Roleplay simulation
Roleplay simulation is an experiential learning method in which either amateur or professional roleplayers 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.
History
invented the model for medical patient role-playing in 1963 at University of Southern California. 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 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.An industry of professional skills training emerged in the late 1990s, primarily in the United Kingdom. Companies began hiring acting professionals to create situational dramas to be overcome by learners as part of an experiential learning methodology. Today, there are more than twenty companies in the UK that specialize in providing role-players for workplace simulations.
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.
Use in Experiential Learning
Medical Training
Medical role-players typically fall under the category of Standardized Patients. 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:
- As part of a simulation wherein both learner and role-player are aware of the fiction, and have established rules and boundaries.
- Surreptitiously, for purposes of healthcare provider evaluation or health informatics research.
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 similar military characteristics to the expected real-world foes.Main article: OPFOR
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.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.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. Recently, law enforcement agencies have begun to introduce the identification of human trafficking victims into their role-player curriculum.
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.Forecasting
Role-play also has applications in forecasting. One forecasting method is to simulate the condition being studied. Some experts in forecasting have found that role-thinking for producing inaccurate forecasts unless groups act as protagonists in their interactions with one another.Learning Advantages
The use of skilled role-players in a simulation has several benefits over using unskilled confederates:- When untrained fellow learners are asked to serve as role-players in a simulation, the resulting learning experience tends to be ineffective due to embarrassment, intimidation, or unrealistic performances.
- Skilled role-players also help ensure the conditions for an effective simulation are intact. These conditions include maintaining a safe environment, and dynamically adjusting difficulty, complexity, and intensity to the capabilities and experience level of the learner.
- Since role-players improvise each interaction, predictability is taken out of the simulation. Predictable scenarios limit the development of decision-making skills.
- Role-player providers can typically offer broader coverage of demographic representation than is possible by using in-house staff to portray characters.
Limitations
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", and the performers who drive them are called "ractors".