A Picture and a Thousand Words: The Roleplay Community on Instagram
By Kate O’Flanagan (Deputy Features Editor)
Stick the letters ‘RP’ (or ‘_RP’, a stylistic choice preferred by some) after the name of any popular media or franchise and you generate thousands of results via hashtags; 480K for strangerthingsrp, 539K for marvelrp, even the long-finished Game of Thrones (GOT) yields 31.6K under the gotrp tag.
'RP' stands for roleplaying. Roleplaying games date back to Gygax and Arneson with Dungeons and Dragons in the 1970s, but social media has allowed the medium to rapidly evolve and cater to specific niches. Roleplaying on Instagram basically consists of users partaking in longform collaborative fanfiction writing. Users set up accounts to portray canon characters, those native to a specific universe, or original characters of their own creation.
Like improv comedy, 'Yes, and...' is the rule-of-thumb for roleplaying. Whether it's in adding your addition to the collective story or working out character dynamics one-on-one, it is better to build on your partner's creativity than shut down suggestions.
The roleplay community has existed in parallel with the mainstream Instagram userbase since its inception. As the social media site has increased and adapted the range of features available, so too has the roleplay community. Prior to the introduction of direct messaging, lengthy roleplays would be carried out in the comment sections of public posts with those involved being tagged in each response to keep track of the story unfolding.
Comments no longer being shown in chronological order hindered this form of narrative building, and the introduction of direct messaging largely marked the end of roleplays taking place on dedicated public posts. Instead, users turned to DMs. This change was reflected in the language used within the roleplay community. Prior to the introduction of DMs, users would discuss the length of their writing in terms of 'lines' but now it is more common to see the number of DM 'bubbles' used as a descriptor of length.
With the collaborative writing aspect moved to DMs, the public facing aspect of the roleplay community became more focused on account administration and individual pieces of writing. The usual set up for a roleplay account includes posts introducing the character the user will be portraying, crediting the filters and overlays used in photo editing to their creators, and the user’s rules for writing with them. These rules are pretty standardised across the community: no spamming, no godmodding (controlling another writer's character), and don't spam comments or DMs to get a response.
Users often list their personal triggers in this section to ensure that they will not be brought up while interacting with others. As a safeguarding measure, users may sometimes hide a password of sorts in their rules. Often something like asking the reader their favourite film or asking for a specific emoji to be commented, if you do not DM or comment the password then the user will not write with you.
Beyond administration, the posts on a typical roleplay account consist of developing the character through solo writing pieces. These can range in length from quick flash fiction to multi-post arcs. Prompt challenges are also popular, either via premade alphabet challenges or asking their followers to submit single words through Instagram question boxes which then form the basis of their corresponding writing.
Brina, an English teacher and active member of the Stranger Things roleplay community on Instagram believes that roleplaying is a useful tool that can benefit young people. She has even implemented a form of it into her classes — assigning her students creative writing prompts in which they imagine themselves as a character in a story that they are reading.
“Not only does writing regularly help to improve our grammar and spelling skills, but roleplaying increases our empathy as we take the time to imagine what it would be like to be a different person and write from their perspective. It also improves creative thinking and writing skills," she says, adding, "I'm not saying that absolutely everyone in the world should roleplay, but I think there's a stigma around it that it doesn't deserve."
Not only does roleplaying help develop writing skills, the photo and video editing that has become a basic component of roleplaying on Instagram has also benefited its practitioners. “All the skills I obtained through creating Instagram edits for my original characters in my teens I have used as a base for my video editing and animation classes in university,” one Canadian contributor says, “No way I would have picked up key framing and colour grading as quick as I did in school had it not been for my background in editing from the roleplay world.”
Oft-lauded soft skills can also be developed through roleplaying; it is an activity that fundamentally calls for communication, teamwork and adaptability. “There really is no limit,” this contributor goes on to say, “There are a vast array of skills and experience one can gain through roleplay. From running several roleplay stories at once to interacting with people of different ethnic, language and religious backgrounds to yourself. You can learn how to collaborate in a patient manner and mediate when creative differences arise, as well as time management.”
For all the potential benefits, the roleplay community does have its downsides. As anyone who has spent any amount of time online knows, the internet can bring out the worst toxicity in people. From anonymous hate messages to catfishing, the contributors to this article have experienced it all in their time roleplaying online.
"I've been cyberbullied through Instagram roleplay," Brina admits, "One particular moment left me devastated for a long time. I found out that a very close friend of mine, that I had invited to know intimate details of my life, was actually lying about many details of their life, especially their age. When I was cyberbullied, I grew incredibly paranoid and sobbed uncontrollably for days. I really worried that I could be doxxed over petty roleplay drama, and about how that could affect my offline life."
Another contributor also recounted instances of "verbal abuse," saying, "As with any entry into the social media world, you will run into extremely toxic individuals. But, I personally never found [ those individuals ] bad enough to warrant avoiding social media. Of course you hear horror stories, but usually a collective of positive creators would support each other in such situations."
Cancel culture also came up in discussions about the Instagram roleplay community. Call out posts detailing users' bad behaviour have become popular in recent years. While some are justified, tackling behaviour that should not be tolerated under any circumstances, such as racism, sexism, homophobia or transphobia, more often the targets of these call outs have committed lesser offences — being rude, but not cruel or abusive, in DMs or copying a caption layout without proper credit. Eunoia, who has been involved with online roleplay communities for almost ten years, reflects on the latter type; "There’s not really room for people to come back from these incidents if they get 'cancelled' because the roleplay community has a herdish mentality. Even if they’re getting cancelled for something that, in the end, doesn’t actually matter in the real world."
Even with the negative experiences they've had, everyone I spoke to for this article agreed on one thing: the people they've met are worth it.
For Eunoia, "the best part of the roleplay community is that it is, in fact, a community." While they still retain some anonymity online through the use of a pen name, they're grateful for the friends they've made.
Brina also mentioned the friends she's made, saying, "I'm still friends with people that I met during my first week of writing on Instagram in 2018. I'm so, so thankful for that. These people are absolutely lifelong friends of mine, and we still write together. They're a part of my life even when I log off of Instagram for the day."
Instagram isn't the only social media platform roleplayers call home. There are active communities on Twitter and Tumblr. Many people migrated to Instagram from other sites — the comments of Wattpad or Wikia, now called Fandom, pages. It seems that any platform created for people to communicate with others will be hijacked by those who want to tell stories.
As social media becomes increasingly insidious, trying to sell a false idealised life to its userbase, these communities centred on creativity remain a bright spot.
