When WoW first launched in 2005, probably around a quarter of the characters you would meet would react to you ‘in character’. Nobody talked about ‘vendoring trash’ and ‘dinging’ or ‘rezzing at the GY’. Partly because it took a while for a consistent game jargon to emerge, of course, but also because there wasn’t the same sense of urgency to race up through the levels and collect emblems from heroic dungeons for ilevel 245 gear. So there was a lot more, “Hey citizen, shall we band together to rid the world of this fearsome gnoll, known as Hogger?”

In fact, there was enough of this going on for players to demand – and receive – specific role-playing servers where the really hardcore RP types could get all “hail fellow, well met” with each other.

To begin with, in fact, it was so extreme that I was once accused of talking ‘out of character’ when I referred to the ‘tank’. Apparently, this was inappropriate since tanks weren’t invented until the first World War.

Nowadays, RP servers might have marginally fewer rogues called Istabu, but trade chat is still full of “LFM ToC25, dps 5k minimum & link achieve”. It’s hardly immersive. To combat this (assuming you care enough to want to try), you need to make sure the story of your own character is strong enough that it can survive these intrusions. Sometimes, it can be a superficial thing. When I roll new characters, I like to choose hairstyles that are as youthful as possible. Then, every ten levels or so, I take a trip to the barber and make myself a shade greyer or recede the hairline by another notch, or make my beard a little more luxuriant. Sometimes, role playing is about arbitrarily making my life harder, just for the sake of characterisation. I have a druid who is vegetarian, so no Fish Feasts for her. And my warrior can’t swim. In fact, he is so scared of the water that he won’t even go on any of the boats. If he wants to get to Kalimdor, he has to find a friendly warlock to summon him there, until he can build his own gnomish teleportation device.

Self-imposed restrictions like this are obviously daft, from a purely min-maxing point of view. But what you lose in levelling speed or questing convenience, you gain in the sense of connection to your character. Even if all your interaction with other players is out of character, you will still know, deep down, that your guy is not just a collection of stats. He is a proud, neurotic, dipsomaniac coward. Or an irascible, technophobic, obsessive-compulsive pagan. In other words, as well as being powerful and heroic, he is complicated, troubled and flawed.

Just like the rest of us.
Luis Villazon