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Within dramatherapy and psychodrama, the term ‘de-roling’ indicates a set of activities that assist the subjects of therapy in ‘disrobing’ themselves from their fictional characters. Starting from the psychological needs and the therapeutic goals that ‘de-roling’ techniques address in dramatherapy and psychodrama, this text provides a broader understanding of procedures and exercises that define and ease transitional experiences across cultural practices such as religious rituals and spatial design. After this introductory section, we propose a tentative answer as to why game studies and virtual world research largely ignored processes of ‘roling’ and ‘de-roling’ that separate the lived experience of role-play from our everyday sense of the self. The concluding sections argue that de-roling techniques are likely to become more relevant, both academically and in terms of their practical applications, with the growing diffusion of virtual technologies in social practices. The relationships we can establish with ourselves and with our surroundings in digital virtual worlds are, we argue, only partially comparable with similar occurrences in pre-digital practices of subjectification. We propose a perspective according to which the accessibility and immersive phenomenological richness of virtual reality technologies are likely to exacerbate the potentially dissociative effects of virtual reality applications. This text constitutes an initial step towards framing specific socio-technical concerns and starting a timely conversation that binds together dramatherapy, psychodrama, game studies, and the design of digital virtual worlds.

In this paper, we will look at how Chinese youth perform nationalism through player-devised play methods. We argue that as young players become more politically conscious, they are negotiating their politics through play. Within these play situations, players are solidifying their individual beliefs while finding like-minded players. However, players are also establishing a nationalism that is defined not only through a set of core characteristics, but also through an active rejection of the politics embedded within western-oriented digital spaces, by playing in non-standard ways. Through transgressive play methods, players are countering hegemonic western politics present in commercial games and replacing them with their own nationalist politics through player-enforced rules, discussed through internet forums and preserved through memorial videos on online websites. We will look at two specific case studies: firstly, we will look at the Red Shirt Army, a streaming community in H1Z1, where players acted out Chinese military superiority by flouting the four player limit originally set by the designers; secondly, we will look at the Great Socialist Production play method, where Chinese players went against the morality set in Frostpunk, a steampunk game by Polish developers, by arguing that greater societal prosperity was more important than “white left” moral posturing.