Role-playing

• 1. Introduction

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  Role-playing is the act of changing one's behaviour to assume a different role, and it runs through human experience in ways most people never think to connect. Children do it instinctively. Soldiers do it under orders. Researchers use it to study the darkest corners of human obedience. The word covers make-believe in the backyard and military wargames on supercomputers. It encompasses ancient Roman spectacles, the improvised comedy of 16th-century Italian street performers, and online worlds built by hundreds of strangers who may never meet.

  What does it mean to step outside yourself and inhabit another? How did role-playing move from the classroom to the clinic? And why did psychologists like Stanley Milgram and Phillip Zimbardo turn to it as a research tool? Those are the questions this documentary will try to answer.

• 2. Play and Pretend

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  Make-believe is one of the earliest forms of role-playing a child encounters. In it, children adopt characters like doctor and act out those roles in character. Sometimes make-believe turns competitive and oppositional, producing games like cops and robbers, where the drama of conflict gives the play its structure.

  This is not merely entertainment. Psychologists have found that role-playing sits at the heart of a child's psychological development. The moment a child begins to define "I" and to separate themselves from an adult is described as both the initial condition for and the result of role play. The self, in other words, is partly built through the act of performing it. Researchers have also documented behavioral change through role-playing: smokers who were asked to pretend to be a person diagnosed with lung cancer reported a negative attitude toward smoking afterward.

• 3. Centuries of Re-Enactment

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  The ancient Romans, Han Chinese, and medieval Europeans all organized events in which everyone pretended to be from an earlier age. Scholars who have studied these gatherings judge entertainment to have been the primary purpose. These were not reconstructions in the modern sense but communal performances in which ordinary people stepped into the past for an afternoon.

  Within the 20th century, historical re-enactment shifted from occasional spectacle to a sustained hobby pursued by adults in their own time and on their own terms. This shift reflects something significant: the impulse to inhabit another era moved from a socially sanctioned event into personal leisure, part of a broader expansion of role-playing into private life.

• 4. Improvisation and the Stage

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  Improvisational theatre traces its lineage to the Commedia dell'Arte tradition of the 16th century, when performers built scenes on the fly from stock characters and audience energy. Modern improvisational theatre found its classroom footing in the 1950s, through the theatre games of Viola Spolin and Keith Johnstone.

  Spolin was one of the founders of the comedy troupe Second City. As early as 1946, she insisted that her exercises were games and that they involved role-playing. Her own view was precise: role-playing in the theatre was rehearsal and actor training, or the playing of the role of actor versus the roles performed onstage. But the exercises she designed took on a life of their own. Many people now use her games purely for enjoyment, independent of any professional stage work.

• 5. Games With Rules

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  A role-playing game is a game in which participants assume the roles of characters and collaboratively create stories. The actions of those characters succeed or fail according to a formal system of rules and guidelines, but within those rules players may improvise freely. The choices they make shape both the direction and the outcome of the game.

  Online role-playing extended this format to groups ranging from two to several hundred people, using public forums, private message boards, mailing lists, chatrooms, and instant-messaging services to build worlds and characters over timespans ranging from a few hours to several years. Forum-based roleplays often set their own standards: minimum word counts, character applications, and dedicated boards for plotting. When existing books, movies, or games serve as the setting, the practice edges toward collaborative fan-fiction, with players choosing either established canon characters or original characters they create themselves.

• 6. Training and Simulation

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  Role-playing entered professional training under the name role training, where people rehearse situations alone or with others to prepare for future performance and to sharpen their abilities. Occupational training, educational exercises, medical role-play, and certain military wargames all fall under this heading.

  One of the first uses of computers was to simulate real-world conditions for participants role-playing the flying of aircraft. Flight simulators solved the equations of flight and trained future pilots. The army took this further, running full-time role-playing simulations with soldiers in both full-scale training exercises and targeted drills covering specific tasks under wartime conditions. Weapon firing, vehicle simulators, and control station mock-ups were among the tools. A very different training application is the teddy bear hospital, a roleplay strategy in which pediatric and nursing medical students act as teddy doctors for children who act as the carer of a stuffed toy. Programs for teddy bear hospitals now operate at dozens of universities and medical facilities worldwide, used both to reduce children's anxiety and to help medical students understand pediatric patients.

• 7. A Research Tool

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  Kurt Lewin used role assignment in his early classic social psychology experiments in 1939. Stanley Milgram followed in 1963, and Phillip Zimbardo in 1971. Each assigned research participants to particular roles and instructed them to act as if specific conditions were real, then observed what followed.

  Herbert Kelman, writing in 1965, suggested that role-playing might be "the most promising source" of research methods that could replace studies relying on deception. That is a striking claim: one form of performance, he argued, might be the ethical alternative to another. Whether the research community adopted his recommendation is a separate story, but the fact that some of the most debated experiments in psychology's history turned on role assignment speaks to how far this practice reaches. Zimbardo's experiment, in particular, raised lasting questions about what happens when ordinary people are given roles with real authority.