scoundrel, and off they go to horse around in the summer sun. But the subtext of this game is far more insidious. Cowboys and Indians reinforces imperial mythologies that have dominated American culture since its inception.
Regardless of which team wins one improvised fracas or another, this role play reinforces ideals just as much as Cops and Robbers. But instead of the innocuous lesson that “criminals are the bad guys,” Cowboys and Indians teaches children too young to really understand that America’s Indigenous peoples were supposed to “lose” to Europeans and their descendants. Role playing can reinforce, broad social values.
Often we are unaware of this. For the longest time, most parents didn’t think twice about their children playing Cowboys and Indians. Perhaps most of them still don’t. And children’s role plays about Thanksgiving, which also justify imperial mythologies, are still standard in schools.
While people can assume role playing is more innocent than it really is, they can also develop irrational fears about genuinely innocuous role playing. One example would be Role playing games (RPGs) such as Dungeons and Dragons.
During the 1980s, some parents, religious figures, and social critics claimed that RPGs were cultivating mental illness, encouraging violent behavior, and promoting the occult. That may seem laughable now, but public outcry was so loud that at one point TSR, the company that sells Dungeons and Dragons, revised the game to exclude all references to demons and devils; a large scale Center for Disease Control study on teen suicide went to the trouble of dismissing any link to RPG participation; and prosecutors in a 1988 North Carolina murder trial played up the killer’s involvement with the game, which in turn led to a true-crime book and made-for TV movie that also pushed that angle.
Hair spray, spandex, and shitty synth-pop music went out with the 1980s, thankfully, but RPGs are firmly entrenched in the culture. Now mostly online, they are more popular than ever as the first generation of fans has grown up, and others have followed. How popular? Believe it or not, if you search the term “Role Playing,” the expected litany of sex sites actually takes a back seat to the kind of gaming that involves chain mail and swords instead of leather and whips.
Dungeons and Dragons and similar fantasy RPGs are staged in intricate supernatural realms and enmeshed in pretend violence. For the vast majority of players, such games are merely a vehicle to express their imaginations, though there can be elements of catharsis involved. Who hasn’t occasionally released frustrations by fantasizing about being stronger, better looking, smarter, richer, and in any number of ways more powerful?
Beyond cops and orcs, or maybe including them, sex has always been a central domain for role playing. As such, it can be very innocent and enjoyable, or darkly complicated. An example would be rape fantasies. Two (or more) happy, healthy people indulging themselves with some kinky fun? No problem. A former rape victim using role play to cope with trauma? It would be an understatement to say that is much more complex.
In all of these forms of role playing, from kids to grownups, from games to intense adult behavior, the line between innocent fun and more complicated forms is not always so obvious. And when 
concerns are raised, the result is rarely unanimity, but rather heated debate and even controversy.
Debates about on sexual role playing are so numerous as to defy simple summary. They include a myriad of competing views on both private sexual activity, semi-public sexual activity (such as in clubs), and sexual activities produced for the marketplace, ranging from pornography to prostitution.
In my view, a full spectrum exists. Role playing that incorporates sex and/or violence can run the gamut from innocent fun to the very troubling. The key then is to be, as much as one can be, both socially and self-aware. Use a keen and honest eye to delineate between that which is good fun and that which betrays.
Like most people, I’d like to think that I can draw that line without much trouble. However, as I’ll explain in the next post, my ability to do so was unexpectedly tested recently. How?
I went to play paintball.