NEWS AND Announcements 

*The original deadline of April 1st has been extended, all nominations are now due by April 15th.

Submissions are now open for this year's Reacting awards! Read on to learn more about these wonderful initiatives and how you can apply for them or nominate a deserving colleague.

Brilliancy Prize

The Brilliancy Prize seeks to recognize and publicize extraordinary creativity within the Reacting enterprise. Instituted in 2019, it’s presented to a particularly ingenious or creative idea or pedagogical practice that advances Reacting games, and comes with a $1,000 award, presented each year at the Annual Institute at Barnard College.   We would like to present the award at the Summer Institute at Barnard (June 8-11).

You can read more about the Brilliancy Prize and learn about past winners here, and if you want to apply, please send a letter of nomination (for yourself or someone else!) of no more than a three pages detailed description of the innovation being nominated and a rationale for why it is deserving of the award, along with any supporting materials, to current chair of the Brilliancy Prize Award Committee, Wendy Closterman at Wendy.Closterman@brynathyn.edu by April 15, 2023.

Dana Gorlin Johnson Fellowship

 The Dana Gorlin Johnson Fellowship is named in memory of Dana Johnson Gorlin, the founding administrator of the Reacting to the Past program. Without her work from 2002–while still an undergraduate student at Barnard–until 2014, the Reacting Consortium would not exist. You can read more about Dana here, as well as learn about past winners.

This fellowship is  awarded to a deserving faculty member, especially from a community college or public university, who best exemplifies Dana’s exceptional qualities of character and mind and who gives high promise of advancing Reacting. To apply or nominate someone for this award, please submit a two-page statement outlining the applicant's/nominee's previous experience with Reacting to the Past, as well as their potential for advancing the program, to Marina Maccari-Clayton at (mmaccari@utk.edu) by April 15, 2023.

There have been a lot of changes to our games in development! We're excited to announce some of the updates to our games and new games and files coming very soon. We'll update this page when new files are added or updated.

New Files:

Roman Prisoner Dilemma

Formerly known as Egyptian Prison game, updated Gamebook and Role Sheets.

Greenwich Village Second Edition

New Role Sheets, Instructor's Manual, and Handouts.

Updated tip sheet to help instructors prepare for the changes made in the second edition.

Democracy in Crisis: Weimar Germany, 1929-32

New Role Sheets, Instructor's Manual, and Handouts.

Monuments and Memory-Making: The Debate over the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial 1981-82

New Role Sheets, Instructor's Manual, and Handouts.

Ashoka: Becoming the Dharma King

Revised Files.

Ending the Troubles: Religion, Nationalism, and the Search for Peace and Democracy in Northern Ireland, 1997-98

Advanced to Level 4 with updated files!

Coming Soon:

Bacon's Rebellion

Moving to Level 4.

Grandsons of Genghis: The Mongol Kurultai of 1241

Moving to Level 3, will be published on Reacting Consortium Website.

The Investiture Controversy: Church and State on the Road to Canossa, 1075-77

Moving to Level 3, will be published on Reacting Consortium Website.

1349: Plague Comes to Norwich

Moving to Level 3, updated files.

Faculty at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan, have recently been awarded a grant that will help facilitate the use of RTTP at the High school level! Over the coming months, their consultant, Chris Jones, will gather and curate available teacher-created materials. When possible, we will make these materials available via the RTTP Consortium website High School page.

Mr. Jones and Dr. Anne Caillaud, Professor of French Language and Literature at GVSU, plan to facilitate a roundtable discussion at the RTTP Annual Institute at Barnard College June 8-11, 2023.

If you are a high school instructor and have created resources to help adapt Reacting to the Past games into a high school curriculum we would love to hear from you! Use this form to send your resources and tell us about how Reacting has been helpful in your classes.

Join us for the first West Coast Game Development Conference.  The annual event will be held from July 13-15 in Corvallis, Oregon, on the campus of Oregon State University.  The GDC conference provides engaging opportunities to discuss, collaborate, and gain insight as we create and teach using innovative pedagogy.  All ranks of experienced Reacting instructors (from one game experience to 100) are invited.  I am looking forward to sharing with you in the coming weeks information on our keynote speaker, game nights, and events planned to make this GDC a memorable experience.    

The registration website will go live in a few weeks, but the GDC Board wanted to give clarity on the registration cost for the conference.    

