Embodied Entrepreneurship: Exploring How an Analogue Role-Play Game Develops Entrepreneurial Mindsets in Master’s Engineering Students

Abstract

This paper presents the Entrepreneurial Journey Game, an embodied, role-play-based learning experience designed to strengthen entrepreneurial mindset development and students’ comfort with uncertainty. Through improvisation, surprise events, hidden roles, collaborative decision-making, and investor interactions, the game creates a playful but consequential simulation of early-stage entrepreneurial practice. While entrepreneurship simulations often emphasise cognitive problem-solving and business planning, this design foregrounds performative, social, and material modes of play characteristic of analogue role-play, live-action role-play, and tabletop traditions.

Drawing on game studies and performance theory frameworks concerning embodied enactment, uncertainty as a core ludic principle, performative identity, and facilitation, the paper positions the game as an exploration of how analogue, improvisational mechanics can cultivate experiential entrepreneurial mindsets. Using a pre/post mixed-methods survey with master’s engineering students at University College Dublin, the study measured shifts in entrepreneurial intention, comfort with uncertainty, creativity, and confidence in practical entrepreneurial tasks. The analysed dataset consists of 26 complete pre- and post-game responses from a cohort of 37 participating students.

Results indicate increased comfort with ambiguity, enhanced creative thinking, and improved confidence in activities such as idea validation, business planning, pitching, and fundraising. Qualitative responses highlight the value of role-play, investor interactions, time-pressured teamwork, and unpredictable constraints. The findings are interpreted not only as educational outcomes, but also as shifts in player experience, enactment, and interactional framing. The paper argues that embodied analogue game-based simulations offer distinct benefits for modelling the volatility, ambiguity, social negotiation, and productive failure inherent to entrepreneurial practice.