Mark+Carnes+&+Nicolas+Proctor


 * CS6. Mark Carnes & Nicolas Proctor: ** //Reacting to the Past (History Games)//

May 28 Saturday 9:00-10:30 PM HM 150

“Reacting to the Past” (RTTP) consists of elaborate games, set in the past, in which students are assigned roles informed by classic texts in the history of ideas. Class sessions are run entirely by students; instructors advise and guide students and grade their oral and written work. It seeks to draw students into the past, promote engagement with big ideas, and improve intellectual and academic skills. Affiliation/Bio: Simpson College, nick.proctor@simpson.edu. Games were what originally interested me in history. As a boy I played a wide variety of table-top battles with hex-based wargames and Napoleonic miniatures with my uncle and grandfather. In addition, I played luck-based games like Risk with high school friends, role-playing games with college friends, and computer strategy games such as solitaire. In playing these games, I soaked up the notion that history is not so much about things said and done as it is about making decisions – high stakes decisions. When I started teaching, I took many of these idea into the classroom. I experimented with retrofits of Diplomacy and SIMSOC, an extensive text-based historical role-playing game, tabletop battles with American Civil War miniatures, and various short, in-class role-playing exercises. In the process, I learned a great deal about game design through trial and error. I first discovered Reacting to the Past in 2001, and after attending my first Reacting conference I began incorporating Reacting into my classes wherever it seemed apt to do so. I also shifted most of my efforts at game design towards the Reacting approach. Over time, I’ve used almost every game in the series in class. I’ve also facilitated minigames at a number of faculty workshops and academic conferences. I’ve also helped develop three games in the series, Forest Diplomacy: War and Peace on the Colonial Frontier, 1756-57; Kentucky, 1861: A Nation in the Balance; and Modernism vs. Traditionalism: Art in Paris, 1888-89, and I’ve acted as a sounding board for a number of other game developers in the series.

Co-presenter: Mark Carnes, Barnard College, mc422@columbia.edu. Mark C. Carnes received his undergraduate degree from Harvard and his Ph.D. in history from Columbia University. He has chaired both the history and American studies departments at Barnard College, Columbia University, where he serves as the Ann Whitney Olin Professor of History. Carnes is General Editor of the 26-volume //American National Biography//, for which he was awarded the Waldo Leland Prize of the American Historical Association. Carnes has published numerous books on American social and cultural history, including //Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America// (1989), //Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies// (1995), //Novel History: Historians and Novelists Confront America’s Past// (2001), and //The American Nation// (2011), co-authored with John A. Garraty. Carnes also pioneered the Reacting to the Past pedagogy, winner of the Theodore Hesburgh Award, sponsored by TIAA-CREF, as the outstanding pedagogical innovation in the nation (2004). In Reacting to the Past, college students play elaborate games, set in the past, their roles informed by classic texts. (For more on Reacting, see: www.barnard.edu/reacting.) In 2005 the American Historical Association awarded Carnes the William Gilbert Prize for the best article on teaching history.