You can join the Reacting Consortium to have deeper engagement in a supportive community that engages students with imagination, inquiry, and engagement.  

If you have an idea for a game playtest for a full-length or multiple-day game, panel, proposed game, or presentation, there is still time to apply.  We have received a robust early response for game playtests.    

I am happy to talk with you about attending this Summer’s GDC in Oregon.    

Steve Shay  
2023 GDC Conference Coordinator  
steve.shay@oregonstate.edu  

Submissions for this year's Game Development Conference (GDC 2023) are now open! If you have a game that you're interested in having a game play tested or a working proposal that needs feedback, consider using the form below to apply:

SUBMIT YOUR PROPOSAL

If you're interested in learning more about where the GDC will be held and to stay up to date as more information gets announced follow our GDC event page!

Dear Reactors,

Reacting has found a way forward for its Short Games (defined as requiring 2-4 class sessions inclusive of prep time and debriefing) and Microgames (requiring only a single class session for all such activities). The Reacting Consortium Board recently approved the recommendations of the Reacting Short Games/Microgames (SG/Ms) Working Group*, which you can read in full here. There is now a lot of work to be done to make this vision a reality, but here are three things you need to know right now:

• None of the SG/Ms currently listed on the Reacting website are going away in the near future. We know many of you have plans for these materials in the next two semesters, so we are keeping that content in place until we have conversations with the individual authors (see below).

• Authors of new SG/Ms should use the new Frameworks to guide their development. Those Frameworks can be found in the Game Author Resources page of the website under Templates, and can also be downloaded using these links (Short Games / Microgames) We are working now to build the intake processes for new SG/Ms. Our vision is that there will be separate systems for Small Games vs. Microgames, but both will be scholarly peer review systems so SG/Ms can count for CV credit. We also hope to eventually have more robust templates to guide development, similar to those that currently exist for Flagship Reacting. Look for more information in the first half of 2023.

• Authors of current SG/Ms should look for outreach from us in the immediate future. We would love to have all of the SG/Ms currently on the website converted over to the new format, but we understand that this will require significant intellectual labor on the part of their authors. We will contact every currently hosted SG/M author individually in the next 30 days about converting their games to the new frameworks. Conversion will put the games through the intake processes mentioned in the bullet above once we establish them. Games whose author elects not to convert them will be annotated as such on the website and will likely be taken down at the end of 2023 (or earlier if desired by the author). We will explore potential ways to archive non-converted games for historical reference. Time permitting, we will also reach out to SG/M authors listed on the BLORG who do not have content on the website yet.

We know there will be additional questions and concerns about this effort as it moves forward. Please feel free to ask them in the Reacting Faculty Lounge or reach out to us individually as you desire. Let’s make great games together!

Ray Kimball, ray@42ed.games

Reacting Microgame Coordinator

Bill Offutt, woffutt@pace.edu

Chair, REB Short Games Subcommittee

*In addition to the two of us, Scout Blum, Nick Proctor, Maddie Provo, and Jon Truitt all served on the Working Group. We are incredibly grateful for their hard work and candor in the group!

GDR-MicrogameFramework-Dec2022.pdf

GDR-ShortGameFramework-Dec2022.pdf

GDR-SGMWorkingGroupReport-Dec2022.pdf

The Reacting Consortium Board is seeking nominations for three open positions and one student position on the Board beginning on July 1, 2023 and extending through June 30, 2026. All positions are for three-year terms.

For the three open positions, we are seeking individuals who satisfy one or more of the following important criteria:

· Contributes to the racial, ethnic and cultural diversity of the Reacting Consortium Board;

· Experience with issues of diversity, inclusion, and equity in gameplay;

· Contributes to the institutional diversity of the Reaction Consortium Board, i.e. community college affiliation, public university affiliation, etc;

· Experience with development and fund-raising;

· Experience with game design, role playing, or game-based learning outside of Reacting.

For the one student position, we are seeking an individual with experience playing RTTP games and a strong interest in promoting the goals of Reacting as a pedagogical experience. We are especially interested in individuals who represent communities of color, members of the LGBTQ community, and increase our gender balance of women to men.

Nominations (including contact information) should be sent to the Chair of the Nominations Committee, John Lucaites (lucaites@iu.edu), by March 6, 2023.

There’s been a lot of changes to our website over the past few months, with more on the way!

