By: Alexander Rolnick
History Teacher
Mary Institute Country Day School

“True colonization did not occur in our lands, but in our minds; the moment we give up and refuse to fight is when we have truly lost,” advises a mild mannered psychiatrist turned Algerian freedom fighter at the close of a speech arguing for the necessity of anti-colonial political violence.

The room breaks into applause and tension escalates as a young nationalist leader from Southern Rhodesia rises to question the psychiatrist, “There is no need for the fear, corruption, and violence that war brings to be forced upon a fledgling nation.” A heated discussion on the merits and drawbacks of the legitimacy and value of violence for achieving national liberation follows.

Although a moment like this happened in 1958 in Accra, Ghana at the All African Peoples Conference, instead this describes high school students in my African History class role playing historical figures, participating in one of the most sophisticated discussions I’ve listened to my students engage in over a decade of teaching high school.

My discovery of the Reacting pedagogy in 2021 provided a useful framework for developing my use of simulation and role play in the classroom to a new level, and has revolutionized my teaching. I’ve also found the best fridge benefit I never imagined when I first went searching for an engaging way to teach about the Cold War and discovered a prototype of Eyeball to Eyeball: a positive and constructive community of educators - at both the university and secondary level - who believe that the best learning happens through active experience.

After finding success adapting Eyeball to Eyeball in my context, I applied for professional development funding from the independent (private) high school I work at in St. Louis to support my attendance at Reacting Annual’s Institute, and the rest is history. At this conference, between trying to avoid dying as a rural Indian villager in Indian Independence 1945 and exploiting the working classes as a merchant in Engines of Mischief, I met another Reacting neophyte and shared a basic working prototype for a game I was developing focused on African decolonization. That prototype - now a shared endeavor with my co-author Eric Covey that we’ve invested hundreds of hours to develop - is called Hands Off Africa, and is on its way towards a place on the Reacting website.

This project revitalized my love of amateur historical research, and has led to the adaptation of other Reacting games, and new projects aimed at encouraging the passionate discussions that the Reacting frameworks for historical role play encourage. For the St. Louis History class that all Juniors take at my school, I used the short game framework to develop a prototype for a civil rights protest short game set in 1963 St. Louis based on the (locally) iconic Jefferson Bank protest. I convinced my colleagues to run it, and last fall they all ran the game. Despite never having run a Reacting-style game, my colleagues found success: 86.3% of the 131 students who responded to a post-survey found it either “helpful” or “extremely helpful” compared to “traditional instruction.” Only four judged it to be “unhelpful,” which for high school students is pretty astounding.

Overwhelmingly, the feedback I receive from students on learning with the Reacting pedagogy reiterates the value of these learning experiences to their educational experience. A significant benefit of Reacting is, of course, the significant library of games available for use and adaptation, but the game development frameworks have also significantly improved my capacity to develop and offer high quality learning experiences to students.

Indeed, two students in my African History class later reflected on their experience playing a prototype of my game in development: “Using role playing games as an interactive way of learning instead of traditional teaching methods gives students another way to understand challenging material. It allows students to use critical thinking skills, imagination, and everyday life skills, such as negotiation and compromise when working with others, while also participating in a fun activity.”

Learning should be fun, and Reacting offers an antidote to the boredom most people associate with classes in history while still working thoughtfully to develop the knowledge and skills that students need to find success both in and outside of school. It has also enriched my experience of my classroom and provided some of the most significant highlights of my teaching career thus far.

Alex Rolnick will be facilitating a session specifically for high school teachers and GMing "Hands off Africa!" with his co-author Eric Covey during this year's High School Fall Conference at GVSU. If you're interested in seeing how Reacting can transform your classroom firsthand consider registering today!

Register Today!

By: Nick Proctor
Executive Director
The Reacting Consortium

The first rule of Emperor's Club is that you do not talk.

I attended my first Reacting conference at Smith College in January 2005. I’d run a couple of Reacting games by this point, but as anyone who attends a conference well knows, playing a game is a very different experience. Dana Johnson, Reacting’s first administrative director, dropped me into Confucianism and the Succession Crisis of the Wanli Emperor, 1587, and cast me as the Son of Heaven himself, Emperor Wan-li. Not wanting to let down the people of China (or Dana), I took game preparation seriously. I read the gamebook and pored over the Analects. I also practiced my Chinese calligraphy. I wrote the symbol for harmony/peace/togetherness (和) over and over again. I was determined to be a good emperor.

The best pregame conversation I had was in the lobby of a little hotel next to campus. Struggling to understand the degree to which my role could be convinced, I had a good long talk with a couple of student preceptors. The game focuses on Wan-li’s attitude toward succession. He wanted his third born son to replace him. I was distressed because the Analects suggested that Wan-li was wrong. Couldn’t I be persuaded? They urged me to be true to my role sheet. I remained a bit disgruntled, so I turned to the Analects for guidance. Consequently, when the game started, I was determined to be as proper as possible. Two analects guided me. The first is at the beginning of chapter two, “He who exercises government by means of his virtue may be compared to the north polar star, which keeps its place and all the stars turn towards it.”

