Role-playing

The ancient Romans, Han Chinese, and medieval Europeans all enjoyed occasionally organizing events in which everyone pretended to be from an earlier age, and entertainment appears to have been the primary purpose of these activities.

Viola Spolin, who was one of the founders the famous comedy troupe Second City, insisted that her exercises were games, and that they involved role-playing as early as 1946.

Role-playing can also be done online in the form of group story creation, involving anywhere from two to several hundred people, utilizing public forums, private message boards, mailing lists, chatrooms, and instant-messaging chat services to build worlds and characters that may last a few hours, or several years.

Often on forum-based roleplays, rules, and standards are set up, such as a minimum word count, character applications, and "plotting" boards to increase complexity and depth of story.

For example, the instance when a child starts to define "I" and separate him or herself from an adult is the initial condition for and the result of role play.

[4] There are also experiments that found role-playing resulted in behavioral change such as the case of smokers who reported negative attitude towards smoking after being asked to pretend to be a person diagnosed with lung cancer.

It has been used in the early classic social psychological experiments by Kurt Lewin (1939/1997), Stanley Milgram (1963), and Phillip Zimbardo (1971).