44 ROLE-PLAY

Stephen Gapps

Role-play is broadly defined either as unconsciously altering behavior to fulfill a social role, or as consciously assuming an imagined or real character in a performance, game, or educational setting.

The growth of role-play techniques and the beginning of reflective and critical analysis of role-play can be traced to the development of improvisational theater in the UK and US in the 1960s, in particular, when improvised dialogue and stock characters and scenes replaced the scripts of traditional theater. Neither participants nor audience could know the direction or outcome of any given performance. Audience-performer boundaries were blurred in what proponents argued was a democratization of traditional theater. At the same time, in the field of psychology, role-play developed as a cathartic therapeutic technique (trauma).

From the 1970s, history educators claimed that using role-play by trained staff at herit­age sites and museums could foster a meaningful and democratic engagement with history through interactive immersion. In a burst of enthusiasm for so-called living history, par­ticipants often inhabited the first-person, acting as if from the past, but speaking only in the present tense. This form of role-play certainly occupied a formative place in the growth of history tourism and outdoor museums, but it has proved difficult to sustain and is now only rarely part of the repertoire in historical reenactments and heritage sites. First-person role­play has, however, found more fertile ground in the related sub-cultures of the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA), cosplay (costumed play), and live action role-play (LARP).

Public historians have keenly observed the strengths and weaknesses of role-play methods employed at living history museums and history tourism sites such as Plimoth Plantation in the US. Audiences either refused to engage with role-play or disrupted it, often delighting in breaking the conceit of a performance of the past that employed obvious anachronisms. Since the initial enthusiasm of the 1970s and 1980s, particularly in the US, first-person interpretation by costumed actors role-playing historical characters declined under criticism from academics as well as from performers and their audiences (Anderson, 1984; Carson 1998; Creviston Lee, 2013; Roth, 1998; Snow, 1993; Gapps, 2002; MacCannell, 1973; Magelssen, 2004).

So-called second-person interpretation techniques, which do not require such active audi­ence participation in the role-playing game, have been more successful in living history muse­ums and heritage sites. In hands-on living history displays, social history educational methods emphasize the daily tasks of working peoples’ lives. Proponents argued that witnessing a black­smith operating a forge, for example, allowed everyone to understand the tools, the medium, and the person using them. This method also became the dominant form of interpretation that involved some level of role-play in Europe and Australia, where first-person role-play in history tourism had never been as well received as in the US (Magelssen, 2006; Gapps, 2002; 2018) (Figure 44.1).

Beyond living history museums, role-play formed the basis of several related sub-cultures that also developed from the late 1960s and early 1970s, initially in the US, then quickly taken up by other Western countries, particularly Australia. Some of them, such as role-playing in Scandinavian countries, were influenced by local theatrical traditions, but the basis of much role-playing technique in the 1970s originated in wargames and coincided with the explosion of interest in medieval-inspired fantasy literature such as Lord of the Rings (gaming).

During the early 1970s, wargamers moved from table-top games with figures and counters into a more cognitive and collaborative experience, in which a game master would describe a fictional world and participants could suggest their characters’ responses to given situations. Depending on the game master’s assent, the story would evolve in unforeseen directions, pro­pelled by participants’ imaginations. Role-playing games combined wargaming rules systems with improvisational theater to create an immersive, collaborative form of game-play that added a level of individual agency. Until the advent of computer-based role-playing games, miniature

Figure 44.1 Actors at the Tower of London role-playing Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. Source: Stephen Gapps.

Stephen Gapps

wargame figures were used in moments of game-play that required more technical adjudication, with rules and dice-rolling rather than interactive story building.

Various games were spawned in informal gaming networks, but in 1974, Dungeons and Dragons—regarded as the “first modern role-playing game”—became commercially available. There followed a boom in “RPGs,” as they became known, particularly among science fiction and fantasy literature fans. Many of the sets or worlds, stories, and game-mechanisms formed the basis of computer games from the 1980s onwards (Hendricks et al., 2006; Tresca, 2010).

