Player

Lionel Messi, Argentine football player

A player is a participant in a game. There are various games for every number of players, from single-player solitaire to massively multiplayer online role-playing games, which can number in the thousands. There are also games, if they can be called that, that do not require any player, such as John Horton Conway's game of life.

In role-playing games, both traditional and video games, we speak of a player character (often abbreviated as PJ). Player characters are characters created and controlled by one player (meaning that each player plays a single PC during the game), while non-player characters (in turn often two and controlled by the game master. In role-playing games, the NPCs are controlled by the computer and are usually friendly or neutral towards the PCs, although the GM can also act on them, albeit in a limited way.