INTRODUCTION: THE BASIC CONCEPT

Most college seminars adopt, intentionally or not, a Socratic approach:  the instructor guides students through difficult texts by posing questions. This course is different. Here students will play one or more elaborate games. Each game lasts about ten class sessions. 

Students should plunge into the first game book almost immediately. For the first few sessions of each game, the instructor provides guidance on the issues and historical context on which the game will turn. On the second or third session, the instructor will assign students roles, based on historical figures. Early in the third session (or thereabouts), the class will break into factions, as students with similar roles will meet together to accomplish their objectives. They will probably meet in factions outside of class as well.

By the fourth or fifth session, the class will again meet as one. Students whose characters function in a supervisory capacity—president of the Athenian Assembly in 403 B.C., First Grand Secretary in the Hanlin Academy of the Ming Dynasty, Governor General of the Simla Conference in India, 1945—will preside over what transpires. The instructor will intrude merely to resolve disputes or issue rulings on other matters.

The heart of the game is persuasion. For nearly every role to which students are assigned, they must persuade others that “their” views make more sense than those of their opponents. Their views will be informed by important texts cited in the role objectives.

Historical Contingency

Most history courses teach what happened. Historians deduce the factors—usually economic, sociological, political, and technological—that caused some consequence: the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries gave rise to worker’s movements; the growth of maritime commerce in ancient Athens contributed to its supremacy in naval engagements; etc. Often missing from scholarly studies is the importance of individual actions and decisions. This course presumes that individuals play a significant role in history; it asserts that broader economic and social forces place constraints on what individuals may do, but that those forces do not determine human events. People do. 

”Reacting” seeks to replicate the historical context of a particular past, with all its causal forces:  economic, sociological, political, and otherwise. But it also provides students with the opportunity to explore counterfactual issues of individual agency: Would a different constellation of leaders in ancient Athens have effectively resisted the rise of Athenian democracy? Would a different set of arguments have prevented Galileo from being convicted by the Inquisition? To assert that human agency matters is to say that what actually happened need not have happened. Historical forces do not foreordain human affairs. History is not predetermined. It is contingent on multiple factors, including the vagaries of human individuality.

Individual Agency

To illuminate the element of agency in human affairs, this course, though set in the past, is constructed as a game. It differs from most games in that students do not know all the rules at the outset. Things will happen that they may not anticipate and over which they have little or no control. The game will unfold in ways that are not predetermined: what students do affects what will happen.

Nevertheless, not all people begin the game—or life—on equal footing. The roles to which students are assigned certainly influence their prospects. Some objectives are more difficult to achieve than others and chance intervenes in unpredictable ways. Thus a student may play a game brilliantly and still not achieve their objectives, or she can bungle her way to success; this is true in life as well. 

As in life, too, students can improve their prospects for success in several ways: by forming effective and cooperative teams; by studying the world they inhabit; by making plans for the unexpected; and by working hard to win others over to their views. Students need information—lots of it—about the historical context and about the other players. They need to understand those whom they wish to persuade, and those who may seek to block their goals. The game materials and accompanying texts should therefore be read carefully several times. Students will also need real skills:  to speak and write clearly and persuasively; to work effectively with others; and to figure out how to solve problems.

Each “Reacting” game is based on the game designers’ sense of the period. What happened in the past will not necessarily repeat itself in this game, but the “real” history may provide some sense of the likely issues that will emerge and of the designers’ understanding of historical causation. If students study the historical context carefully, they will have a better chance of understanding what will likely happen in the future. That, too, is true in life as well.