Adapted from material contributed by Lisa Leutheuser

What is roleplaying?

Many corporate employees are familiar with some form of role-playing in the context of their job, such as communication skill building, customer service training, assertiveness training, etc. In most of these the participants play themselves, responding to scenarios in order to practice those scenarios and develop skills. Roleplaying can go far beyond that, and there are many contexts in which it can be used for both soft skills training and problem solving.


Roleplaying involves adopting a specific role to play out in the game. The role will frame the player's perspective in the game: it will define how they respond to the game environment. One one end of the roleplaying spectrum, each participant simply plays themselves, or on the other extreme, in the acting zone, players enact roles very different from their real selves with very different background and motivations.







Why use roles in a game?

A game isn't real life, so the consequences are low. The game provides a safe environment in which to explore an issue. Using "roles", a person may express ideas/opinions that they might otherwise feel too intimidated to say. "That's not my opinion; it's what this person in this role would think."

Changing purpose changes the game

The purpose of your game, what your objectives are, will define or affect how  roles in the game are used. If you are training process, real-life scenarios, or skills, then you will play roles that are very similar to yourself (or just play yourself). If your game is intended to explore communication issues, as opposed to communication skills, you may play different roles. 

An example is a police department and a fire department that were having trouble collaborating on emergencies. It was causing a lot of problems. Each side was pointing fingers at the other, and they were not able to develop an atmosphere of teamwork. So they played a game in which the police had to play the firemen and the firemen played police. Then they had to see how they would respond to an incident. In this way, they explored communication issues, exposed barriers that were preventing good collaboration, and it opened up a lot of communication between the teams and led to better teamwork.  

This kind of scenario can raise a lot of emotions and needs to be carefully managed.

If you need to look at a problem in a new way, for example in the game played at lean training, in the first day of that training you play a game, pretty much for most of the day. In that game, you get to explore some of the lean tools or lean methods and how to think about solving problems in a "lean" way. It is a very abstract game, and in that case, the roles you play don't need to be related to who you are and your real-world job. It can be completely unrelated so in the lean healthcare game, people play patient transporters or surgeons, or other related roles, but it doesn't have to match up with what you do in real life. The role there is important, but it's not going to drive what you're doing as much.




Predictive modeling and "futuring"


Predictive modeling is another area where you roleplaying games are a natural fit. A typical game may involve a policy or procedure that will change in your business environment, and it is uncertain what effects the change will have in real life. The costs of unforseen consequences could be enormous. You can design a game that models how that process or policy is going to work out in your unit or workplace. Then the game is used to find problems before the change is implemented. This allows you to begin solving those problems before making a costly mistake. In this type of game, roles are chosen that are similar to the real-life roles of the players because you want to bring in their knowledge and expertise of their jobs into the game. That will give you a better, more accurate predictive outcome, so you can anticipate problems.


To demonstrate the manner in which changing the roles changes the purpose and outcomes, take the example of a game with the goal of improving the patient experience on a hospital unit. If the goal is to have your staff understand the patient's experience, staff should play the roles of the patients. But if the goal is to do some predictive analysis of a policy change which may affect how staff work and interact with the patients then you hospital staff should play roles similar to their real roles and jobs. Non-staff, preferably people without experience in the healthcare environment, would be recruited to play patients so that feedback is more accurate. Hospital staff have insider knowledge which would bias the results.

 










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Use for both communication change and skills training. Learners can
play different roles than they would play in real life, to facilitate
improved communication.


A vital part of immersive simulations and role playing games is the debriefing




Imagining the World: The Case for Non-Rendered Virtuality - the Role Play Simulation Model




Design of a role-playing game to study the trajectories of health care workers in an operating room




DOI Bookmark: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1125451.1125658




ABSTRACT




Drawing on an ethnographic study of hospital work in an operating
room, we present the design and implementation of a web-based
role-playing application of a master schedule. We show how we simulate
the coordination mechanisms and trajectories of hospital personnel as
they move patients in and out of OR. Experiments are proposed to show
how active and passive notification systems (interruptions) are
expected to affect trajectory management and performance over time.




Creating Learning Opportunities Using an RPS Authoring Tool (Linser & Ip)

a role-centred simulation or a role-play simulation (RPS) (Linser,
Naidu, & Ip 1999) is a dynamic artificial environment in which
human 'agents' respond to a scenario by adopting and playing roles with
defined characteristics and relations to one another. In the case we
are discussing it is web environments in which participants (human
agents) play the roles of different actors in organizations,
communities, or other institutions. The interaction between the players
and the material to be learned is mediated by the experience of playing
in the environment created.




Role-play simulations have been found to be a very engaging and
effective learning strategy for a number of soft skill subject domains,
including politics (Vincent & Shepherd 1998; Ip & Linser 1999;
2001), leadership training (Linser, Waniganayake & Wilks 2004),
marketing, work place issues etc. The success of these runs of RPSs
obviously depended on a number of factors including creative design,
the skills of the moderator (Ip, Linser, & Jasinski 2002), and
other factors. This paper focuses on the foundation phase of designing
RPS.




EJ330946 - Geriatrix: A Role-Playing Game.

Hoffman, Stephanie B.; And Others




To sensitize medical students to the complexities of geriatric
patient care, the geriatrics faculty of Upstate Medical Center's
Clinical Campus developed Geriatrix, a role-playing game. Students
attempt to win points in a board game containing Fact, Concept, and
Crisis Squares. Crises promote exposure to ethical dilemmas and invite
intense debate and questioning. (Author/BL)