A few pages later, Confucious provided me with some additional advice, when he explained that the superior man “acts before he speaks, and afterwards speaks according to his actions.” I did not know how to escape from the dilemma that faced me, so I sat with my uncertainty. All day long, I listened. I whispered a few things in the ear of my First Grand Secretary, but I never spoke aloud.

A few years later, Mark Carnes told me that this caused some consternation for my GM. At a break, Mark asked him how the game was going. “Fine,” my GM said, “but my Emperor – I don’t think he gets it. He’s just sitting there.” Mark is appropriately sage-like about this sort of thing, so he just shrugged and said, “Let’s see what happens.”

It was a two-day conference. I’d spent the first presiding with gravity, and I was scheduled to give a speech on the second day. Preparing for it was when Reacting hooked me.

That evening, while others gathered and socialized, I sat at my hotel desk in the cold air, the iron New England dark. My dog-eared Analects was open and heavily annotated. My little book of Chinese calligraphy exercises was open too. I’ve read a lot of Faulkner, so I sat with these garrulous outraged baffled ghosts, listening, having to listen, as I turned myself to writing my speech.

Using a keyboard seemed improper, so I wrote by hand. There were lots of cross-outs. I kept finding analects and counter-analects. I entered that space where time disappears; you have nothing before you but the task. When I surfaced, I rewrote the whole thing in clear script. I finished up with a Chinese symbol for each page. These would help me to stay organized. The next morning, I got to the classroom about twenty minutes early.

Some grand secretaries had been irksome. I wanted to head off any potential for disobedience, so I pushed all the tables together to make one big one. Then I put chairs around the margins of it and placed one chair – my throne – on top. Eunuchs would have been useful, but a good emperor does what he needs to do. After all, the Master said, “The business of laying on the colors follows the preparation of the plain ground.” When people started trickling in, my First Grand Secretary helped me with stage management. Once everyone was seated, I entered the room, used the chair she’d kept clear to get on top of the table, and sat. The grand secretaries reacted in different ways. Some clearly agreed with the assessment the GM shared with Mark. Others smirked. Some rose and bowed with appropriate depth. One chortled. He would get his soon enough.

The FGS got things moving. As before, I retrained myself. Nodding sagely from time to time, I followed the discussion. Then, it was time to speak. I didn’t wait for the FGS to recognize me. I just started speaking. When I started, two grand secretaries audibly yelped. Their deportment left something to be desired, but one of the purists bowed so deeply that his forehead made an audible bonk on the table. He totally got it. This abject obedience made him untouchable. The speech prepared the ground well. Most grand secretaries agreed that their filial piety was the paramount virtue, so they remained obedient and supported my succession plans. One troublemaker was angling for martyrdom, so we sent him to investigate the rude tribes living west of Shaanxi. When the FGS announced this, he broke character and started complaining that this meant there was “no way he could win.” How offensive! Foul disrespecter of the rites! I reversed myself and had him executed instead.

Afterwards, our preceptor asked if she could have my written speech. Was this like asking for the set list after a particularly good rock concert? I enthusiastically handed it over.

Has this ever happened again? No. Regardless, it helped to cement Wan-li as my favorite game in the series. This is not just because it has the potential for building a fanbase. I love it because everyone needs to use the same central text. They understand the world differently, but they need to describe it through the prism of the analects. This always takes a little while for players to figure out, but once they do, it is a real thing of beauty. Philosophy and politics are enmeshed. On top of that, the game structure is elegant and pure. It seems too simple, but it is not. If we had the Brilliancy Prize back then, this would have been a shoo-in.

This Fall, Reacting is bringing back online workshops for games, if you have any interest in having a formative Reacting experience be sure to sign up to play Confucianism and the Succession Crisis of the Wanli Emperor, 1587, on October 25th!

Register Today!

By: Ahuva Liberles, Assistant Professor of Jewish History and Education, Tel Aviv University

It was the last week of December 2023, dark and cold. I was asked to deliver a lecture at the monthly English-speaking group in a senior living community in Jerusalem. The group consisted of about 20 men and women aged 75-92. Some were Holocaust survivors or army veterans, and all had rebuilt their lives in a new country. This event was made possible with support from the Koret Center for Jewish Civilization.

In December 2023, the atmosphere in the Middle East was heavy with grief and fear; the organizer of the English forum mentioned that the senior residents were reluctant to leave their rooms and often just watched the news. I needed to find a way to give them a pathway to share, open up, and feel empowered, even if just for an hour and a half.

Despite initial skepticism – "How can we play at a time like this?" – I decided to proceed. I used the micro-game version of the debate from the beginning of a longer game, Threshold of Democracy: Athens in 403 B.C.E. Players debate the “reconciliation agreement,” a law that muzzled freedom of expression in the hope that eliminating divisive language would unite the Athenian people.

Given the past two years of strife over the judicial reform in Israel, I initially thought this game was appropriate, and now, after October 7th, it felt all the more relevant. Excitement grew as the game day approached, with participants emailing and asking questions about how to prepare for the game.

When I arrived with the role sheets, the group was ready. The room was perfect for our needs, allowing space for setup, group discussions, and speeches. I introduced the game and its concept, gave some historical background, and the role-playing began.

