The history of roleplaying is often traced back through Dungeons & Dragons to tabletop wargaming, but there is a less-discussed history that goes back to group therapy techniques, management training, and social studies classrooms. Peter McDonald’s new book, The Impossible Reversal: A History of How We Play, traces this history across a wide range of sites.

“[I]n my archival work, I started discovering other roleplay practices,” McDonald explained. “That discovery not only shifted a well-known story in game studies, but more importantly, began to reveal how a practice I had always taken for granted had a really specific, and relatively recent history.”

As is often the case with academic research, the project took many twists and turns along the way.

“From some initial references to roleplay in classroom use, I began working my way back to its intellectual origins and laterally to other places that it was taken up,” McDonald said.

This included the group therapy practices of Jacob Moreno, who invented roleplay techniques for re-enacting scenes of emotional intensity, the espionage training practices of the Office for Strategic Services, which used roleplay to evaluate spies during World War II, and the ways roleplay was used to create emotional distance between managers and the people they might need to fire. In more recent work, McDonald has looked at the way roleplay was adopted by Reverend James Lawson to train civil rights protestors for nonviolent conflict.

Across these different sites, McDonald said he “began to see roleplay as a powerful social technology that has a playful element but also has broader political consequences.”

The Impossible Reversal takes the ideas around roleplaying “into a whole bunch of other fascinating directions,” McDonald concluded. “My hope is that folks can find lots of ways their own work might intersect with these themes.”

Peter McDonald is an Assistant Professor of Design, Creative, and Informal Education in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison whose research explores the ways people interpret play and playful behavior as meaning-making activities, the design practices that can support critical engagement through play, and the historical contexts of playfulness.

He will further discuss his research in a Graduate Speaker Series event on Thursday, April 16, at 3:30 p.m. in Annenberg Hall, Room 3.