The Fields That Already Play -- and the Frontier They're Missing
By Garrett Munro
For most of us in NASAGA, this year's theme lands close to home. Fields have used games, roleplay, and simulation to teach, rehearse, and decide for a very long time. The military ran Kriegsspiel on sand tables before modern pedagogy had a name for it. Medicine built sim labs and trained standardized patients. Aviation put pilots in the loop before it put them in the cockpit. Business schools have leaned on in-basket exercises and negotiation roleplay for decades, and social work and counseling have long rehearsed the hard conversation in character before the real one arrives.
So the interesting question isn't whether other fields use these tools. It's what most of them still use them for, and where the room is.
Look across those examples and a pattern shows up: most professional simulation is built to rehearse procedures and skills. Run the code. Land the plane. Close the deal. Handle the objection. That work matters and isn't going anywhere. But it leaves a second use almost untouched: roleplay for identity, not only competence. Not “can you perform the task," but "who are you becoming, and can you imagine yourself into a role before you have to hold it."
That's the frontier I'd point to.
Some of the work I'm part of sits right there. With colleagues at Cleveland State University, we're piloting tabletop roleplaying games as an interprofessional education intervention for occupational therapy and other health-professions students: future clinicians learning to see a patient, and each other, across professional lines. The same approach is turning up in faculty training, where an instructor steps into a role to feel a course from the learner's side before designing it. The point isn't the dice. It's that a well-built role lets a person try on a professional self in a low-stakes space, and come back a little changed.
It's early, and I don't want to oversell a pilot. But it rhymes with what this community already knows: put people in a role, give the situation real stakes, and learning stops being something that happens to them and becomes something they do.
The opportunity runs wider than health careers. An NSF-funded STEM education project led by Dr. Brian Lane is building a tabletop game to help students see themselves as scientists: another field, the same underused lever. Wherever a profession has to form people and not just train them, there is room for this.
If you've watched your field adopt simulation for skills and wondered what else it could carry, that's the conversation this year's theme is inviting. Bring the example from your corner. There's more room than we've used.
Image Credit: Nano Banana Pro using a prompt generated by Claude 5 Sonnet.