The transformation was remarkable. Initially hesitant, the participants allowed themselves to be immersed in a historical event in 403 BCE and quickly became deeply engaged. They embodied their roles – merchants, veterans, sailors, philosophers – and grappled with complex dilemmas. During the setup, I walked from group to group, answering questions and assisting them in envisioning the next phase. Soon enough, they understood their unique historical stands.

The speeches were passionate and insightful, using their role sheets and drawing on their life experiences. The Athenian "Agora" came to life in a way I had not seen before. I was struck by how profoundly they connected to the historical event. Anyone joining the room would have mistaken this moment to be about a contemporary issue.

They debated the deep dilemma of not receiving closure and accepting former injustices to rebuild and look forward to a brighter future. They felt the hard feelings of betrayal towards the oligarchs who supported the Thirty Tyrants and now sought forgiveness. They questioned their current democracy and the potential imbalance the change might bring. They discussed fear, hate, and mistrust and aimed to build something stronger than walls.

In the debriefing, many expressed their astonishment at how immersed they became. One participant noted she was discussing Athens, but thinking of Israel's 1952 reparation agreement with Germany. Another remarked on the importance of integrating role play, especially for senior citizens, emphasizing that active learning is much more stimulating than passively listening to the many lectures they hear.

A third commented later in an email that she and her friends attend many classes, some over Zoom and some in person, but they remain receivers of knowledge and don't use their minds and feelings in the same way as in the Reacting to the Past demo she just experienced. The game provided a unique, immersive learning opportunity, allowing participants to connect deeply with historical events while setting aside their current worries.

"I realized how the historical discussions connected to the present," the organizer of the English forum summed up. "I found gaming an opportunity to encourage real conversation and debate in my community. It gave all participants a chance to voice their opinions publicly and make use of their life experiences. Playing Reacting to the Past gave me the feeling that we can still contribute to society and look forward to a better future."

Driving home, I felt privileged to have facilitated such an enriching experience. I hope this could be a broader avenue for Reacting to the Past to explore, offering senior citizen groups a dynamic and engaging way to learn and connect.

Blog Author Questionnaire:

 Dr. Ahuva Liberles is a faculty member at Tel Aviv University in the Jewish History department, Head of the History track in Tel Aviv University's Teacher Training program, and currently a guest professor at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. A historian and educator, Ahuva specializes in the social and intellectual history of Jews in pre-modern Europe (1100-1600) and in developing innovative pedagogical approaches in the humanities, a research path she began as a Blaustein postdoctoral fellow at Yale University (2021-2023). In 2024, Ahuva won the Dana Gorlin RTTP fellowship. Her research centers on family life, identity, marginality, and inter-religious encounters, with a strong commitment to fostering meaningful collaboration and guiding the transformation from student to teacher.

By: Raymond Kimball
Reacting Microgame Coordinator

Dear Reactors, 

Complementing the debut of Reacting Short Games at the 2024 Annual Institute, I’m pleased to announce the publication of the first Reacting Microgame, Jonathan Lawrence’s Ban the Jesuits! This publication is the culmination of 18 months of hard work to create templates, build a review system, and run a game through it to work out the inevitable glitches. We are very proud that we’ve created a process that:

• Produces a high-quality product,
• Applies peer review to support both the author and the community, and
• Teams up with world-class partners!
• Here’s a small taste of what’s waiting for you in Ban the Jesuits, which can be run with anywhere from 8 to 30 students:

Faceoff for the Future of the Order: The year is 1772 and the Jesuits face accusations from multiple directions ranging from fear of their allegiance to the Pope and independence from local political and religious rulers, claims that “seeing God in all things” has led them to wrongly accept concepts from other religions and violated Church teachings, to rumors that they are hoarding secret wealth despite their vows of poverty. Jesuits, Royal Ambassadors, Archbishops, and members of the Crowd have gathered in Rome to decide the fate of the Jesuits.

Reacting Microgames are a member benefit and can be accessed at no charge if you have an individual or institutional Reacting Membership. If you are not a member, you can pay a one-time fee to download the materials and license the game for use in your classroom.

We’ve completed peer review on the second Reacting Microgame and hope to have it out in the fall of 2024. Looking forward, we believe this system can support publications of up to four Microgames per year at an appropriate level of quality. If you have a Microgame in work, please contact me so I can keep you apprised of all the latest developments and make sure you’re getting the support you need.

With systems now fully in place for structured creation of Short Games and Microgames, we have archived Legacy versions of those games from the RC website. Legacy games are those whose authors have indicated that they do not plan to develop them for the new formats. We are still thinking about ways to make those Legacy games available in a manner that does not cause confusion in the community. Look for more updates about this effort by the end of the summer.

Play on!

By: Nick Proctor
Executive Director
The Reacting Consortium

Games with two sessions of gameplay are fun. They are also easy to fit into existing classes. And, as it turns out, they are devilishly hard to write. Players must be launched into the game with dizzying speed. Agendas must be tight. Ideas need to be accessible. In short, there is no time for lollygagging!

Determined to break the logjam in the development of short games, a small and dedicated group of Reacting stalwarts hammered out guidelines for their components in the Spring of 2022. 

These guidelines inspired some new projects. And they also allowed the recalibration of projects that were originally developed for the Flashpoints series.

This year’s Annual Institute will feature the fruits of these labors: four short games intended for a variety of disciplines and perfect for situations that cannot accommodate a full-length game.

