If you’re looking to reinvigorate an existing class or create a new class, adding a Reacting to the Past (RTTP) game can help you engage students; structure your course to dig deeper into specific topics, time periods, or events; and motivate your students to actually read the primary documents you assign. This spring, I retooled my History of Illness and Medicine course and added a game, After a Long Battle: Congressional Response to the AIDS Epidemic, 1982-1985. Having taught the course with a different topic each week, ranging from mental health to reproductive medicine to smallpox, it lacked coherence. This semester, I narrowed the focus to viral diseases. The change allowed me to simplify the medical knowledge students needed, introduce a consistent examination of public responses to infectious diseases, and encourage more nuanced conversations about the interplay between the biological aspects of illness and human responses. To give us time to fully understand how to approach a disease from all angles—biology, history, cultural and social forces, individual and corporate economics, regional variations, and politics—we spent six weeks on HIV. At the unit’s center, After the Long Battle plunged our class into a time when little was known about the virus, there were no treatments, and both politicians and the public were forced to consider the federal government’s role in addressing epidemics and how to think about an infectious disease seemingly targeting only marginalized groups. Despite some challenges, students emerged with a deep understanding of the role of politics, group identity, and public opinion in shaping epidemics.
What is Reacting to the Past?
RTTP is not re-enacting the past; games are not academic versions of battle re-enactments, historical cosplay, or the classroom equivalent of a Renaissance fair. Immersed in tense and significant historical moments, students are reacting, making decisions based on constantly shifting information and events, which lead to uncertain outcomes.
Three primary factors define RTTP games: use of primary sources, engagement with big ideas, and indeterminate outcomes. Students craft their characters based on primary texts assigned to the entire class and specific supplemental texts—for example in After a Long Battle, all students read selections from the 1980 Democratic Platform, but Speaker Tip O’Neil must read the entire platform. Each game features big ideas, in this case conflicts between LGBTQ+ activists and the Religious Right, partisan battles over the size and structure of the federal budget, and public questions about the appropriate role of the government in handling public health crises. Finally, the outcome is uncertain, and it depends on how different students navigate the game and operate within their power constraints.
This semester, Congress turned out to be far stingier in their appropriations than they were in real life and thousands of people contracted HIV and died as a result of the federal government’s failure to fund education, research, and prevention. In other games, sometimes Ann Hutchinson is not expelled from Massachusetts Bay Colony or the Colonial Legislature in New York City sides with the British during the American Revolution. Counterfactual outcomes must be possible, otherwise students are merely acting a part, but game mechanics (and your interventions as an instructor) prevent ahistorical outcomes. Congress cannot vote to cure HIV in 1984, John Winthrop never becomes an atheist, and aliens from Mars do not thwart the British invasion. This instability helps students understand both the importance and limits of personal agency in determining historical outcomes. What students say and do matter to the outcome. But as they quickly learn, some of their characters have far more power, just like members of privileged groups in real life—this semester students quickly learned that President Reagan had a great deal more power than AIDS patient and gay-rights activist Bobby Campbell.
Why Use Reacting to the Past?
Research tells us that game-based learning engages students, and in my experience it shifts many students from extrinsic motivation (grades) to something closer to intrinsic motivation, resulting in stronger engagement with the assigned materials. I don’t grade based on game outcomes because different roles have different probabilities of success, but the mere desire to win is a powerful motivator and peer pressure strongly encourages both preparation and attendance. Other benefits include increases in empathy; improvements in speaking, writing, leadership, and problem-solving skills; and a higher degree of interaction with their classmates.
On the instructor side, I’ve found incorporating games helps me be more engaged, particularly when teaching the same courses repeatedly. Looking forward to students’ small and big victories is much more energizing than reviewing lecture notes, although it can be more time consuming. Because each game changes day by day and semester by semester, I am more flexible and agile in the classroom, and my preparation time shifts from writing lectures to planning for each day’s possible outcomes and helping students with out-of-class planning and strategizing.
Advice for Getting Started
Choose your first game carefully. RTTP games are all classified into one of five levels. Level one games are in the most rudimentary state of development and are only used by their authors, while level five games are published. The easiest games to run are level five—they are polished and extensively play-tested, instructor materials are complete (and free to use), typically other faculty have provided a wealth of useful supplemental materials, and you’ll easily find experienced people who can help when you have questions about setting up your syllabus or when something unexpected happens mid-game. The RTTP Facebook group is a great place to connect with instructors from all disciplines to share ideas and get help if you need it. The only downside is the cost of the gamebook to students (typically $30 for a print copy, $10 for an e-book).
