Life Cycle of Role-Playing:
Early Stage

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Jump directly to any 'Early Stage' subsection, or review them in sequence:

Preliminary Observations
Understand Role
Understand Scenario & Engage
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Preliminary Observations

Time spent in this stage can be very rewarding later. It requires a fair amount of research and writing for the students.

EXAMPLE from Middle East Politics RP (...description>>)

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Understand role

Role play designers (subject matter experts) deliberately create only sketchy descriptions of the roles. This is to promote the ownership of the role by allowing students to embellish the character, research the stakeholder viewpoints and establish operational public and private agendas.

EXAMPLE from World Politics in Transition RP

At this stage, students should have their assigned roles, begin research and write up the role profile or stakeholder position paper for other roles to read. Moderators should now provide a fixed date for posting this first task. This date may match the date when the online role-play moderator releases the initial kick-off episode of the scenario. The public agenda of the role can be published as part of the role profile, however, the online role-play moderator may request the participants to send their private agenda to the online role-play moderator. There is a significant learning opportunity at this stage and the online role-play moderator may choose to make the write up of the role profile part of the assessment.

  : Boundaries

Establish boundaries in using outside contacts (including the real person if the role-play is based on real people).
Mark Freeman, UTS

  : Group support

Consultative groups: The use of consultative groups can provide a useful support mechanism for less confident students. These groups work together (prior to the action) to explore and discuss the role they have been allocated.
Elizabeth Devonshire, USyd

EXAMPLE from Environmental Decision-Making RP (...description>>)

EXAMPLE from Middle East Politics RP (...description>>)

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Understand scenario & engage

In the second part of this stage, roles need to have a compelling and urgent reason to act. The online role-play moderator releases the kick-off episode of the scenario. One design objective of the kick-off episode is to create the compelling reasons for sufficient number of roles to act immediately. As roles are engaged, the online role-play moderator needs to start monitoring the communication between the roles regularly and exercise the various online role-play moderator duties.

EXAMPLE from World Politics in Transition RP

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