Read on to learn about the new and updated short games that we're featuring at this year's Annual Institute!

Cigarette Century: Tobacco and Lung Cancer, 1964-1965

By: Chad Curtis

From the author: How do we know if X causes Y? "The Cigarette Century: Tobacco and Lung Cancer, 1964-1965" explores this question in the context of the congressional debates surrounding tobacco and lung cancer after the publication of the 1964 Surgeon General's Report. Players take on the role of senators, bureacrats, scientists, media representative, and tobacco executives as they seek to interpret the existing body of evidence to inform regulatory policy decisions.

Do We Take Shelter?: Evaluating "High Stakes" Information

By: Martha Attridge Bufton

From the author: By December 1940, the Western Allies were in the second year of the war with Germany, and the Luftwaffe began a series of air strikes on England. Individuals and families were regularly faced with life or death decisions: should one stay at home or go to a community shelter during a raid? These decisions were complicated by the information--or lack thereof--to which people had access. This game asks players to think critically about sources: which are authoritative, current, and unbiased, and which are not? When the sirens sound, what will you do? Learn more here: https://dwts.interdisciplinarylib.ca/

The Jumonville Incident: Washington at Fort Necessity

By: Nick Proctor

Overview: Constant struggles between the British and French empires fighting for territory along the frontier draw in colonists, indigenous populations, and various European powers. Now, a new flashpoint has developed: The Jumonville Incident. In this game, players will take on roles representing all the factions involved in this contested event to determine what actually happened, and what that might mean for the struggles that lie ahead.

North Korean Hunger Games: Famine, Rogue Regimes, and the Ethics of Aid, 1995-1998

By: Emily Simon and Kelly McFall

Overview: Students will take on the question of humanitarian assistance in an environment fraught with complications. A wide range of government representatives and aid organizations have gathered to discuss the future of assistance to North Korea. While no one can deny North Korea’s need, players will debate whether the nation qualifies for international aid, who should provide it, and how best to meet the needs of the people without further empowering the dangerous regime under whom they suffer.

These games and more will be available to play at the Reacting Annual Institute in June! Early bird registration is now open with discounted pricing for Reacting Consortium members. Don't wait! Register today!

The energy and inventiveness of the Reacting community is a sort of perpetual motion machine. It’s powered by people’s eagerness to lean into the mantra of improvisational theater. They like to say “yes, and.”

When instructors pose challenging questions, others rush in to answer. Then they usually end up raising interesting questions of their own. Consequently, my interaction with Facebook is mostly clicking the “like” button. When someone else has already posted something wise or clever – or wise and clever – I feel silly adding a comment of my own. “Yes,” I think. “You’re right! Good point!” Click! Click! Click!

All this leads me to wonder, when the band is playing improvisational jazz, what is the point of a director? Over the last year, I’ve generally found that the answer is that it is a lot like teaching Reacting – just say “yes” as often as possible. 

I started figuring this out at the beginning of the year when Naomi Norman asked me to present the keynote for the 2023 Winter Institute. I said yes and presented “Building Brave Spaces for Reacting.” This generally went over well, probably because I was clear that most of the ideas came from Mark Carnes’ book, Minds on Fire, talking with Allen White, the comic strips of Charles Schulz, and my experience at Knutpunkt. 

When Ray Kimball proposed working with the authors on one session games, I said yes. When Bill Offutt started the short games subcommittee of the REB, I said yes. When Kelly McFall’s students made a student perspective video and asked to put it on the website, I said yes please. 

Immediately after the Winter Conference, Jenn started planning the 2023 Annual Institute, which would mark our triumphal return to Barnard College. Jenn was eager to maximize the impact of meeting face-to-face, so she dropped the usual breakout sessions, which are easily replicated online, and reorganized the schedule so that everyone could participate in working groups dedicated to addressing the big challenges facing Reacting. When Jenn explained her plan, my response was, “Yes, let’s do that.” Clearly, I was gaining wisdom and growing into the job. The video interviews that we did at the AI bear out that my response was the correct one. 

This schedule overhaul gave me the opportunity to facilitate a working group about the relationship between generative AI and Reacting, which yielded a document for our growing online library of materials for instructors. Of the others, another highlight was the group focused on Reacting in high school, which was organized by Chris Jones. It allowed instructors who had been working in isolation to coordinate their efforts. One of them,Mark Whitters, just landed a grant from the Upshur Institute for Civic Education to continue this work. 

The Annual Institute at Barnard also provided an opportunity to playtest the “Fall of Athens,” a mobile phone delivered, one-session game that Jenn and I adapted from Mark Carnes’ popular “Athens Besieged” with Trey Alsup and Lauren Kelly of Experiential Simulations. As expected, there were some bugs, but not enough to scare off intrepid volunteers for fall playtests – including me! I’ll be running it as a Tony Crider-style “epic finale” in my FYS as well as running it at the Science Center of Iowa’s “mixology” event, which will show how well it works with drunk people.

