Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
Wiktionary
alt. To Take on a role (in the sense an actor has a role) and enacting or playing that character. vb. To Take on a role (in the sense an actor has a role) and enacting or playing that character.
Usage examples of "role-play".
When she was a kid, Cutler and her friends had played role-playing games, one right after another, their computers linked into a network of make-believe, eating up hours, days, entire weekends with the flights of adventure and fantasy.
As an adult it amused him to add new layers of role-playing and gamesmanship to an otherwise dreary life.
Already I was letting go of the notion that a lone Webmaster was skillfully engaging in ghostly role-playing.
Ahmed and Ginko engaged in a role-playing game, while Harry Chin watched.
The youngster was a MUDhead - he spent hours in the Multiuser Domain chat rooms on the Internet, excelling at role-playing games and active in creating and maintaining the fantasy societies so popular in the MUD realm.
Up to now, and despite everything that had happened to them, it had still been possible to imagine that they were engaged in some kind of ultrarealistic role-playing game.
The seam of the box gave way suddenly and a dozen role-playing figurines spilled out, wizards and sorcerers clattering across the cobbles at his feet.
Sure enough, all the stuff about fantasy games and role-playing was kept ambiguous, the text peppered with conditionals: 'may have', 'could be', 'if.
Harrison's work is definitionally fluid, you can't really grasp the worlds he creates, but I'm doing a sort of Mike Harrison role-playing game.
That "struggle" is often formed between the various personalities representing the various role-plays that the human form has dependencies upon, and their interpretations about: he/she versus me.
When he's not writing or editing, he enjoys role-playing games and disc golf.
Though no genetic material is actually exchanged, this gender role-playing has real physiological and reproductive effects: animals who have pseudocopulated are far more fertile than those who have not.
People coming out of surgery are being offered places in a psychological/historical research project aimed at probing the social conditions of the first dark age by live role-play.
He was often in character, and quite consistent in his role-playing.
But Goto Dengo takes it pretty calmly and instantly cross-correlates it to late-breaking developments in the Nipponese game industry, which has been doing this gradual paradigm shift from arcade to role-playing games with actual narratives.