For the 2026 Winter Conference, we are featuring a series of interviews with the authors of Reacting Games being played at the event. For our third and final interview, Reacting Intern Jocelyn Edwards sat down with Dr. Joseph Sramek, author of Politics, Religion, and the Birth of the Public Sphere: England, 1685-1688.
So, first things first, how did you get introduced to the world of Reacting to the Past?
About eleven years ago, I had a class in the Spring of 2015 – Modern European History. I had about 30 students, nobody wanted to talk, and it left me really frustrated. So about mid-semester, I was looking at all kinds of primary source readers to try and reanimate the class, and one day the Norton textbook representative came by asking for spring semester orders. I said, “do you have anything for me?” She said, “Come to think of it, we carry this curriculum you might enjoy called Reacting to the Past.” She put me in touch with professors in nearby universities, I started emailing them, and next thing you know I was going to the summer conference at Barnard. I remember that summer the French Revolution and the American Revolution were both being played. By the end of that weekend, I knew what I was doing for my course, and the rest, as they say, is history.
For The Birth of the Public Sphere, could you give me a quick elevator pitch?
So, the game itself is an immersive experience set inside a coffee house. London, in the late 17th century, had about fifty of these. According to a scholar named Jurgen Habermas, Coffeehouses in many ways represent the birth of the public sphere – the concept of modern civil society. What you have here is the origin of modern, vibrant civic culture where people don’t kill each other for different ideas, but discuss them.
This is coming in the late 17th century, right after those religious wars in Europe, and right after the problems England experienced throughout the 17th century. One king had been beheaded, another king overthrown, and you have a lot of turmoil. On the primary source end of things, I wanted a game that focused on authors like Hobbes and particularly John Locke, considering how normal he is nowadays to us. I wanted my game to capture an earlier moment when he was controversial.
What do you think makes the Birth of the Public Sphere unique in the Reacting library? What draws people into it?
We still need a lot of games to fill open niches in the Reacting library, like games set before the 18th and 19th centuries. We have a lot of games that are modern games, and in contrast my game covers early modern Europe. Additionally, we also need games in cultural settings – that really think about power and what power is. Games that feature less direct forms of power, or how the power is mediated and experienced by less elite actors. A lot of our games are male-heavy, so how do we get female roles into games? How do we get more historically marginalized voices in our games? Perhaps more cultural settings are the way to do that.
The last thing I would say is we need games with modular structures – kind of mix and match games. And one of the things that I did in my game design is that because it is a coffee house, it can be a versatile setting. When I was writing this game, I got some feedback from the community, from professors in English departments, that wanted to teach early modern literature in the setting of my game. It was also obvious that I needed to do something with early modern science because of the contemporaneous Scientific Revolution. It was a really low-hanging fruit to add that in.
So, I have created my game as a modular structure. There is a core group of characters, but only about 12-13 are needed in the game to get the basic debate going. As you go beyond those core roles, I have 50 additional roles which I divide into “character packs.” So, if you want to beef up your early modern science, I have science people. If you want to beef up your literature, I have people for that. If you want to talk about Empire, slavery, etc., I have characters for that. I want to model this for the rest of the community, as a way you can do games that could be used in multiple types of classrooms.
Of all the characters in the game, do you have a favorite?
It is so hard, I have a couple. I have always enjoyed the Marquis of Halifax, because he is such a moderate in a period of extremes. I also find the character of John Churchill, Winston’s infamous ancestor, fascinating. He famously switches sides, and I always like seeing what students do with his utterly pragmatic, principle-less personality.
What comes next? Any other projects or ideas you’re working on right now?
I am working on a game set in the UK that is called, Social Democracy Versus Market Liberalism in Britain, 1976-1979. I want to play with the idea of: “What if Margaret Thatcher never came to power?” When she becomes Prime Minister in the late 1970s, it is a sea change in economic policy. In the leadup to this era, John Maynard Keynes was a very prominent economic thinker, and many believed that the most important thing was to avoid unemployment – to avoid the Great Depression of the 1930s. Therefore, the government should step in to regulate the economy as necessary during times of economic downturn, such as during the late 1970s. But in real history, these ideas are toppled by more conservative ones, and Thatcher’s side ultimately prevails, but it is a narrow run thing. It is never as triumphant as her supporters seem to think it is. I want to explore this clash of economic philosophies and see how things might have unfolded had events played out slightly differently.
If you want to try out Birth of the Public Sphere for yourself, and find out about the exciting changes coming in Reacting 3.0, be sure to sign up for the Reacting Consortium's 2026 Winter Conference!
