The origins of role play
Role playing, as a category of play, emerges in toddlers before their second birthday. The preschool years are the golden age for pretense and symbolic play, when children turn sheets into Superman capes, chairs into forts, and closets into secret caves with hidden dangers and treasures. Almost any object is a candidate for a prop in a child's theatrical arsenal, and imaginative children can find exotic uses for the most humble household articles.
When the role play includes other children, a special culture emerges with very strict rules about how to enter the play, maintain the pretense, and make an exit. Holly Giffin studied this kind of make-believe for her doctoral research and observed the existence of an extremely important one called the illusion conservation rule. The players are expected to stay inside the play and avoid any references to the fact that the stage is just a stage, or that "it's only pretend." The illusion must be conserved; out-of-character remarks aggravate the other players because they interrupt the fantasy and diminish its power. If they must leave to answer a nature call or go home for lunch, they are expected to adapt their exit to the illusion's script, at least insofar as their imaginations will allow.
On a school playground, one of these sociodramatic plays emerged that showed how these rules control the action. Jackie, an imaginative 5 year-old, began using a stick as a telescope from the top of the Jungle Jim, and his younger playmate Sid shouted, "Ahoy, Captain!" from below. Spontaneously, and with no discussion, the curtain on the pirate play went up and the unspoken, but clearly understood rules for participating were put into effect. Sid clambered up to the top and handed Jackie a piece of paper saying, "Here's the map, Captain." From below, another boy shouted, "Hey, I want to play!" Jackie, however, did not acknowledge the newcomer except to point the telescope toward him and announce [to Sid], "Enemy pirate ship approaching. Man the guns." The intruder needed no other hint that he was violating the illusion conservation rule with his OOC entrance, and deftly switched into character as a marauding pirate foe. Later, when the bell rang to line up and return inside, the players wound down the drama as gracefully as they could by stowing their pirate gear under the seesaw and shouting, "Next time, Bluebeard, you'll walk the plank!" The children dropped out of the pretend mode and into the line.
The clear demarcation children attempt to establish for such games creates a special frame of unreality inside the larger, real-life reality frame. Once they cross the boundary into the role-play frame, they are in a different world where new rules apply. The rules can be just as demanding as those in real-life, sometimes even more so, and they serve to protect the play-frame against leakage from the surrounding real world.
Children begin losing interest in elaborately constructed role plays by age 5 or 6 and turn instead to other forms of play. They become far more interested, for example, in games of skill and chance in which they can compete against one another without leaving their real-life identities behind them. These games have equally stringent rules but the improvised make-believes and role plays so common in young children have virtually disappeared by the time they enter middle school. By the teenage years, adolescents are experimenting with their identities in other ways but they are certainly not doing spontaneous sociodramas of pirate battles between math and chemistry classes.