The internet is, first and foremost, a tool for communication.  People get online to transfer ideas, interact with others, and generally learn and make themselves known to others.  Although the people involved in these exchanges may never meet each other, and in some cases, have these interactions in totally fantastic settings, the psychology behind these interactions is real since real people are still interacting with each other through machines.  However, unlike in real life, the computer allows you to set up your identity however you want it to be.

The most simple form of person to person interaction on the internet is probably the message board.  The format isn't much more than threads of text on a screen, and most of the time, people don't have much to identify themselves with aside from a screenname and possibly a small picture icon.  While this is somewhat limiting to the imagination, users can still create identities for themselves through the way they post, which may be quite different from how they act in real life.  Pictured here is GameFAQs, a website with message boards that specialize in video games.  Forums for online games can be used to arrange things in game, but more commonly people discuss various tips and pointers.

A massively multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG) provides even more ways for a person to assert an identity that may or may not accurately reflect who they are in real life.  Being a game, players can choose a 3D avatar and create an identity for themselves based on the types of quests they choose to undertake and the choices they make in game.  Current MMORPGs decended from Multi User Dungeons (MUDs), a nongraphical game resembling a chatroom or message board only with elements taken from classic tabletop RPGs.

Of course, the social RPG is not a concept that was invented along with online video games by any means.  The concept of being someone you're not and working along with a group of friends and their in game avatars has been around since the very earliest days of Dungeons and Dragons.  in fact, some would consider this the most pure form of RPG and argue that today's MMORPGs don't really deserve the title of role playing game at all.  After all, when most people log into Everquest or World of Warcraft, they aren't necessarily letting what they think the personality of an elf cleric ought to be influence the way they act and play.

In fact, on some occasions, players would argue that MMORPGs barely even qualify as games.  Unlike traditional pen and paper RPGs or single player RPGs, quests in these online games are often designed to be as time consuming as possible.  The reason for this is simple.  The people who run MMORPGs must charge a monthly fee to players in order to run such large servers, so the longer they can get people to stay on and play, the more money they will make.  This method of game design leads to long, tedious quests in which the main purpose is to level up the character or obtain some super rare, powerful item.  This aspect of gameplay is parodied in Progress Quest here, which essentially does all the leveling up for you.  Players begin to experience a boredom with the game that comes out in their interactions with other players, but they still don't simply stop playing and spending all that money since they become addicted to the social atmosphere of the game.

According to this graph, we can see the amount of time people spend playing Everquest, an MMORPG, compared to online games of other genres.  Players spend significantly more time playing EQ than Quake, a first person shooter, and nearly twice as much time playing it than Starcraft, a real time strategy game.

In this graph, we can see the majority of people play EQ 10-20 or 20-30 hours a week, comparable to some part time jobs.

With the amount of time some people spend playing MMORPGs like Everquest, addiction can be a major problem.  Although the social interactions are real and people often make true friends online that they wouldn't mind meeting in real life, time spent online can easily cut into and even damage real life relationships.