Roleplay simulation

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Roleplay simulation is an experiential learning method in which either amateur or professional roleplayers (also called interactors) improvise with learners as part of a simulated scenario. Roleplay is designed primarily to build first-person experience in a safe and supportive environment. Roleplay is widely acknowledged as a powerful technique across multiple avenues of training and education.

Contents

History

Howard Barrows invented the model for medical patient role-playing in 1963 at University of Southern California. [1] This program allowed doctors practice taking medical histories and conducting physical examinations by participating in a one-on-one scenario with a role-player. The role-players (called Standardized Patients or SP) were also trained on providing performance evaluations after the fiction of the scenario was complete. Barrows continued to evolve this model, eventually bringing it to other physicians in the 1970s, and into the academic world in the 1980s. Today, many hospitals and medical universities have their own standardized patient programs that employ part-time role-players trained to specific standards of interaction. The Association of Standardized Patient Educators has members from six different continents. [2]

An industry of professional skills training emerged in the late 1990s, primarily in the United Kingdom. [3] Companies began hiring acting professionals to create situational dramas to be overcome by learners as part of an experiential learning methodology. [4] Today, there are more than twenty companies in the UK that specialize in providing role-players for workplace simulations.[ citation needed ]

Professional military role-players have been employed by the US Military since 2001, primarily as a response to the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States. Preparation requirements for the resulting War in Afghanistan created a need for cultural role-players skilled in languages and customs of current theaters of war to populate simulated villages and urban environments. [5]

Use in experiential learning

Medical training

Medical role-players typically fall under the category of Standardized Patients (SP). SPs are extensively used in medical and nursing education to allow students to practice and improve their clinical and conversational skills for an actual patient encounter. SPs commonly provide feedback after such encounters. They are also useful to train students to learn professional conduct in potentially embarrassing situations such as pelvic or breast exams. SPs are also used extensively in testing of clinical skills of students, usually as a part of an objective structured clinical examination. Typically, the SP will use a checklist to record the details of the encounter.

Role-players can engage with medical learners in one of two ways:

  1. As part of a simulation wherein both learner and role-player are aware of the fiction, and have established rules and boundaries (i.e. the "fiction contract").
  2. Surreptitiously, for purposes of healthcare provider evaluation or health informatics research.

Medical role-players can also be used to portray distraught or bereaved family members of patients in emergency medicine scenarios, giving the learners practice in handling emotionally difficult or distracting situations.

Military training

Role-players in military simulations can portray various types of interactive characters:

Opposing force (OPFOR)

Role-players are trained to accurately emulate real-life enemies in order to provide a more realistic experience for military personnel. To avoid the diplomatic ramifications of naming a real nation as a likely enemy, training scenarios often use fictional countries with similar military characteristics to the expected real-world foes. [6]

Civilians on the battlefield (COB)

Some COB role-players are expatriates of foreign countries who have the looks, language skills, and cultural familiarity needed to accurately portray key points of interaction in a military scenario. Others are locals who may be unskilled as actors, and primarily serve to populate a particular area of operations within a military scenario so that soldiers can be challenged with problems of crowd control, or situational awareness. [7]

Tactical Combat Casualty Care (TC3)

Field medical training, or Tactical Combat Casualty Care training utilizes role-players to portray wounded soldiers and civilians on the battlefield. Role-players will often scream in pain, convulse, and panic to create extreme emotional conditions under which battle medics must operate proficiently. It is not uncommon for TC3 scenarios to employee amputees as role-players. These role-players are fitted with realistic prosthetic wounds that can gush synthetic blood or other bodily fluids in order to heighten the emotional intensity of a simulation. It is expected that trainees who are routinely exposed to such intense situations in simulations will eventually experience a level of "stress-inoculation" that will provide life-saving advantages in real battle situations. [8]

Law Enforcement Training

Role-players are often hired by law enforcement agencies to portray criminals or victims of crimes in scenarios that simulate typical law enforcement situations. These can range from a response to a domestic violence call to an "active shooter" scenario. Role-players are advantageous over video-based police simulations in that they can escalate or de-escalate a confrontational situation in response to the words, body language, and tone of voice of the trainee. This becomes key in effective use-of-force training.

Law enforcement scenarios use role-players for scenarios such as interrogation, hostage negotiation, and witness interviews. [9] Recently, law enforcement agencies have begun to introduce the identification of human trafficking victims into their role-player curriculum. [10]

The Federal Law Enforcement Training Center at Glynco, Georgia, is the largest employer of non-military role-players in the United States.

Business Leadership Training

Role-players are used by businesses to equip their leadership with experience in handling interpersonal conflict, negotiations, interviews, performance reviews, customer service, workplace safety, and ethical dilemmas. A role-player may also simulate difficult and sensitive conversations such as layoffs, or reports of sexual harassment. This gives leaders a chance to make mistakes in a safe environment, rather than learn from a mistake in the real world, which could lead to costly litigation.

