Role Play and Roles

The roles that I discussed in the last post can be thought of as roles defined in a bottom up fashion. That is, you do something which indicates a role preference and then get suggestions for other things that maybe be suitable to someone who enjoys that role. But, bottom up role definition has some problems.

Let's say that you are a creative, artistic, imaginative person who has for some reason been steered away from being who you are naturally. Let's say further that you have adopted a serious person complete with a set of interests that are appropriate for that serious persona but not really suitable to who you are. If your serious person reads only nonfiction then it is likely that bottom up approach will only reinforce this mismatch. You order dull books on history and the algorithms suggest more history books. How do you break this cycle?

I think one answer may be virtual world role play. I run into endless people in Second Life who are there because they can behave in ways that feel much more natural and yet would not be acceptable for some reason in real life.

Several months back, I wrote a few posts on a concept called StrengthsFinders which was developed by the Gallup Corporation. The premise of StrengthsFinders is that there are certain things that you are hard wired to do and doing those things are virtually effortless for you. I think this idea can be extended beyond business strengths to roles in general. There are things you can do that are virtually effortless and feel natural. If you do those things life is easier and more satisfying. However, for any number of reasons people often get steered away from roles that are natural for them and into roles that are not natural. Role playing in a virtual world allows you to explore different roles and possibly find roles that are more satisfying for you.