>>106
Well, I did notice that some people are super unwilling to even mention 1-st person roleplay. and want to distance from all that as far as they can but In my experience, most are willing to do it in 1-st person and they really imagine themselves in that situation rather than collaborating on the story. (this is pretty easy to see and people usually fully reveal themselves during roleplay)
So of course it can be both ways.

In my opinion that is the whole purpose of all role-everything, no matter if it is game or fantasy, that when you start a game of doom on your PC you are not just controlling the character you are the character itself. There are other kinds of games where you may be given the role of some mentally sick person, role of god or assassin or a role of a school shooter and you experience what it is to be that person. Even if you are a guy and you are given the role of the girl you really become a girl and your orientation changes you now worry about girly stuff and fall in love with hot guys.
This is the main purpose of that interactive media and it is also quite a powerful brainwashing tool too. when a creator of the game forces you do something like killing an innocent person it is *you* who do the killing, not a fictional character. and you have to reevaluate your moral principles that maybe in some situations it is worth killing innocent people for a certain benefit.

Not all people are very uptight about the gender and sex of their partner or even their own gender. as I noticed the majority of guys play bisexual girls. and if you see some very perverted girl online then most likely she is a guy. You know that all cute catgirls in RPG games are guys ;)
It looks like most people are not too focused on their identity and don't care who they are as long as they have some fun. But yes there are also people who are Like you describe and it is even hard to tell who is the majority.

Movies and books are a bit different because they do not put you in the place of any character, but you are rather made to be a friend (or guardian angel) of that character and you are sharing the same experiences together.
If you have a story about a serial killer and his victim you can either associate yourself with the killer or with a victim. Same as when you watch a basketball game on TV. when you choose one of the teams. If you see that police is about to enter the base of your friend murderer you will be thinking "run run away they are coming for you" of if you see that he left some evidence you think "hey what are you doing?"
You can watch one movie where the detective is trying to catch a thief and another movie where the thief is trying to outsmart the detective and in both those situations, your moral principles will swap.
You do not necessarily have to become that character but now you think that stealing of good and police is bad. you associate yourself with the world where they live and the story author usually puts you in a certain position of that world.


The idea that the character had to be certain gender race and nationality is, of course, excessive because a normal human being will have no problems associating himself with a mouse or tentacle monster if that's necessary. It does not need to be you but you have to feel through your empathy what that character feels. I think this idea is rather a result of identity politics where you are only supposed to associate with your own kind so you are not allowed to associate yourself with a white protagonist if you are black.
But anyways the goals is to imagine yourself being "with that character" not being "that character" ) of course you would not like to be with a totally incompetent idiot and even more, you don't want to be with hypercompetent god. you want your friend to be somewhat similar to you so that you could have some shared experience.