Mediation and Facilitation Training

Role-playing is used to equip future practitioners with experience in using diverse skills, structures, and methods to handle various mediation and facilitation scenarios. These roleplays usually have students roleplaying both the mediation-facilitation and client-sides of the interactions; however, more intense or complicated scenarios can be explored with more experienced or professional role-players. The interactions are usually scaffolded; with various key features of the participants and situation defined, but much of the roleplay is improvised. The practice of roleplay in this context promotes several important factors, beyond basic skill-building. It fosters the capacity for multiperspectival thinking. It helps mediators and facilitators cultivate empathy and compassion for their clients, this cultivation can be critical for achieving better outcomes.

Forecasting

Role-play also has applications in forecasting. One forecasting method is to simulate the condition(s) being studied. Some experts in forecasting have found that role-thinking for produces less accurate forecasts than when groups act as protagonists in their interactions with one another. [11] [12]

Learning advantages

The use of skilled role-players in a simulation has several benefits over using unskilled confederates:

Limitations

Role-players can be expensive to organizations with limited training resources. Role-player fees are typically contingent upon skill and level of specialized knowledge, and can range from minimum wage to more than US$100 per hour.

Certain types of training that require objectively quantifiable measures of success can be incompatible with the variability of using a human-in-the-loop.

In fiction

The Diamond Age (novel)

Interactors feature prominently in Neal Stephenson's novel, The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer .

Set in the near-future, artificial intelligence is depicted in the novel as having failed in its goal of creating software capable of passing the Turing Test, therefore it is renamed "pseudo-intelligence". As a result, virtual reality entertainments are augmented by role-players skilled in the use of digital puppetry who don motion capture suits and perform as interactive avatars within virtual environments. These human-in-the-loop simulations are known as "ractives" (an abbreviation of "interactives"), and the performers who drive them are called "ractors" (an abbreviation of "interactors").

The Game (film)

Ubiquitous and surreptitious role-players are the primary plot drivers of the 1997 film, The Game, directed by David Fincher. The protagonist agrees to participate in a vaguely defined game hosted by a high-end entertainment company called Consumer Recreation Services. He later ends up being manipulated by dozens of CSR role-players who psychologically torment him to the brink of suicide.

The Magus (novel)

In the John Fowles' novel, The Magus, an eccentric and wealthy recluse uses surreptitious role-players to manipulate the protagonist. The novel never fully clarifies which characters are "real", and which are being portrayed by actors. Additionally, there are role-players who engage with the protagonist as multiple different characters. He eventually loses the ability to distinguish artifice from reality, and realizes that he has become a fictionalized version of himself in the simulation of his own life.

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Live action role-playing game</span> Form of role-playing game where participants act out the roles

A live action role-playing game (LARP) is a form of role-playing game where the participants physically portray their characters. The players pursue goals within a fictional setting represented by real-world environments while interacting with each other in character. The outcome of player actions may be mediated by game rules or determined by consensus among players. Event arrangers called gamemasters decide the setting and rules to be used and facilitate play.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Simulation</span> Imitation of the operation of a real-world process or system over time

A simulation is an imitative representation of a process or system that could exist in the real world. In this broad sense, simulation can often be used interchangeably with model. Sometimes a clear distinction between the two terms is made, in which simulations require the use of models; the model represents the key characteristics or behaviors of the selected system or process, whereas the simulation represents the evolution of the model over time. Another way to distinguish between the terms is to define simulation as experimentation with the help of a model. This definition includes time-independent simulations. Often, computers are used to execute the simulation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sexual roleplay</span> Sexual and other interactions of people playing type roles

Sexual roleplay is roleplay that has a strong erotic element. It may involve two or more people who act out roles in order to bring to life a sexual fantasy and may be a form of foreplay and be sexually arousing. Many people regard sexual roleplay as a means of overcoming sexual inhibitions. It may take place in the real world, or via an internet forum, chat-room, video-game, or email—allowing for physically or virtually impossible erotic interests to be enacted.

Educational games are games explicitly designed with educational purposes, or which have incidental or secondary educational value. All types of games may be used in an educational environment, however educational games are games that are designed to help people learn about certain subjects, expand concepts, reinforce development, understand a historical event or culture, or assist them in learning a skill as they play. Game types include board, card, and video games.

Situated learning is a theory that explains an individual's acquisition of professional skills and includes research on apprenticeship into how legitimate peripheral participation leads to membership in a community of practice. Situated learning "takes as its focus the relationship between learning and the social situation in which it occurs".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Experiential learning</span> Learn by reflect on active involvement

Experiential learning (ExL) is the process of learning through experience, and is more narrowly defined as "learning through reflection on doing". Hands-on learning can be a form of experiential learning, but does not necessarily involve students reflecting on their product. Experiential learning is distinct from rote or didactic learning, in which the learner plays a comparatively passive role. It is related to, but not synonymous with, other forms of active learning such as action learning, adventure learning, free-choice learning, cooperative learning, service-learning, and situated learning.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mixed reality</span> Merging of real and virtual worlds to produce new environments

Mixed reality (MR) is a term used to describe the merging of a real-world environment and a computer-generated one. Physical and virtual objects may co-exist in mixed reality environments and interact in real time.