It's an exciting time for Reacting, and our website has changed a lot. This summer and fall we have focused our efforts on updating the website to make it more accessible and to reflect some of the cosmetic changes made by UNC Press. But that's not all!

Here are some of the key updates and changes to our website:

Covers for Games Under Review

Thanks to the tremendous efforts made by Maddie Provo, we have been able to create covers for our developing games based on the new covers that UNC created for our published games. Not only do these covers look nice, but we also hope that they will increase the popularity of our developing games and give them more character at a glance.

Browse Games by Subject

We firmly believe in expanding the reach of our games so that our games can be used to enrich the learning of students anywhere. One way we've reaffirmed this commitment is by scouring our game pages to find games that overlap with other disciplines and fields of study (here's a hint, it's all of them). You can now easily search for games that feature Art, Politics, Religion, Journalism, and discussions on Race, Gender, and Sexuality. These can all be found on our new Games by Subject Page. These categories, along with our STEM and French Language game pages, have made it easier than ever to find the perfect game to suit your needs, even outside of the traditional history class.

Reacting in High School

Last week we featured a blog post highlighting how Reacting to the Past has been used in a high school setting with promising results. The Reacting Consortium Board has been looking for ways to make our games more accessible in the high school classroom and support teachers in making our games suitable for their students. In July we created a discord server dedicated to helping high school instructors which will operate in a similar way to the Facebook Reacting Faculty Lounge.

There is also a dedicated Reacting in High Schools page that is still under construction. We'll be sure to let you know when it goes live and has been updated with official materials, recommendations, and more information on our plans to bring more high school instructors into the fold.

Inclusion

The Reacting Consortium has always been dedicated to promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion and we want our website to better reflect that. In the very near future we plan to publish our Inclusion page that will include resources for promoting inclusive roleplaying, information about the programs we've created to promote inclusion, and an official statement on our commitment to accessibility and inclusion.

Updated Contact Information

Many of our board members and staff's roles have changed! Please be sure to check our updated Contact Us page for the most up to date contact information.

File Formatting and Submission Guidelines

On to the nitty gritty. In order to keep our resources uniform we have implemented new guidelines for submitting files.

The new file submission protocol can be found here!

As always, any updates to games, tools for instructors, and community resources for games are enthusiastically welcomed and can be added to the website. Please submit any new files using our new streamlined file submission form.

“Start Here” Page for New Members

While reacting has become second nature to a lot of us, we are constantly welcoming new, first-time reactors to our community. To help new members we have created a “Start Here” page. This includes information about our pedagogy, guides on how to run and adapt games, and a “Reacting Dictionary” to make browsing and using our games more accessible.

Our Game Authors and Editorial Board and always working hard. We want to highlight some of the new Reacting Games Under Review recently added to our library, as well as updated materials.

Art in Paris

Now includes French translated role sheets, instructor guide, and student handout - August 2022

Ashoka 
New Game - August 2022

Bacon's Rebellion 
New Gamebook - September 2022

Congressional AIDS Hearings 
New Files March 2022

Egyptian Prison 
Updated Gamebook - November 2022

Election of 1912 
Updated Gamebook, Instructor's Manual, and Role Sheets - September 2022

Eyeball to Eyeball
New Files June 2022; Soon moving to Central Michigan Press

Liberia 
New Game - June 2022

Prado
Updated Gamebook and Instructor Manual - September 2022

Radical Reconstruction
New Files July 2022
Notes on the Updates from the Game Author: After an excellent run at the conference in Boulder, I've made a bunch of changes to the Radical Reconstruction in Louisiana game. There is a new document and some of the game mechanics are different. There are also some new roles, which means the game can now have 36 players. They include:

J. Stella Martin, escaped slavery, became an abolitionist, advocated for John Brown, and has now returned to Louisiana.

Ludger Bouguille, a Black Creole who is the secretary for a fraternal order, is trying to keep his small school afloat. He is also friends with Henry Rey, the Spiritualist.

Charles St. Albin Sauvinet is another Black Creole who recently became the Director of the New Orleans branch of the Freedmen's Bank. (This role can act as a sort of "banker" so that players do not lose their Prestige tokens).

Stephen Walter Rogers became literate despite his enslavement and secretly taught others to read and write. By the time the game begins, he is a Baptist preacher, which provides Rev. Dove with some competition. He is also a pacifist, which will amplify this position in the endgame.

