Centre for Middle East and North African Studies
Simulation - Role Profiles
Creating a Roleprofile
Fundamentally, a roleprofile should tell the reader who or what your role is. An accurate profile of your role is often the first indicator of success in a simulation. A roleprofile allows other teams to gain a general understanding of your role (as other profiles allow you to understand theirs) and, more importantly, a profile gives life to the two-dimentional stereotype that each personality or organisation is inevitably reduced to by the media. A properly prepared role-profile will illuminate not only the black and white elements of each role, but the many shades of grey and the personal touches that invariably form part of an individual or team.
A roleprofile need only be 600-1000 words in length and may be in any format that will best convey the necessary information. To research your profile, contemporary and specialist sources are recommended. You may wish to turn to biographies and books to give an overview of your character, but make prudent use of up-to-date journals, magazines and news articles when really profiling your character. Online searches via the internet as well as specialist news services (such as Reuters Business Briefing) are particularly useful in that they allow keyword searches relevant to your role. When using the internet please verify the quality of the information source as numerous web-pages will present biased information as "factual".
In preparing a profile, you should not consume yourself with incidental biographical data such as bithdates, schooling, etc, except where this has a particular influence on your role - in which case the relevant effect should of course be discussed. A short historical overview should then link into information about philosophy and/or ideology - is your character more pragmatic or idealistic, reactive or active?
After a brief outline of your character and background, a profile should address your aims - both long term and short term. Your aims are indicative of an underlying philosophy or ideology and give motivation and direction to your character.
Finally, you may wish to address your regional political relationships. Who are your internal allies and foes? Who are your regional partners, which enemies do you have? More importantly, why have such regional relations formed and how do they impact on your aims and goals? Understanding relationships helps to determine who you should and shouldn't be talking to publically as well as privately (sometimes go-betweens are also necessary).
A profile should be candid - don't be fooled into believing that other roles won't know information about your character that you have found in a newspaper or journal report. Conversely, if you have any specific short-term goals (apart from the obvious) for your role in a simulation, you may want to generalise these rather than spelling out the tactics you intend to take.
Understanding your Role
A good role-profile should be an effective foundation for accurate and effective roleplay in a simulation. In many cases, you may have an ideology with which your role is identified which, as well as accounting for factions, etc, you have an obvious basis to rleplay. In profiling your role and playing in the simulation, there are a few other character issues to consider.
Is your role a leader of an instrumental character? Related to this, your profile and playing style will also vary according to whether you are playing an individual or an organisation.
A leadership role, such as a prime-minister or president, often has executive responsibilty for a country. As a leader, you must consider continuing general policy, creating new policy, reviewing information and delegating authority appropriately. A leader is often responsible to some constituency and is subject to countless lobbying both internally and external. Those playing a leader will general be subject to a large number of requests and will have to prioritise accordingly.
An instrumental role in a simulation generally works closely with a leader to design and then implement policy. Information gathering and dissemination in crucial to this type of role - if you do not keep lines of communication open you may quickly find yourself isolated from your friends and at the mercy of your foes. Instrumental roles also often function as the eyes and ears for others, and are frequently called to liase with others on behalf of a leader. Keep in mind that you shouldn't be a mindless functionary and may be actively pursuing your own agenda, but you may also be subject to other, external controls. Similarly, while action is important, communication is vital for an instrumental role and shouldn't be neglected.
An individual obviously is bound by the aims of some position which he or she represents, but you should consider personal interests and attitudes which will influence your style. Similarly, while an organisation (such as the CIA) is characterised by a leader, you may end up role-playing the aims of its membership as a whole and sometimes the contradictory factions within an organisation.
Overall, it should be recognised that these broad types also tend to overlap - a leader is still an instrument of his/her position just as an instrumental role has its own agenda.
A detailed study of any individual or organisation will eventually reveal a multi-faceted personality or, if you prefer, a number of personalities. Every person has multiple sides which show themselves in different occasions and to different people, as well as often contradictory ideas and parts which form "the self". When researching and playing a role this should become apparent - no-one is completely predictable and the stereotypes that are portrayed in the media or often misleading and sometimes false.
Similarly, thus multi-faceted view of personality implies that no-one is completely driven by one ideology or one aim. Though some aims may be predominant, you should consider what other drives may be part of the role you are attempting to portray.
You should also keep in mind that every person (and organisation) considers himself to be rational and, generally, "right". To roleplay an extremist group, for example, as insane would lead to a poor parody and little effect - an understanding of the logic and ideology which drives that group is necessary and should be worked with, no matter how strange you may find it based on your personal ideas (which you too consider "right"!). This leads to an appreciation of the many grey areas that dominate people and politics, as well as looking below the surface and going some way to understanding different views. Indeed, it is recommended that if you have a personal connection to the region you are playing in that you choose a role opposed to your background (eg a Palestinian may opt for an Israeli role) and attempt to break-out of your preconceptions to play the role realistically (a challenging but rewarding experience).