Can Playing Yourself Be Called Role-Playing?

Role-playing games are all about, well, playing roles, and if that's true, then no, players shouldn't play "themselves". Then again, some games, like Villains & Vigilantes and Timelords, actively encouraged you to do so, and even offered ways to derive your own stats. And one could say that many players, though technically playing a "character", just don't have the acting chops (or interest) to play anything but themselves, albeit themselves in that other role. It's Jim if he were a starship captain, or Lucy if she were an Elven ranger.

What many players want in the RPG experience isn't so much incarnating a different character, as an actor would, but placing themselves in an adventurous situation. Our own lives might be relatively dull, or at least, devoid of action and danger (and that's a good thing), or our status in society might not be a privileged one like that of "hero", or we might not have the incredible skills and powers RPGs often offer. Tabletop role-playing answers the question of what YOU would do if you had the skill, ability and opportunity to be a hero, usually in a fantastic world unlike your own.

Let's Talk Examples
Most role-playing campaigns can easily be tailored to a group of auto-portraits, though you may have to bar certain backgrounds to do it. Fiction is full of stories in which a normal person from the mundane world finds his or herself in another world where destiny forces them to be a hero. Narnia, Forbidden Kingdom, Buck Rogers, Guardians of the Flame, The Last Starfighter, and lots more besides. In BTRC's Timelords, an evening with friends intersects with a temporal accident that sends the whole group to another time. They start hopping through time using the artifact that brought them there, accumulating skills as they go along. You may start out as yourself, but you'll come back as a hero. In Villains & Vigilantes, you are your secret identity, but of course, the superhero you become can have any powers or skills you want him to have. I could be an orphaned alien raised by my human parents, or have been bitten by a radioactive grasshopper.

There are many games that could be repurposed for the "outsider" campaign. I tried to convince at least one player in my Doctor Who campaign to play himself, since Companions pretty much have the same power level as any of us do. Why CAN'T a TARDIS appear in my apartment anyway? I'm in spacetime somewhere, right? GURPS Fantasy's Banestorm event could be used to bring any group of players to a fantasy world, perhaps magically imbued with the skills package or potential of their preferred D&D character class. A flight into the Bermuda Triangle could take the gang to a far future or a lost pocket dimension like Savage Worlds' Slipstream. Or maybe reality isn't what we think. Go Matrix or Inception or Unknown Armies on your players' asses. There's also the possibility of taking the campaign to the near future, aging everyone 5 to 10 years (depending on how old you are now) and allowing them to idealize their abilities and situations to fit the campaign. Your survive the Apocalypse today, who do you become in 10 years' time. Or jump ahead hundreds of years - what if we were all reincarnated?
Not You But You Recognize All the Stuff
A fun reversal of this idea is allowing your players to play different characters, as usual, but placing them in environments that are familiar to them. A current day campaign, for example, could take place in your own home town. Not only do the details come across very well, taking you away from generic locations that are too often a staple of role-playing sessions, but players can more easily invoke the world they live in and get off the map, as it were. The real world is the ultimate sandbox. Of course, you can also adapt your home town for another world. I once ran a superhero PBeM in which my town and the surrounding region were merged into a giant metropolis. The fishing village a half-hour away became the city's docks, and the mountain with the strange name became the source of mystical power in the area. This created a large canvas on which even the players could paint, creating their own neighborhoods based on their local knowledge.

Something else I've done is fill out a large NPC cast by using real people. Most of my group is usually pulled from an improv league that numbers 20 to 30 people, color-coded into teams. That seemed a perfect scheme to fill the ranks of various departments aboard our RPG's starship. Making sure to turn some of the more extreme personalities into their corresponding alien races, there wasn't much else needed to complete the picture. Because everyone knew the characters each NPC was based on, it was easy for the players to tell them apart and for the GM to act them out. And from there, create crews from other ships based on other university teams we knew, or the top level brass using the league's alumni. Any game with a base of operations could use this trick.

You may not want to play yourself, but the real world does offer much inspiration.

(Inspired by a discussion started by The Acrobatic Flea at Hero Press).