RSSExperiment: Role-Playing Games in innovation, part 2
Put together on May 8, 2008 12:03 pm by Dimitris
What do you think?
So, continued from my previous post, here’s what I am suggesting. Two to four people get together and try to come up with a few realistic guidelines about what the world (or a part of the world) might look like. It’s important to focus on things that are relatively feasible – in other words, much as I’d like to involve the word ‘jetpack’ I don’t see this being very probable in the next few years. No detailed work is necessary. Just basic things such as answering questions like what the main energy sources are, what is the political state of a country of interest, what are the social circumstances (in terms of employment, poverty, racism, etc), what major technological and scientific advances have been achieved and so on. Then, one member of the team is chosen to run the world (i.e. be the game master – previous experience on the role is highly recommended) and come up with the basics of a scenario while the rest create characters and roleplay that scenario.
Both the characters and the scenario though are just vehicles to explore the main focus of the game – which is the world itself or one aspect of it (e.g. future communication, personal relationships, sociological changes, impact of technology, etc). To use an example, if the group wanted to explore, how journalism was to evolve in a few years from now, the characters could play the roles of a politician and a journalist while the plot could revolve around e.g. a political scandal and the efforts of the former to cover it up and of the latter to expose it. Within that plot, various courses of action could be tested for their effect. E.g. the journalist could set up a video blog presenting evidence and campaigning against that politician while the politician could respond by setting his own PR campaign.
So, where’s the innovation in all that (apart from using RPGs for a different than the usual purpose)? Well, obviously, this kind of game is not about winning (as most RPGs aren’t) or about who has the most realistic grasp of what’s going to happen but rather about play-testing how things will work in the future. In fact, it’s not about that either. It’s about talking and hypothesizing what it will all be like – both before the game starts to agree on the rough guidelines and after the game has started and players react to various challenges. The roleplaying will be pretty arbitrary after all and just in the minds of participants. But putting yourself in the shoes of a character and being required to think, talk and react within a future possible setting can provide insights about that setting that simply trying to imagine the future won’t reach. While I was playing the scenario I mentioned in the previous post I had plenty of insights (that were also inspiring after the actual game) regarding how communication and what is now called the social media would evolve.
RPGs can also be used as I suggest here to better understand and expose the needs and the psychology of a target audience. They can be used to provide sanity checks on whether a new approach on doing things will work as expected or not. It’s about helping identify how the human factor fits in a new idea – something often missing when people come up with a new concept. Of course, it’s not like setting up a usability team or actually doing market research with polls etc. It’s meant to provide insight to the innovator from within her, i.e. by allowing her to adopt a fresh first-hand perspective. It’s also meant to provide perspective by discussing with fellow interested individuals who are also in a similar frame – i.e. not just wildly speculating.
And to take things one step further and add extra value to the idea, this whole process of the group of people getting together to decide on the world and a scenario and play it all out, could be recorded and uploaded in segments in a dedicated website. Technically, I believe this is already feasible – although serving hours of video might prove a bit costly even with torrent technology. But having all session episodes available for viewing could hopefully inspire others and stimulate further discussion on the subject.
Oh, and I didn’t mention that at the same time a new version of web TV (RPTV?) along with volumes of content from it will drop-off as a by product of this experiment. And all that while basically having fun and playing a game with some friends.
tags: idea |
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