I also said yes when Mark Pleiss, the director of my college’s CTL, asked me if I could “do some sort of game thing” for new faculty orientation. We co-presented the resulting “New Faculty Game” at this November’s POD Conference in Pittsburgh (it’s a big conference for CTL staff). The first version was written by Amy Berger and David Stewart as the “University Game.” Mark and I honed this down to the essentials, play-tested it with our new faculty, and then pitched it for the conference. It is not exactly a Reacting game, but it has all the principles and is better than death by icebreaker, the norm at faculty orientation events. My ambition is to use it as a “gateway drug,” enabling us to gain more traction with CTL staff. We shall see.

The work that Jenn and I were doing was punctuated by Maddie Provo hosting outstanding online events about player safety with Allen White and universal design with Jamie Lerner-Brecher, as well as faculty happy hours. She also continues to do amazing and innovative things with individual, departmental, and institutional memberships. (So much so that we needed to upgrade our site license to handle the volume). 

Similarly, when Jamie Lerner-Brecher saw there were more areas where the Reacting community could benefit from her expertise in Disability Studies and student support, she proposed making some short videos. We said “yes. do that,” and now we can all learn from here videos on Reacting and Anxiety and Reacting and Autism.   

Meanwhile, Noah Trujillo steadily added to his job description. He started as digital resources manager, but as the year passed, his work grew to include coordinating student workers, formatting game materials, editing video, and compiling analytical reports about the operation of our website. 

In the middle of all of this, Maddie and Noah decided to start work to overhaul the design of the website. They both work part time, but their curiosity, commitment, and energy mean that they do more with a handful of hours than most people get done in a week. 

How did I unlock this potential? I nod sagely and say, “Yes. Do that. Do that thing that you just said.” I am excited by the prospect of being able to say “yes” much more in the coming year.

Nick Proctor is the Executive Director of the Reacting Consortium. You can read his other blog posts and updates, including last year's look back.

By: Emily Fisher Gray
Professor of History
Norwich University, The Military College of Vermont

Emily Fisher Gray is a long-time reactor and game author, her latest game, Wrestling with the Reformation in Augsburg, 1530 is one of four Reacting to the Past games being published by UNC Press this Fall!

I sat in front of my computer, stumped by a game design problem. I was trying to create a microgame on the Schilling Revolt of 1524, to get players excited and prepared for my full-length game, Wrestling with the Reformation: Augsburg, 1530. To create the suspense of an urban uprising, I needed to build a sense of menace and danger with an irate mob, but I wanted all available players in the role of city councilors, besieged together in the council chamber. I did not want to give anyone a character sheet that instructed simply, “be very angry, yell a lot, and occasionally shake a pitchfork in a threatening manner.” That might be fun for a few minutes, but it hardly involves the kind of deep thinking and problem solving I was hoping this activity would generate. I needed a crowd without casting a crowd. 

As a professor at a military college, I can generally expect to have a roomful of enthusiastic students eager to help me puzzle through sticky game-design challenges. In the summertime absence of students, my teenage son and his friends are my next best resource, so I took this problem to them. Their solution was immediate, and in retrospect, obvious. My son pulled up Spotify on his phone and within a minute “Crowd – Angry” was playing through the speakers in the room. It was perfect. The noise was chaotic and tumultuous. The voices were disgruntled and sullen, occasionally rising to outraged and furious. Bursts of shouting came through, and even a few dog barks. It was exactly the backdrop against which I could present a set of irrational proletarians’ demands to a roomful of players and say “NOW what are you going to do?!”

In my years of experience using Reacting to the Past to create a historically immersive experience for students, I can’t believe I have neglected the potential power of sound. There are some games that encourage singing – the Ca Ira marks the climax of crowd action in the French Revolution game, and Greenwich Village offers personal influence points (PIPs) to those who are willing to break out into song. I have occasionally (if anachronistically) played La Marseillaise or a Bollywood hit or something from the musical Hamilton to get students excited about an upcoming game. But I had never before considered what a historical space might sound like and made use of the limitless trove of sounds on the internet to supplement a game with historically resonant noise.  

I plan to introduce sound effects into my fall semester Reacting games, both to enhance the experience for students and to solve some constraints and game challenges. Allow me to briefly explain how I intend to experiment with sounds, and suggest a few ways sound effects might be useful in a variety of Reacting games. 

(1) Using Sound to Build Excitement and Suspense. 

After trying “Crowd – Angry” in a playtest of the Schilling Revolt at the summer Annual Institute, I thought of many ways this sound clip could come in handy. I intend to make it the backdrop of the die roll at the end of Reformation in Augsburg, which determines whether Augsburg will be able to maintain its chosen religious reforms or devolve into either invasion by the armies of Emperor Charles V or another urban uprising. But “Crowd – Angry” could also be a perfect supplement to crowd actions in other games, magnifying the effect of student action, especially in a smaller class. It could enliven a lackluster French Revolution Grand Journee and add verve to the mob in Patriots and Loyalists. I purchased a chicken hat after a bland tarring and feathering action in Patriots and Loyalists last spring (is there anything you can’t buy on Amazon?) but I think “Crowd – Angry” would be even more useful in helping to convey a sense of historically-plausible popular rage. 

(2) Using Sound to Signal a New Space within Gameplay. 

