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Transformative Role-Play: Design, Implementation, and Integration

Transformative Role-Play: Design, Implementation, and Integration

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Role-playing has the potential to have profound transformative impacts on participants. Over the years both personally and professionally, we have received hundreds of stories from players who have experienced dramatic expansions in their worldview, their understanding of others, and their ability to affect change in the world around them as a result of role-play. In our own backgrounds, we can both point to several role-playing experiences that have altered the course of our lives as a result of the realizations and interpersonal connections resulting from them. The sheer number of people interested in implementing role-playing and simulation as tools for education, empathy-building, and skill training attests to the methods’ potential potency (Bowman 2014a). Whether through virtual play, tabletop, or larp, role-playing can change people’s lives for the better when participants are open to expanding their perspectives.

Following our Butterfly Effect Manifesto (2019), we believe that the insights gained from role-playing can become powerful tools to help participants become more self-aware, process “real life” experiences in a community that feels safe, and transform their lives and the world around them for the better. When role-playing achieves any of these goals—whether in subtle ways or with greater magnitude—we call these instances transformative experiences. However, in our view, the role-playing experience itself is only truly transformative if it impacts the participant’s life in some meaningful way after the event. Thus, while an experience may feel transformative in the moment, the integration of that experience is the wider-reaching impact that we are most interested in cultivating. In other words, for a complete transformation to occur, the impact should expand beyond the bounds of the original experience and integrate into one’s daily frames of reality and identity.

bufferfly on a petal drinking water

We propose that although transformative effects might occur—and certainly do occur—by chance or as a result of intuitive choices that designers and participants make, we can seek to maximize the potential of such impacts through intentional design, implementation, and post-event integration. We argue that designers and players who wish to maximize the potential for transformative impacts should consciously and transparently focus on the following goals throughout the entirety of the process:

  1. Establishing a clear vision explicitly detailing the desired impacts,
  2. Providing environments that feel safe, and
  3. Offering structures and resources for post-event integration at the end of play.

While this article focuses mainly on design and implementation, individual players also can use these suggested approaches independently to increase the likelihood of undergoing transformative impacts from any given role-play experience.

Before we proceed, we should note that careful consideration and implementation of these concepts and processes will not ensure a transformative impact will take place. Experiences vary from person to person and event to event. However, we believe that the more intentional the choices that designers and organizers make in accordance with these principles, the more likely at least some participants will experience a profound shift in their sense of self, perspective, or agency in the world. We strongly recommend that designers and organizers explicitly state their goals before and after the experience in order to create a deeper sense of investment, increased trust with the participants, and clearer focus upon these impacts for everyone involved.

Finally, we believe that informed consent and safety should be at the forefront of this design philosophy. In other words, we trust players to judge for themselves the extent to which they feel comfortable leaning into certain types of content or experiences based on their own emotional, psychological, and physical thresholds. While growth often involves facing our own resistance to change, we do not advocate for pushing participants beyond their limits. Therefore, while we believe that transformative impacts should always be at the forefront of design and implementation choices, concerns about safety and consent are inextricably linked to creating a secure-enough container for such experiences to transpire.

Below are some suggestions for how to intentionally and systemically design for transformative impacts, followed by some examples from our own design backgrounds.

woman in space holding a galaxy in her hand

Designing for Transformative Impacts

When seeking to design for transformation, the first step should be establishing a clear vision explicitly detailing the desired impacts upon participants. Although additional categories likely exist, we propose the following impacts, which fall under four broad groups: Emotional Processing, Social Cohesion, Educational Goals, and Political Aims. Note that designing for certain types of impacts—such as therapeutic aims—may require advanced training, consultation with experts, or increased safety measures.

Emotional Processing

Social Cohesion

  • Increasing empathy
  • Teamwork
  • Leadership
  • Holding space
  • Conflict resolution/Transformation
  • Prosocial communication
  • Perspective taking
  • Collaboration/Co-creation/Cooperation
  • Building understanding
  • Exploring intimacy/Relationship dynamics
  • Exploring community dynamics

Educational Goals

  • Intrinsic motivation
  • Content exposure/Mastery
  • Promoting active engagement
  • Self-efficacy/Perceived competence
  • Multitasking
  • Problem solving
  • Scenario building
  • Creative thinking/Innovation
  • Critical thinking
  • Skill training
  • Understanding systems

Political Aims

We recognize that any such list can never contain every possible impact that a role-playing experience can invite and any single design can likely only address a few of these aims. Our goal is to provide a concrete tool that enables participants to make conscious choices during the design and implementation processes.

Practical Implementation

As one gets further into the design process, a number of choices are made that can affect the transformative potential of a role-playing experience. Some examples are the setting, format, game structure, practicalities, mechanics, character concepts, safety tools, workshops, and debriefing structures. Conscious implementation is key if designers seek to maximize the potency of these potential impacts.

While choices relating to the larger structure of the game — such as concept, setting, and format — can have a clear influence, in this article, we will limit our focus to the categories of Safety, Workshops/Debriefing, and Character Design.

Safety

Feeling safe to stretch beyond one’s comfort zone without exceeding one’s boundaries is called a growing edge in personal development. Implementation requires creating a secure-enough container for participants to feel that they can surrender into the experience and feel held in the process by the facilitators and co-players. Some recommended structures for intentionally designing safer spaces include:

* The process by which sign-up lists are screened for players whose previous actions have marked them as either unsafe (red flag) or on watch (yellow flag) by the organizers.

** For example, casting players who have a good reputation for providing safe and consensual play in the more sensitive or antagonistic roles.

orange kitty looking in a puddle and seeing a lion reflected back

Workshops and Debriefing

We believe that designing for transformative impacts requires creating an intentional framework for transitioning into and out of the game frame. This framework can include steps for establishing: a sense of communal trust, a shared reference point for the game’s themes, explication of the game’s transformative goals, methods for expressing preferences for play, safety culture and tools, and norms around communication of participant and organizer needs. Workshops before and during the game can help to achieve these goals. Debriefing after the game can aid in the transition back to the frame of daily life.

With these goals in mind, we have constructed the following suggestions for workshopping and debriefing activities:

Pre-game

  • Safety briefings and practicing tools
  • Trust building exercises
  • Establishing character relations
  • Explaining game mechanics/tools
  • Practical/Logistical briefings
  • Contextualization discussions*
  • Pre-game consent negotiations
  • Discussing or playing backstory scenes

Mid-game/Breaks

  • Calibration discussions or exercises
  • Narration of events occurring between acts
  • Mid-game consent negotiations
  • Contextualization discussions*
  • Self-care or downtime for participants
  • Co-player care or emotional processing
  • Organizer care

Post-game

  • Structured or informal debriefing
  • De-roling or formalized shifting from character to player
  • Contextualization discussions*
  • Narrativizing events taking place after the game, or Epilogues
  • Integration practices (see below section)

* One important step that is often overlooked in design is contextualization, which can take place at any stage during the off-game periods of role-play. For example, in the larp Just a Little Lovin’, which is about HIV/AIDS in the 1980s, the organizers provide contextualization sections during the workshops before and after each Act break. Contextualization helps the group filter their experience through the lens of the larger s