Roleplay with chatbots on character.ai: A new directionfor online gaming?

Chatbots are integrated into a multitude of settings and services, ranging from representing historical figures in museums to customer service assistants in online retail (Chaves & Gerosa, 2020).Simultaneously as there are attempts to find interesting use cases for the technology, scholarly efforts are trying to characterize this emerging human-chatbot interaction.A promising new avenue in this respect has been the relatively recently launched research strand of human-machine communication that is focused on the communicative aspects of Artificial Intelligence (Guzman & Lewis, 2020).In this paper, we argue that game studies has much to offer in this endeavor, and that by applying play -and roleplay, in particular -as a perspective we may develop critical insights into how people make sense of and use chatbots.Drawing on an ethnographic study of the chatbot platform character.ai,the paper explores how chatbots are used for roleplaying purposes and how game studies-informed understanding of interactivity and engagement helps us grasp how and why people use chatbots in various contexts.