Reformation in Augsburg includes a mechanism whereby the most important city councilmen can adjourn to the Gentlemen’s Drinking Club to make decisions without the input of their lower-status colleagues. I rarely have access to a separate classroom or open hallway, so my drinking club meetings generally take place in the back of the room.  This fall, I plan to create a unique auditory space for the drinking club meetings thanks to “Medieval Tavern Ambience,” another wonderful Spotify find. Contrary to its name, this sound clip does not transport us to some rowdy low-class establishment, but to a genteel space of clinking glasses, murmured conversations, and soft lute music, perfect for behind-the-scenes dealmaking by my powerful Augsburg oligarchs. If it works as I expect, this music will help me seamlessly transition the class into and out of drinking club meetings with minimal game manager intervention. I’m not sure “Medieval Tavern Ambience” has applicability beyond Reformation in Augsburg, unless you have insomnia – it’s labeled as a white noise sleep sound – but there are other games where students move into an alternate space or time while they remain in the classroom. For example, next time I play 1349: Plague Comes to Norwich I can guarantee that the Grim Reaper will come accompanied by the ominous tolling of a church bell or a nice funeral dirge. 

(3) Using Sound to Create Liminal Space or Transition into Gameplay. 

I have struggled to replicate in other Reacting games the fun liminal activities that open each session of the Athens 403 BCE game. After a nice pig sacrifice and hymn or poem for Athena, students are centered in Athens and ready to play. At the Annual Institute this summer, my creative council clerk for Reformation in Augsburg decided to write a prayer to open each council session, but I would not feel comfortable asking a student to do that as a regular requirement of the game. Instead, I have combed through dozens and dozens of church bell sound effect clips to find the perfect sound I can play to transport everyone to sixteenth century Augsburg to begin each day’s session. It is amazing how many different ways bells can be made to sound, from joyful wedding bells to bells signaling danger to bells appropriate to the Grim Reaper in 1349: Plague Comes to Norwich. For me, “Three Ringing Church Bells” strikes the perfect tone, so to speak: upbeat, energetic but not frenetic, a sound that still signals the start of the day in historic towns across Europe. If sound effects are successful in helping make the transition from 21^st century classroom to 16^th century council chamber for Reformation in Augsburg, I will definitely be looking for other historical noises that could help signal to students that they are entering a game. 

I am convinced that allowing students to hear sounds of the past will help put them in the right headspace to engage more effectively with the historical ideas and situations in Reacting games. A small Bluetooth speaker is an easy addition to my bag of Reacting props along with the flags, name tags, gavel, chicken hat, and other essential miscellany I carry with me to Reacting classes. I am curious to hear if anyone else has experimented with sound effects in class, and to get your ideas about how specific sound clips might add to the experience of the Reacting games you play!

Be sure to check out Emily's newest game: Wrestling with the Reformation: Augsburg, 1530. 

You can also find her previous blog post below:

The Reacting Consortium - Costumes and Uniforms: Reacting at Military College

About the Author

Emily Fisher Gray is a Professor of History at Norwich University. She has written on the early causes and progress of the Protestant Reformation, the phenomenon of Lutheran- Catholic co-existence, and the unique aesthetics of Lutheran architecture. Her ongoing research takes place in churches, libraries and archives in the former Free Imperial Cities of southern Germany, especially Augsburg, where she lived for a year as a Fulbright

Fellow. She has written a Reacting game, "Wrestling with the Reformation: Augsburg, 1530,” and is developing a game on the 1648 Peace of Westphalia.

Blog Author Questionnaire

One word to describe faculty: Curious
Two words to describe your school: Liberal-arts, military
Three words to describe students: Enthusiastic, Open-minded, Game-breakers
Four words to describe favorite games: Armies, Duels, Sausages, Votes
Five words to describe Reacting: Transformational, Challenging, Brilliant, Engaging, Essential

Becca Livingstone
Professor of History
Simpson College

I assigned Monuments and Memory-Making in my Fall 2022 First-Year Seminar course, which centered on the theme of Civic Engagement.  I, as a historian, naturally gravitate towards thinking about such things historically.  As Abby discussed last week, the contest over how we frame, construct, and teach our national history is a central issue in today’s politics.  The very crux of these debates – what history do we tell, celebrate, exclude, and decry – are defined by who is involved in the conversation.  

These are big, complicated questions.  Understandably, most students of mine were not particularly interested in exploring these questions; they were busy navigating their first semester in college, figuring out how to be college students, how to fit in, and how to make a good impression on their peers.  In fact, many of my students expressed a distinct reluctance to discuss anything remotely ‘political’ because of how divisive and uncivil those conversations have become.  There was resistance to civic engagement at precisely the time when they were coming of age to be able to vote.  Is there any wonder why with the current hyperpolarization in the country?  But this is what makes the college classroom space all that more important.  Where else can our young people learn the tools for how to discuss contentious issues if not in our classrooms?  How else can we help them figure out how to not only disagree with respect, but also listen to other viewpoints, engage in meaningful discussion, and build consensus about how to move forward together?

 Monuments and Memory-Making provided an interesting point of entry for my students to explore the issues in our current political debates about history without directly engaging in the politics that made them resistant.  It’s topic – the Vietnam War and the 1980s controversy over the memorial’s design – is far enough away that it didn’t directly touch their lives or outlooks.  The game became a less contentious space for them wrestle with the questions of: Who are we as a nation?  How do we deal with uncomfortable and (in many cases) shameful parts of our history?  How do we come to terms with the reality of history and its actors both holding and acting upon beliefs and values that are antithetical to our modern world?  What does this all mean for who we are as a nation today?  By setting these questions in the world of the early 1980s, students more easily engaged with the divergence in perspectives framed by different experiences, allowing them to more readily explore the negotiated nature of historical memory.   

