What counts as roleplaying when you’re playing a video game?

I spend a lot of time playing roleplaying games, both tabletop and CRPGs, including MMOs like World of Warcraft and ARPGs like Diablo or Grim Dawn as well as more traditional RPGs like Baldur’s Gate 3 or Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous. The thing is, in a tabletop game played with friends, determining what roleplaying actually is doesn’t take a lot of work. It’s when you play the role of a character through the events of the game.

But it’s not so cut and dried when you’re playing a computer game. Even a game like Baldur’s Gate 3 can’t really adapt to all the vagaries of what a group of players, or even a single player, might decide they want to do in the game. Also, many of these games are single player, which means that you kind of get that whole If a player roleplays in solitude, and there’s no one there to tell you that those puns are the worst puns ever, did you even roleplay scenario. A lot of the time, I’m playing these games entirely by myself, so even if I do play the character and make decisions based on what I think that character would do it’s not interactive the way tabletop is.

It’s even weirder when I play World of Warcraft, because I’ve done so many different versions of that. I still remember when I first went Horde and played a Tauren, I used to play up the character when I was on TeamSpeak or Ventrilio. Nowadays, I am not in any RP guilds or even playing on RP servers. But I do find myself making decisions in game entirely based on the character I’m playing, and to me, that’s pretty much what RP means to me in these cases.

But now I ask you — how do you define RP when you’re playing a video game?