EPISODE 16: ROLE-PLAY
Episode 16: Role-Play | 10 March 2026
Stephen and Trent provide a professorial profile of performative play practice in their deconstruction of The Worldbuilding Workshop’s fourteenth chapter, “Role-Play,” including:
Separating “role-play” from “simulation”;
Inhabiting a character (first-person) vs. observing and analyzing a character (third-person);
A brief history of role-play in education;
Revisiting life-worlds and questioning what it means to “be in the same room”;
Encouraging learners to role-play and reflect in a logically coherent way;
Connecting in-character decision-making with real-world decision-making;
“Bootstrapping” as an example of contextual complexity vs. overly simplistic reasoning;
Thinking critically and empathetically about others’ perspectives;
Attending to learners as complicated, changing people;
The Ship of Theseus model for our moment-to-moment reconstitution of identity;
Using role-play to interrogate stereotypes and essentialisms;
Role-play for deconstructing complex systems in corporate environments;
Voter ID legislation, drug testing for government benefits, and building a border wall as examples of reductive problem-solving;
Good-faith vs. bad-faith argumentation;
The “Do”s and “Do Not Do”s of educational role-play;
Consent-driven role-play and why you probably shouldn’t position learners as oppressors/oppressed;
The importance of debriefing role-play activities to break down power dynamics;
Going meta on role-play, memory, and lived experience;
How Nathan Fielder's The Rehearsal taught commercial airline pilots about critical thinking and empathy via richly authentic, socially collaborative role-play;
The critical difference between regurgitating rote information on an exam and demonstrating knowledge through performance;
Using role-play to understand everything from sweeping historical events to an individual’s day-to-day decision-making; and
Whether the arc of history truly bends toward justice (spoiler: possibly, but only if we bend it).
Episode References:
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