Rolepages is the novel creation of a group of people who are tired of always having to be themselves online. The internet is an unprecedented medium for anonymity, which can give people the freedom to explore who the really are without fear of consequence. Despite this, most of the big social networks encourage you to sign up for their sites as a real person, with real information displayed to friends, family, and coworkers. RolePages.com fills in the gap left by these other services, by allowing you to sign up for their community as anyone, or anything, that you can imagine.
The idea is pretty simple. Sometimes you want to escape from your own personal reality. Sometimes you want to interact with people, but not have to worry about the consequences. That’s where RolePages comes in. They have taken the popularity of sites such as Facebook, Myspace, and Bebo, and given users the chance to enjoy these venues, without having to worry about their actions being traced back to their real lives.
It is of course possible to sign up for a fictional account on any of the big social networks. The problem is that often, the administration of these networks will delete your account, or sanction you for the creation of accounts which are not, strictly speaking, real. Even if the rules are not enforced, you still have a community set up to hamper the engagement of any fictional interactions.
The name RolePages of course refers n part to the act of roleplaying, a game where people assume fictional roles and then tell stories through imagining actions of those characters in a made up environment. While the site does consist of a core group of roleplaying members, the actual purpose of the community is the telling of stories. This is not your old dungeons and dragons dice game. Rolepages makes use of video, pictures, chat rooms, forums, profiles, and a host of other communication technologies to develop elaborate stories around each new member that joins.
The eventual goal of the website is to become a kind of book, which is constantly updated by its members in a variety of ways. The idea is that web 2.0 technology has taken the power of the author, and the director, and put it in the hands of the group, thus allowing stories to be collaborative projects, with each member contributing as much or as little as they want.
At present RolePages has several layers. You have personal profiles for each member, which allows them to set up their characters background story. Then you have groups, forums, and blog posts, which allow these characters to create a back story for the fictional world. Finally you have the chat room, where all of these ideas can be “acted” out in real time by the various members of the site. The entire site is then multiplied through the use of twitter, facebook, myspace, and a host of other communication technologies, which allows it to stretch far beyond the borders of its own collective.
The site is located at http://www.RolePages.com and is free and open for membership. Interview requests, inquiries, and questions can be directed to the site creator Joseph Gambit, who can be reached at rolepages@gmail.com