While role-playing games were booming, other variants of role-play took shape. The SCA began in California in 1966 among a small group of people who articulated their medieval- themed gatherings as a “protest against the 20th century.” Initially focusing on costume and tournament combat from medieval history, the SCA chose to “selectively recreate” the past, only “choosing elements of the culture that interest and attract” members. In joining the SCA, “everyone is presumed to be minor nobility” from pre-17th-century Europe (SCA, 1996).

SCA members adopt a medieval name and title and develop a suitable persona or character to go with them. While some characters may be highly fictional, many are based on historical figures or generic roles. The role-playing of these characters is featured at specific events, such as recreated medieval tournaments. The SCA eschewed the more stringent rules around historical accuracy that amateur reenactment groups imposed, and this attracted the growing numbers of people interested in performed medieval fantasy fiction. Membership expanded rapidly during the 1970s and remains strong, with tens of thousands in the self-styled kingdoms and principali­ties of the SCA worldwide.

A series of related movements that engaged with role-play techniques emerged in the 1980s. The most prominent were cosplay and LARP. Cosplay originated in US science fiction fan conferences as early as the late 1930s, when attendees began to turn up dressed in costumes of their favorite sci-fi book, movie, or cartoon character. The practice boomed in the 1980s, and cosplay acquired a decidedly more global appeal, highly popular in Japan in particular. Cosplay is often styled as a form of performance art and, while it has similarities with historical reenact­ment practices in the attention paid to costume details, role-play is not as important as costum­ing (Go, 2015).

LARP emerged as a distinctly postmodern phenomenon in the 1980s. Techniques of his­torical reenactment's mock combat were added to table-top or computer-based role-playing games, and participants costumed themselves as their game characters in order to play out game scenarios in “live action.” Despite its connections with theater, living history, and education, analysis of LARP has mostly been in the field of game studies. Yet while there are similarities to game-play and the creation of alternative worlds, live and digital role-playing are in many ways quite distinct. Unlike digital games, live role-play is rarely commoditized and, while open to ethnographic analysis, its ephemeral nature evades documentation.

So-called Nordic LARP diverged significantly from the US and elsewhere. Often called “Nordic Art Larp,” “participatory” or “new theatre,” the game-play often explores particular emotions or concepts through fantasy worlds, thus finding broad acceptance as “social value” or therapeutic escapism (Bressanin, 2012). Nordic LARP's growing body of largely partici­pant-driven literature also distinguishes it from other LARP communities, since it draws on academic work with strong connections to theater studies, gaming, and history education. As online gaming cultures became pervasive during the last two decades, interest in the educational value of live role-play techniques to “increase engagement and motivation” in students grew,

and educational role-playing or “edu-larp” emerged in classrooms across Scandinavia (Bowman 2016). LARP’s fantasy-fiction genre origins remain strong, yet in no way do they characterize the entire sub-culture. By the 1990s, Larpers in Europe and the US were claiming urban waste­lands as evocative sites for post-apocalyptic-themed games and LARP worlds were taken from “forests and castles” to “industrial halls and city streets” (Montola, 2007, p. 267) (dark tourism).

Whether “live” role-play first emerged in response to online and digital gaming remains unclear. LARP has much in common with the structures of digital gaming worlds and their communities, and often combines live and online digital gaming. Yet an important thread for many is the informal theater of role-playing—acting without being on stage—which has led to the term “Theatre-Style Larp” (Harrison 2009; Young 2003). Real, normative, and hegemonic spaces are often transformed in role-play games (performance and Performativity). Role-play has thus been considered in terms of Foucault’s concept of a heterotopia, where the collec­tive game experience becomes a liminal “other” space that can be imbued with a new politi­cal function.

From their origins as a sub-culture in the 1970s, role-playing games have had a surprisingly strong and ongoing resonance in popular culture across the globe. They exhibit intersections of fantasy, history, and real-world social behaviors and political motivations, particularly in terms of the construction and political contestation of heterotopias (Hendricks et al., 2006, pp. 1—18; Hutchings and Giardino, 2016).

Further reading

Gapps, S., 2018; Hendricks, S. Q., Williams, J. P., and Winkler, W K. (eds.), 2006; Hutchings, T., and Giardino, J., 2016; Magelssen, S., 2006; Montola, M., and Stenros, J. (eds.), 2010.