The experience of playing the game left them with the crucial question of ‘why should this matter to them beyond the classroom space?’  This is where the debriefing session became critical; it was the place where we made the connections between the game and our present.  First, we discussed how the game demonstrated the power and the impact that everyday people, just like themselves, have on the creation of historical memory.  The interaction of roles opened students up to thinking about how people today can have such divergent understandings of American history.  To complete the ultimate task of the game, students had to figure out how this disparate group of people could (or couldn’t) come together to achieve a consensus of what it meant to be American.  This then served as a springboard for us to consider how these questions are alive today and why they matter to all of us.  

We as a nation are still trying to figure out who we are now and who we want to be.  It should not be the voices of the few or the powerful that decide the vision of the past, present, and the future of our nation; rather it should be the voice of the many, the people.  The stories that we lift up and give voice to matter.  Through this experience, my students began to think about how historical memory is constructed by various competing voices, both big and small, that mostly have nothing to do with historians or the professional discipline.  Instead, it is ordinary people, just like them, who ‘make’ a nation’s historical memory.  The game served as a lesson in civic responsibility and empowerment.  It also showed them how to engage in civil discourse about things that matter deeply to people.  Two things, which our present state of politics are sorely in need of.    

Abigail Perkiss
Professor of History
Kean University

Recently, one of my students told me that it was impossible to truly put himself into the mindset of the role he had been assigned, because he would have been seeing the past through his 2023 eyes. As instructors, we do our best to acknowledge and mitigate this inevitable collision of past and present – of a student’s contemporary predicament influencing the way they understand and interact with a role, a text, a historical moment.

But what happens when the game asks students to confront this very collision, and calls on them to understand that our present impacts our understanding of the past as much as our past impacts our present?

Suddenly, their current reality becomes a site of inquiry, an entry point into the ways we as a society experience and make sense of the past, and how those meanings become contested.

Such is the case for Monuments and Memory-Making. When my co-authors, Rebecca Livingstone and Kelly McFall, and I began conceiving of this game – in 2013 – we aimed to give students a glimpse into the creation of collective memory by entering contest over the construction of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. We wanted students to consider how we create a national memory of our collective past. How we move on from a lost war. How we remember the dead while honoring the living. How we reunite a fractured nation.

We wanted students to understand that the past is neither fixed nor concrete, that empirical evidence is always viewed through the lens of the contemporary reality in which it is interpreted. We wanted them to see that the struggle for the memorialization of the Vietnam conflict was rooted as much in the civic life and politics of the late 1970s and the early 1980s as it was in the preceding decades of fighting.

Nine years later, as we were finalizing the manuscript for production, armed insurrectionists stormed the US Capitol, brandishing the flag of the Confederacy. Though the history of the Capitol attack was – is – still being written, it was clear early on that this act was more than a mere nod to the past. In the halls of the Capitol, in congressional chambers, and through the streets of Washington, DC, those who participated in the attack invoked an interpretation of history that called back to the aftermath of the US Civil War, when former enslavers fought to memorialize the southern cause as noble and just, a heroic battle to preserve the ways of the South while minimizing the brutality of the system of slavery.

This fight over the narrative of the Civil War – so deep as to challenge the naming of the war itself – has pervaded American life for more than 150 years. In the wake of the conflict, southerners held dear to this noble “lost cause” narrative, as northerners sought to celebration widespread triumph and the reclamation of a united nation. Today, as historians center the experience of enslaved people and the consequences of slavery in retelling the period, white supremacists like those who invaded the US Capitol on January 6 evoke the Confederacy to push back on the ideas of federal oversight and racial justice reform, lionizing those who fought as victims of an aggressive northern campaign to dismantle southern customs and traditions.

These debates over the past are not simply academic exercises; they matter because the way we understand and make sense of our collective past informs how we make sense of our contemporary reality. These efforts to commemorate a past as the past stem from our desire to craft a national collective memory of what has come before.

In 2013, we envisioned Monuments and Memory-Making as a game that would call on students to interrogate the relationship between past and present in the early 1980s. We didn’t conceive of the game as an opportunity for students and instructors to contemplate current events in the time and place in which they were playing the game.

By: Robert Goodrich
Professor of History
Northern Michigan University

This is a continuation of the previous blog about the recently published Democracy in Crisis: Weimar Germany, 1929-1932. The previous post can be found here.

Alongside my overenthusiastic tendency to overdesign the game, the biggest conundrum proved to be the use of antisemitism, Nazi imagery, and playing a Nazi. These issues quickly became a stumbling block as the RTTP community split into roughly two camps. The first camp, to which I belong(ed), argued that this is RTTP. Our own name is “Reacting to the Past.” We do not shy away from historical controversies but instead believe that only by immersing ourselves in the intellectual realities of the past can we understand how history unfolded as it did without projecting our contemporary prejudices onto it. In short, antisemitism matters. Nazism matters. And we need to confront them head on using all the power of RTTP pedagogy.

