Project System: totalitarian utopia as a role-playing game

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to determine how to educate people about complicated social topics or politics?; how to lead them to critical thinking?; and how to convey emotions or life experience they never lived through?

Design/methodology/approach

Project System is a three-day experience for adult participants concerning totalitarian regime, freedom and inequality. The Project System does not give fast and easy answers but leads participants to find them on their own. For 30 hours, participants find themselves within a larp, which is a very intense type of role-playing game based on human interactions. The author has chosen a larp as a medium as one of the most immersive and influential method of game-based learning which can facilitate topics that are normally hard to explain through conventional methods of learning. Participants learn firsthand through their roles, emotions, story and experience.

Findings

Project System was a really strong and important experience for many players that may have partially changed their lives. After more than 500 players walked through it, the author can say that this method is beneficial.

Originality/value

Larp as an educational tool is used all over the world; however, there are still only few professional organizations. Most of them are focused on using larp (or similar role-playing methods) as a tool at elementary or secondary schools. Using larp in andragogy is currently pioneering.

Citation

Kotryová, L. (2017), "Project System: totalitarian utopia as a role-playing game", World Journal of Science, Technology and Sustainable Development, Vol. 14 No. 2/3, pp. 218-227. https://doi.org/10.1108/WJSTSD-08-2016-0051