Gaming and role playing as tools for creativity training

Abstract

This chapter comments on the concept and process of gaming (including role playing), leading to the perception of gaming and role playing as tools for creativity training. In these introductory remarks, we comment on the history and diverse roles of gaming in the era of knowledge civilisation and the time of virtual reality. We turn then to trends observed in the development of three interrelated fields: gaming, negotiations, and game theory, with their tendency to increasing specialisation, and comment on the need for an interdisciplinary, open, and informed systemic synthesis. Next we discuss the increasingly broad and intensively developed field of gaming applications used today for the purpose of training business managers; we postulate that the goal of such training is to accelerate the formation of business intuition and thus can be considered as creativity training. We turn then to the possibility of using gaming and negotiations for problem solving and idea formation, exploiting the strong motivation provided by role playing, on an example of simulated negotiations and the related theory of coalition games. The chapter is summarised by conclusions. © 2007 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.