Some of us started our "adventuring" before there were computer adventure games by playing pen-and-paper roleplaying games. Some examples of those games are Dungeon & Dragons, Call of Cthulhu, Hero etc. In this a GameMaster took the role of the world and the players took on a single player character. The GM had a prepared adventure and there were often battles payed out on a grid battlemap using dice. At younger age most of us were not roleplaying at all, just fighting monsters, finding loot and levelling. Later many adopted to some in-character speach to make the adventure become more engulfing and/or becoming more like watching a movie, hence roleplaying. A good example of an rp-adventure would be a mystery or a detective riddle where in-character communication was the way to solve it, not by fighting alone.
When MMOs started some had dedicated servers where the players were asked to roleplay or at least refrain from using too modern language or discussing things out-of-character. The feeling got more engulfing and you could more easily think of it as a good movie or book.
Nowadays there are sadly rather few roleplayers on the rp-servers. Many use some out-of-game speech but are drawn to the rp-servers to play with a slightly different player base and a somewhat different in-game-feeling. Add the fact that if you cannot understand what roleplaying is or what's so fun about it for some, then that player probably doesn't understand a lot of other things either... You don't get to meet those players or too many kids on an rp-server.
But be aware that roleplaying is NOT considered as something cool, quite the opposite in fact. You shouldn't mention this to girls when you are trying to impress them with your CE-uberness.