And in case you missed it...here's the most recent from Fall/Winter 2021 (also found in this announcement):

NEW GAMES FALL/ WINTER 2021

Japanese Exclusion in California, 1906-1915

Ending the Troubles: Religion, Nationalism, and the Search for Peace and Democracy in Northern Ireland, 1997-98

UPDATED FILES

Russian Literary Journals, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy in St. Petersburg, 1877 
Updated February 2022

1349: Plague Comes to Norwich
Updated January 2022

Bacon's Rebellion, 1676-1677: Race, Class, and Frontier Conflict in Colonial Virginia 
Updated October 2021

The Crisis of Catiline: Rome, 63 BCE 
Updated August 2021

Watergate 
Updated August 2022

• The revised documents include the alternative of a 6 game session full version of the game or a 3 game session abridged version of the game, which is one of the recommendations that came out of the Winter Conference playtest. There are separate Zip files of the role sheets for use with the full version and abridged version of the game, respectively.

• Other revisions include: revised historical context essay, core documents/contemporary texts, and handouts sections; expanded GM instructions for the Senate Watergate Committee report, the Saturday Night Massacre (including a new subplot for Kissinger), the White House’s decision to release tape summaries and transcripts, Supreme Court oral arguments, and the Senate trial; and a scorecard to assist the GM in keeping track of the game’s various moving parts.

COMMUNITY-CREATED MATERIALS
Expanded and Modified Materials from the Community

French Game Resources Added new resources for instructors and students

Restoring the World, 1945: Security and Empire at Yalta New Expanded Files - March 2022 - this includes name tents, additional roles, etc.

Red Clay Added pre-game reading quiz by Lucy C. Barnhouse

Reacting Leadership Transitions
An Announcement from the Reacting Consortium Board

It is an important moment of change for the Reacting Consortium and its community.

Mark Carnes will step away from his role as founding Executive Director of the Reacting Consortium on July 1^st, 2022. Nick Proctor, founding Chair of the Reacting Editorial Board (REB) and an early member of the Reacting Consortium Board, will become the new Executive Director of Reacting. Kelly McFall, a member of both the Reacting Consortium Board and Reacting Editorial Board, has been selected as the Interim Chair of the Reacting Editorial Board with oversight of the development and review of games for publication.

Mark Carnes Founder; Outgoing Executive Director

Nick Proctor   Incoming Executive Director

Kelly McFall Incoming Chair of REB

The Reacting community owes a great debt to Mark and in fact wouldn’t exist but for his original vision for a new way to teach history in his Barnard classroom. From that moment of collaboration with his students about a new way to engage with classic texts in 1996, Mark went on to be a prolific author of Reacting games, grant-writer, fundraiser, recruiter, game-master, and encourager-in-chief to newcomers with fresh ideas about new topics and directions for Reacting. After this first experiment with a game set in Ming China, he went on to develop games about the Trial of Anne Hutchinson, the French Revolution, and India in 1945, making use of a FIPSE grant to enlist co-authors with disciplinary expertise in these areas. In 2001, he hosted the first Reacting workshop, inviting 40 colleagues from around the country. Having always served as Executive Director pro bono, Mark looks forward to being able to devote more time to writing and revising games and supporting others in the game development process.

Under Nick Proctor’s direction, the Reacting Editorial Board (REB) became a formal body that defined a “Reacting game,” established criteria for guiding its development, and set up a system of peer review to determine when games were ready for publication. As he steps into the role of Executive Director, Nick’s vision for the future focuses on continued expansion of the flagship library; deepening our relationship with high schools; figuring out the balance between in-person conferences and online programming going forward; and improving fiscal stability by growing existing income streams as well as increasing their number. As he notes, “We should also capitalize on the expertise that we have built with online programming. In addition to broadening the geographical and institutional scope of attendees, these can offer good opportunities to field test new games."

Kelly McFall’s goals for the REB include management of the process of soliciting, reviewing, and moving toward publication efficiently and effectively; continuing to grow our pool of game authors and game projects; working with the Game Development Conference to pilot and experiment with different structures and mechanisms; serving as an ambassador for Reacting and an effective liaison for game authors; and completing and executing a system for review of existing games that are moving into second editions.

The Reacting Consortium is deeply grateful to Mark Carnes for all of his years of creative and inspired leadership. We are glad that he will remain an active member of this community and look forward to supporting Nick and Kelly as they step into their new roles.

To read a tribute to Mark Carnes, check our blog.