Formats
Reacting to the Past is the one format on this site you do not have to design. It is a published curriculum: somebody else wrote the roles, the objectives, the primary sources and the instructor’s manual, and your job is to run it and grade it. There is no circuit, nothing to travel to, and no association to join.
What makes it a different animal
In Model UN a student speaks for a state. Here a student plays a named historical person at a real turning point, holding that person’s intellectual commitments while inventing their own rhetoric. Four things follow from that, and together they are the format.
- Private victory objectives. Each role sheet tells that student what their figure must achieve, and does not tell anybody else. Nobody in the room can see the whole board, which is what makes the persuasion real rather than performed.
- Factions, plus the students nobody owns. Most roles belong to a committed bloc. A few are indeterminates, unaligned, and their votes are the prize. That single design decision is why the arguing is aimed at somebody instead of at the air.
- The students run the sessions. The Consortium’s own line is that instructors advise students and grade their oral and written work. You are not chairing. For a teacher used to running the room this is the hardest adjustment in the format, and it is the point.
- The outcome is genuinely open. It is not a reenactment and there is no script. The Constitution can fail to be ratified. Students who know how it really ended still do not know how this will end.
Every published game ships four things: a student gamebook, an instructor’s manual, a packet of role sheets, and the primary-source texts the arguments are built from. The reading is doing double duty, which is the quiet reason the format survives a syllabus audit: students argue from Burke and Rousseau because they have to win with them.
What it costs in class time
This is where Reacting is more honest than most published teaching material: every game page states both how many class sessions it takes and how many students it works with. You can tell before you commit whether it fits your room.
- A microgame is a single session, defined as roughly 60 to 75 minutes, with setup and debrief optional. This is the one to try first if you are unsure.
- A short game runs two to four sessions including preparation and debriefing.
- The full published games in the table below run from about five sessions to about fifteen, counting setup, play and debrief. The long ones are a unit, not an activity.
Games a politics course can use
Sixteen of the published games, chosen because the room is a political body making a decision. Session counts include setup and debrief where the publisher separates them. The Consortium’s own politics index is longer and includes games still under review.
| Game | What the room is | Sessions | Students |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Constitutional Convention of 1787 Coby | Philadelphia, 1787. Constitutional design with the document genuinely in doubt. The closest thing to a founding-era AP unit that runs itself. | 8-15 | 12-40 |
| The Threshold of Democracy: Athens in 403 B.C.E. Norman, Ober and Carnes | The Athenian Assembly after the Thirty. Democracy itself is the question on the floor. The best known game in the catalog. | 7-15 | 11-50 |
| Rousseau, Burke, and Revolution in France, 1791 Popiel, Kates and Carnes | The National Assembly. Students argue political theory because winning requires it. | 8-14 | 7-41 |
| Patriots, Loyalists, and Revolution in New York City, 1775-1776 Offutt | New York as the city decides. Loyalism is played seriously, which students find genuinely disorienting. | 9-11 | 11-29+ |
| Kentucky, 1861: Loyalty, State, and Nation Proctor and Storey | A secession crisis in a state that went neither way quickly. Federalism as a live question. | 6-10 | 11-28+ |
| Radical Reconstruction in New Orleans, 1868-1876 Proctor | Constitution-making and its collapse. Pairs with any civil rights unit. | 6 | 11-30 |
| Chicago 1968: Policy and Protest at the Democratic National Convention Proctor | A party convention and the street outside it. Scales further than anything else here. | 5-7 | 14-61 |
| Changing the Game: Title IX, Gender, and College Athletics McFall and Perkiss | A university implementing federal law. Policy implementation, which almost nothing else simulates. | 7-10 | 10-40+ |
| Watergate, 1973-74 Parrish | Separation of powers under maximum stress. Ships with an abridged version for a shorter unit. | 6-10 | 12-30 |
| The Collapse of Apartheid and the Dawn of Democracy in South Africa, 1993 Eby and Morton | The Multiparty Negotiating Process. Constitutional design and transitional justice at once. | 8-12 | 11-27 |
| Ending the Troubles: Northern Ireland, 1997-98 Burney and Auge | Multi-party peace talks. Power sharing, and what it costs the people who agree to it. | 6-13 | 28+ |
| Defining a Nation: India on the Eve of Independence, 1945 Embree, Carnes, Nath and Pullin | Simla, 1945. Decolonization, partition and the design of a state. | 11-12 | 11-35 |
| The Needs of Others: Intervention in Rwanda, 1994 McFall | The UN Security Council. The closest Reacting game to a Model UN committee, and far harder. | 7-10 | 14-32 |
| Climate Change in Copenhagen, 2009 Henderson | COP15. International negotiation with real science in the briefing packet. | 4-6 | 12-31 |
| Europe on the Brink, 1914: The July Crisis Moser | The crisis itself, run as a crisis. For an IR course rather than an American politics one. | 8 | 12-30 |
| Restoring the World, 1945: Security and Empire at Yalta Proctor and Moser | Yalta. Three great powers, and the postwar order as the stake. | 7-10 | 12-30 |
Getting the materials
You do not need a membership to teach a published game. Instructors make a free non-member instructor account with an institutional email, which gives unlimited access to the basic instructor materials for published games. The account exists to keep students out of the role sheets, not to charge you.
Membership adds the full Consortium library, expanded instructor materials, student and instructor materials for games still in development, assessment and grading resources, and discounted conference registration. Published prices: institutional $1,250 a year; lifetime individual $1,500; and an annual individual rate on a sliding scale by the instructor’s own income, from $150 down to $25. Individual games in the shop run $10.00 to $12.50 as direct downloads. The full gamebooks are published by the University of North Carolina Press.
If you teach high school, the Consortium keeps a high school page rather than a separate curriculum: an FAQ on standards alignment, assessment and controversial content, a recommended-games list with length notes and content warnings, a handout on roleplay and another on plagiarism, and a Discord. Its own advice is to treat a full game as a four to six week unit, or to use the short games and microgames instead. A community resource drive exists but is shared by request rather than published.
The Consortium also runs short online workshops on individual microgames and short games, which are the cheapest way to watch one run before you commit a unit to it.
What the research says about it
Reacting has a better evidence base than most teaching formats, and it is still thinner than its advocates suggest. Stroessner, Beckerman and Whittaker (2009), in the Journal of Educational Psychology 101(3), is the foundational study and the reason the format is taken seriously: it measured gains in rhetorical skill and in beliefs about the malleability of the self and of human attributes, which is a stranger and more interesting outcome than the usual knowledge measure.
Bledsoe and Richardson (2022), in the International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education 33(3), is the most useful recent piece and is free to read. Reacting students reported more engagement, more perceived learning and more self-efficacy, and, the finding worth carrying, students aligned with a faction gained more self-efficacy than unaligned students did. That is a design lever rather than a general endorsement: it suggests the indeterminate roles need more support than the factional ones. Bylsma (2020), in Papers on Postsecondary Learning and Teaching 4, is a shorter complement.
The honest caveat is the same one that applies to the whole literature on this site. These are mostly self-reports, mostly without a control group and without a delayed measure, and the strongest general finding about simulations, that retention comes from the exercise plus a structured debrief rather than from the exercise alone, has not been tested on Reacting specifically. Run the debrief anyway. What the Research Says sets out the wider evidence.
Every game page, price and resource linked here was loaded before it was published, and the session counts and class sizes are the publisher’s own figures. The Consortium revises its catalog and its prices. If one of these has moved, please say so.