The second camp did not disagree with any of this in the abstract. But practical application was different. They pointed out that there was, in fact, a red line that we should not cross, and that proactive use of antisemitic speech and Nazi imagery espoused by student characters were obviously on the other side of that line. A colleague pointed out the potentially disastrous public relations optics of a student using their phone to video a part of the game where a Nazi character spews antisemitic filth, captioned, “Professor Makes Students Be Nazis.” Twenty years of building a positive brand recognition gone in a flash… Other experienced instructors pointed out the dangers to the students. While we expect much of our students, asking, in particular, a Jewish student to either play a Nazi or be exposed to attacks by a Nazi character could well be expected to shut that student down, trigger warnings be damned. If the goal is to learn about these issues, placing such a high affective barrier is not necessarily conducive to that goal.

I am not about to try to weight how an individual student might respond emotionally to an RTTP character who embraces ideas diametrically opposed to their own beliefs, but we do this all the time. We expect fundamentalist Christians to be Darwinists, Muslims to play Crusaders, Blacks to play racists, Native Americans to be genocidal whites, and so forth.

And yet there emerged a particular sensitivity to antisemitism. Not that other game designers or the RTTP community in general were insensitive in the cases just listed. Far from out. I spoke with most of the designers of these games and they were keenly aware of the need to take the students’ sensitivities into consideration. They either developed various mechanics to isolate explosive content or they chose to remove it since, although relevant, it got in the way of bigger issues. And the visceral reaction of many faculty at the RTTP conferences when playing Democracy in Crisis kept appearing as the central point of concern in their assessments.

Here is not the place for an argument about why antisemitism proved a sort of last frontier. The fact is, it was. Game production stalled. The perceived stakes were high. But in 2022 the editorial board voted to advance it and UNC Press accepted it among its first tranche of RTTP publications released this year.

What happened? I think three things. First, there were changes in the RTTP board. New faces brought new perspectives, and there was a general shift towards advancing the game. But that just begs the question as to what had happened to shift general perspectives. While the game was regularly debated by RTTP, it played no role in board elections. So other factors were at play.

The second element was the consequences of the election of Donald Trump to the US presidency in 2016. This was not immediate, but the events of the “Unite the Right” rally in August 2017 and Trump’s persistent refusal to take a principled, consistent, and policy stance against racism (quite the contrary, in fact), were accompanied by an almost inevitable statistical rise in antisemitic and other racist acts and beliefs during his presidency. Whether Trump’s role was casual or contributory or correlative can be debated. And I have not done an opinion poll of RTTP members, but I noticed a distinct shift by 2017 in the willingness to grapple more aggressively with the controversial issues in Democracy.

“Unite the Right” Rally, Charlottesville, Va, 12 August 2017, by Anthony Crider

The third element flowed from the second. Working with colleagues, especially those who had faced similar design and classroom challenges, we made changes to how antisemitism and Nazi imagery were handled. The revisions specifically prohibited Nazi iconography (no swastika, “Heil Hitler”, fascist salute, or any such thing). Just as importantly, the section on antisemitism now allowed instructors to choose from three broad options on how to proceed with antisemitism.

Reich Youth Rally,  Potsdam, 1932 (photograph), Calvin University, German Propaganda Archive

1) Full integration: Antisemitism, as essential to the period and the issues, remains since leaving it out sanitizes the Nazis, and it is the rise of the Nazis that is the primary reason we study Weimar Germany. It must be confronted head on, and that includes exposing how an overtly racist organization can twist its rhetoric to fit into the norms of a democracy.

2) Full exclusion: It is dropped as a debate issue entirely. While antisemitism was an integrating construct for the Nazis, they rose to power based on other issues – unemployment, opposition to Versailles, anti-Marxism, collapse of traditional values and ways of life, etc. The game, and history up to 1933, make sense without antisemitism (what happens after, however, does not). After all, this is not a game about the origins of the Holocaust or about the Nazis or Hitler. The topic is replaced by racial eugenics (race hygiene) and eugenic sterilization, which gets at the broader issue of Nazi racial thinking.

3) Hybrid: Antisemitism remains in the game but rather than having players express those ideas in character, we use historical documents from ~1930 to be read by everyone, distributed in place of speeches by antisemitic characters.

The revisions went a long way towards allaying lingering concerns, but the changed and charged political climate was likely decisive.

About the Author

Robert Goodrich’s research interests lie in Modern Central European history with a broad and integrative approach. His research and teaching emphasizes cultural and social history and the interplay of factors such as labor, gender, sexuality, and religion in identity construction. The nature of his research into religion and identity also requires a comparative view of European and American experiences, reflected in his interest in transnational history and recent focus on questions of identity related to Austro-Hungarian migration to, from, and through Michigan. Goodrich also works to promote internationalization at Northern Michigan University and has taken students to Spain, Peru, Greece, and most regularly, to Austria.

Blog Author Questionnaire

One word to describe faculty: Engaged

Two words to describe (your) school: Supportive, Humane

Three words to describe students: Kind, Underprepared, Distracted

Four words to describe favorite games: Team-Based, Open-Ended, Immersive, Problem-Solving

Five words to describe Reacting: Contingent, Document-Based, Confrontational, Student-Centered, In-Depth