Unpublished games are only available to RTTP Consortium members. (Memberships are available on an income-based sliding scale or for institutions.) With a membership, you can share game books with your students free of charge to them (an advantage if book costs are a concern or your institution requires OERs) and they expand the available topics beyond the published games. On the downside, unpublished games are trickier to run, may be incomplete, and can have complications with game mechanics that have not been fully addressed. It will be more difficult to find help (although some authors will happily answer questions) and typically there are no supplemental materials available, creating more work for you.
In my experience, Greenwich Village, 1913 is the best first game for instructors. It is an extremely well-developed game, easy to run with complex intersecting historical themes but simple game mechanics, and its structure directly incentivizes many of the out-of-class activities that other games implicitly encourage. Its main themes are labor and women’s suffrage (and changing women’s roles), with sub-themes of race, class, and sexuality, and World War I making a last-minute appearance (don’t tell the students). It can easily fit into a US History from 1865 survey or a chronological course (such as The Progressive Era), as well as classes such as women’s history, gender studies, labor history, intellectual history, or constitutional/legal history. Supplemental materials are easily available (for free) and most experienced instructors have used the game at least once, so there’s plenty of help if you need it.
Once you’ve picked your game, consider pairing it with a short starter game, to get students used to being active participants in your classroom. Almost any open-ended game will work, but two common favorites are Monumental Consequences and Making History which both fit into a 50 or 75 minute class session. Monumental Consequences provides a great set-up for games involving life-or-death decisions, war, art, ethics, or public memory while Making History deals with using evidence from the past to construct a plausible narrative about two college students’ break-up. Even if I’m not incorporating a RTTP game, I use a game the first day of class in all my courses to set the stage for a semester of active participation.
As you shape your syllabus, remember that you’re sacrificing breadth to gain depth and skill development, as most games take 3-5 weeks. Consider what other assignments, lectures, or class activities might need to be added, modified, or eliminated to make room. Are there themes in the game you want to emphasize throughout the rest of the course? To incorporate Greenwich Village, 1913 in my American Women’s History class, for example, I restructured the class to emphasize three themes—suffrage, labor, and reproductive rights, choosing new readings for the rest of the semester accordingly. In the US History from 1865 course I am redesigning, I am using three games, with the over-arching theme of how gender intersects with American history, which will drive the re-tailoring of lectures from Reconstruction to the Cold War.
Remember to build in time and materials to draw students in and teach new skills. Providing brief videos of actual students talking about their RTTP experiences can help build confidence and interest in the game. You will want to spend time talking about public speaking—how to prepare a speech, deliver it in character, and overcome stage fright. And if your students don’t already know how to analyze a primary document, you will need to teach them.
Also consider how you will accept and track game assignments. Unlike a traditional class, students’ deadlines are driven by the moments in the games when they give speeches, produce newspapers, and write policy proposals, so they will occur throughout the game. I’ve found it easier to require paper submissions and track game grades in a spreadsheet, rather than trying to handle complex deadlines in the LMS. Most games have an opening quiz on the game manual (provided in the instructor materials) and two in-game assignments. I also require a final reflection essay, which encourages students to integrate what they have read, written, done, and thought to create a deeper understanding of the historical situation.
My most important advice for first-timers is to take risks and be open to fun and unpredictable outcomes. I held off too long because I was unsure whether my students and I were up for the task and because I was wedded to older notions of the importance of broad coverage. But after my second RTTP-semester, one of my students wrote:
[The game] helped me understand the unpredictable nature of history. But I also learned more empathy—it’s easy to say “oh, I am [character] for four weeks”; and learn nothing from it. But actually being that character and interacting with other people set in this time period was… wow. I found myself wanting to go back in time and hug the crap out of all of these people. I felt for them, and I felt strongly about their fights.
I realized then that these experiences will stick with them much longer than the most brilliant lecture I have delivered.
See Elizabeth Georgian’s syllabus (discussed above), “History of Illness and Medicine in America: Pandemics” and the accompanying game schedule, “Game Schedule—After a Long Battle: Congressional Response to the AIDS Epidemic, 1982–1985.”
Additional Sources
“‘Reacting to the Past’ Engages Students,” Northern Michigan University, 10/4/2018, https://news.nmu.edu/reacting-past-engages-students-0
Megan Bylsma, “Learning from the H.I.P.: Engagement through Reacting to the Past,” Papers on Post-Secondary Learning and Teaching, 4 (2020): 25-31.
Paul Dagnall, “Understanding Extrinsic and Intrinsic Motivation in Your Students,” University of Dayton, 9/13/2021, https://udayton.edu/blogs/onlinelearning/2021/09_13_2021_motivation.php
Mark C. Carnes, Minds on Fire: How Role-Immersion Games Transform College (Harvard University Press, 2018).
Featured Image
USC Aiken students playing Ellenton, 1950, taken by Elizabeth A. Georgian
Clio and the Contemporary 