Roleplay (RP) is one of those pots of gold at the end of the Rainbow – everyone sees it, some people will try to reach it, and even less actually achieve it.
In looking at Roleplay in terms of someone who works a 9-5 job, where they are in a position where they have to pretend to be nice and happy – should you really expect that person to come home and RP an Elven Warrior for countless hours? Heck, their job already requires RP on an intense level. Why should their recreation time be more of the same?
By extension of that, you could suggest that the super happy Sales Person come home and develop a nasty, evil mean character to counter their daytime persona. That does sound like a valid idea, until you realise that different people have different perceptions of Good vs Evil. I can see my evil mean character as the most evil presence in the entire universe and play it to those limits – and yet your own perception of my evil mean character will be more along the lines of a hormonal teenage girl – nasty yeah, but pfft. An amateur at the height of my brilliance!
Then we take into account the perspective of a third person – the uninitiated. This is the player who has not separated out the differences between a character’s persona and a player’s behaviour. In reality, I’m just a laid back dude who is the epitome of chilled out. My online persona is a kitten-killing, goat sacrificing, steals-candy-from-a-baby evil Lord Death_Bitches. The uninitiated sees this character and immediately responds with their real persona rather than their own version of a Hero, or even their corresponding Villain. All of a sudden, Lord Death_Bitches is too hard to deal with, and I’m either reported for abuse, put onto an ignore list, or the new player leaves because ‘all people on this game are bastards’. Ultimately, there are some uninitiated who will take up the gauntlet and dare to actively participate and figure out for themselves the difference between Ben (Chill) and Virax (Death_Bitches). But those are far and few between.
Over the years I have seen people roleplay online, and in a loose environment their performance becomes…rote. All their characters behave the same, with the same delivery, the same staunch speech patterns, and conversely – the over-obvious attempts at masking the recognisable features. Even when I had my first mud experience back in 1996, I was able to spot the typical character creations – apparently in mythical worlds, all orphans are powerful warriors/mages who grew up in abject poverty, who also discovered their latent abilities right after they found out they were the long lost child of King Myztylplyx (not to offend anyone who uses the template – but how many RP’ers make characters that are servants, without a sexual role?).
By about 2000 I decided that enforcing RP was probably the hardest thing in the history of gaming to do. You cannot mandate creativity, you cannot mandate happy participation. All we can do as designers is provide the tools for an honest evening’s relaxation and hope someone enjoys their time in our worlds. The obvious exception here is physical tabletop pen and paper dice rolling, but that can be seen as a different extension of the genre in game adventuring.