Playing With The Fictitious “I”: Early Forms of Educational Role-playing in Hungary, 1938-1978

In this article we interpret Eszter Leveleki’s special vacation program at Bánk, Hungary, as an organization, and present it in terms of contingency theory. As a background, we introduce the context, strategy, and structure behind Bánk that brought remarkable behaviors to life during its existence, prevailing in politically repressive regimes for almost its entire history. The article qualitatively analyzes available sources, the recollections of those who took part in the vacation program, mainly from the ‘50s to the ‘70s, and diaries written on site in order to determine what forms of transformative play were present at Bánk that established a unique heritage of educational role-playing in Hungary. We go through all the identifying elements and themes and show how Bánk was a fertile soil for more complex forms of play to emerge. We compare our results with different definitions of role-playing and child’s play in general in order to determine to what extent the more complex forms of play at Bánk can be called larp, what key characteristics of it might differ from those of larp, and whether these differences serve a certain purpose.