The term virtual patient is used to describe interactive computer simulations used in health care education to train students on clinical processes such as making diagnoses and therapeutic decisions. Virtual patients attempt to combine modern technologies and game-based learning to facilitate education, and complement real clinical training. Using virtual patients is increasing in healthcare due to increased demands on healthcare professionals, education of healthcare trainees, and providing learners with a safe practice environment. There are many formats from which a virtual patient may be chosen, but the overarching principle is that of interactivity. Virtual patients typically have mechanisms where information is parsed out in response to the learners, simulating how patients respond to different treatments. Interactivity can be created with questions, specific decision-making tasks, text composition, etc., and is non-sequential. Most systems provide quantitative and qualitative feedback. In some cases, virtual patients are not full simulations themselves, but are mainly based on paper-based cases; as they do not allow for physical examination or an in-depth medical history of an actual patient. There are certain drawbacks as crucial clinical findings may be missed due to the lack of examining patients in person.

Business simulation or corporate simulation is simulation used for business training, education or analysis. It can be scenario-based or numeric-based.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Medical simulation</span> Medical training and evaluation technique

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An instructional simulation, also called an educational simulation, is a simulation of some type of reality but which also includes instructional elements that help a learner explore, navigate or obtain more information about that system or environment that cannot generally be acquired from mere experimentation. Instructional simulations are typically goal oriented and focus learners on specific facts, concepts, or applications of the system or environment. Today, most universities make lifelong learning possible by offering a virtual learning environment (VLE). Not only can users access learning at different times in their lives, but they can also immerse themselves in learning without physically moving to a learning facility, or interact face to face with an instructor in real time. Such VLEs vary widely in interactivity and scope. For example, there are virtual classes, virtual labs, virtual programs, virtual library, virtual training, etc. Researchers have classified VLE in 4 types:

<i>3DiTeams</i> 2007 video game

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">MSR – The Israel Center for Medical Simulation</span>

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Immersive learning is a learning method which students being immersed into a virtual dialogue, the feeling of presence is used as an evidence of getting immersed. The virtual dialogue can be created by two ways, the usage of virtual technics, and the narrative like reading a book. The motivations of using virtual reality (VR) for teaching contain: learning efficiency, time problems, physical inaccessibility, limits due to a dangerous situation and ethical problems.

Virtual reality is the creation of a three-dimensional, interactive environment. With this technology, users are able to move through this developed simulation, as if it is real.

References

  1. ↑ Wallace, Peggy (1997). "Following the Threads of an Innovation: The History of Standardized Patients in Medical Education". Caduceus (Springfield, Ill.). 13 (2): 5–28. PMID   9509634. Archived from the original on December 28, 2008.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: unfit URL (link)
  2. ↑ "APSE Program Location Chart". Archived from the original on 24 August 2013.
  3. 1 2 Saunders, Danny (1996). The Simulation and Gaming Yearbook, Vol IV: Games and Simulations to Enhance Quality Learning. Kogan Page. ISBN   978-0-7494-1866-3.
  4. 1 2 Crace, John (January 2002). "Making a drama before the crisis". The Guardian.
  5. ↑ "Contemporary Operational Environment Actors & Role Players Handbook" (PDF). U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command. August 2007.
  6. ↑ Operational Environment and Opposing Force Program. Washington, DC, USA: Department of the Army. 2015.
  7. ↑ Sasser, Bill (November 2007). "Iraqi expatriates play civilian roles to help train US troops for battlefield conditions". Christian Science Monitor.
  8. ↑ Roach, Mary (2016). Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War . W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN   978-0393245448.
  9. 1 2 Stress and Decision Making. FLETC Training Research Branch, Training Innovation Division, US Department of Homeland Security. 2011.
  10. ↑ "Police Chief Magazine - View Article". www.policechiefmagazine.org. Retrieved 2016-06-21.
  11. ↑ Kesten C. Green and J. Scott Armstrong (2011). "Role thinking: Standing in other people's shoes to forecast decisions in conflicts" (PDF). International Journal of Forecasting. 27: 69–80. doi:10.1016/j.ijforecast.2010.05.001.
  12. ↑ J. Scott Armstrong (2002). "Assessing game theory, role playing, and unaided judgment" (PDF). International Journal of Forecasting. 18 (3): 345–352. doi:10.1016/s0169-2070(02)00024-9. S2CID   2226294.
  13. ↑ Morgan, Zach (2010). "JRTC: Roleplayers add authenticity, culture to rotations". www.army.mil. Retrieved 2016-06-21.
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