How games can teach students more history than lectures

On 5 November 2024, his Majesty King Louis XVI’s life hung in the balance. Carleton University (CU) sophomore Ben Lamarre, Louis’ avatar, watched anxiously as the game master, CU history professor Pamela Walker, rolled the dice in a classroom that since the beginning of the semester had doubled as the Assemblée nationale circa 1793.

Last spring, Camille E Simard, a final-year BA student majoring in English literature, watched the members of King Henry VIII’s court vote to determine whether her character, Anne Boleyn, or her one-time ally-turned-nemesis, Lord Chancellor Thomas Cromwell, would live or die.

In these two games – French Revolution and Henry VIII – as well as other historical games produced by the Reacting Consortium, based in Barnard College at Columbia University, history is not re-enacted; rather, it unrolls within “the corridor of historical possibility”, explained Walker, who has been using the games in her courses at CU in Ottawa for six years.

Henry’s court voted against executing Boleyn, thereby dooming Cromwell.

In the moments before the roll of the dice that decided King Louis’ fate, word reached the Assemblée nationale that the king, then known as Citoyen Louis Capet, and the rest of la famille royale had escaped to the army of Marie Antoinette’s homeland, Austria.

The king and his family had been transported to the frontlines by the Marquis de Lafayette, who had ostensibly taken the king from Paris so that he could negotiate on France’s behalf with the invading Austrians.

“The national assembly was in an uproar,” Lamarre told University World News.

“Then came the roll of the dice and six came up, meaning I was safe. The peasants stormed the national assembly in anger and Robespierre stood up and ordered that heads be chopped off: the ‘Terror’ had begun”.

‘Students want to win’

Walker’s first response when, six years ago, she learnt that some of her American colleagues were using Reacting to History games in their classes was: “You’ve lost your mind. It’s very sad that you're playing games in the classroom.”

However, she also knew that her current students were not as engaged as her students in the past. “I couldn’t get them to read. I couldn’t get them engaged. They were just sitting there,” recalled Walker.

After spending a weekend at Reacting Consortium in New York, Walker returned to Ottawa enthused about the games.

Each game, she explained, comes with a game book. The one for Henry VIII includes documents from the Catholic Church, Martin Luther, English Protestants, and some about translating the Bible into English.

Walker supplements the information provided by the game by showing students where to find primary sources. When playing Harlem 1919, for example, she pointed the student embodying W E B Du Bois, the Black American who was both a pioneering sociologist and civil rights leader, towards the digitised collection of The Crisis.

Du Bois edited The Crisis, the official newspaper of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and wrote hundreds of articles in it. “They can read the articles he wrote in 1919 and see what he was thinking at the time and use them to fashion their speeches,” said Walker.

Students want to win. So they have an incentive to read primary sources, she said.

“If you’re the king of France and you read Rousseau in order to argue why we ought not to get rid of the monarchy because Rousseau is wrong about everything, you have to actually read it [The Social Contract (1762)] and understand it.

“[Also], you have to read Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, published in 1790, the year before The French Revolution game begins, when the king and his family are hauled back to Paris after trying to escape in 1791.

“Students have to read these to understand the underlying principles for each of these points of view. You can’t argue in the national assembly if you don’t understand both your position and the other positions.

“This incentivises students to research on their own, so they can win the game,” said Walker.

Charlie Morgan, who last year, as a third-year student, played Henry VIII (and this year is assisting Walker) grounded their character, Knight of the Shire (Berkshire), one of Henry’s supporters, in deep research.

“I went to the library and checked out a bunch of books on English history, one on the Shire of Berkshire, and another on rumour in King Henry’s Court. I also read an agrarian history of England and Wales as well as the Canterbury Tales. I read the King James Bible and other translations, including the Great Bible,” said Morgan.

The Great Bible, which Henry authorised in 1539, Morgan explained, was very important because during the debates in Henry’s court bishops often quoted from it to back up their position.

Walker admits to having “moments of such joy when students in Henry VIII argue about whether or not the Bible should be translated into English. They argue over this question like their lives depend on it”.

She said: “Of course, the Bible was long ago translated into English, so this is not an actual problem for them. But at that moment in the game, it really is.”

Historical possibility

The games are not re-enactments, meaning that the outcome – for example, Louis and Boleyn surviving – can differ from history, though only because each lies within the “corridor of historical possibility”.

Walker explained this term with three examples. The first was the vote in the Assemblée nationale to free the slaves in Haiti. The assembly could have voted to maintain slavery because there were members who voted to do so.

By contrast, voting to give women the vote in France in the 1790s was, however, outside the corridor because, as Walker explained to her class, there was a strong majority of members of the assembly who were adamantly against doing so.

Walker intervened in Greenwich Village 1913 when the suffragettes tried to wiggle their way out of a historical dilemma. For the 21st Amendment to the Constitution, which gave women the vote, to pass, the suffragettes needed the support of the Southern states.

To get this support, the suffragettes would have to abandon the idea of making an alliance with Black women and, in fact, argue that by giving them (women) the vote, they could dilute the votes of the few Black men who were able to vote despite the Jim Crow restrictions.

The game players tried to get out of this historical box by voting to do away with segregation – a move Walker disallowed.

“I explained to the class that this was not a possibility at the time. [The year] 1913 was not 1964,” the year the United States Congress passed the Civil Rights Act,” said Walker.

Representing the other

In most of the games, the majority of the characters are men; in The French Revolution, there are only two female roles. Accordingly, women often play male roles. In the four games Simard played, she played a male twice.

Playing Jean-Sifrein Maury, archbishop of Paris, was “not difficult because he was a man. It was difficult because he was a man of the clergy”, Simard told University World News.

“We had to be very specific with what we were doing because we didn’t have the freedom other people did. Yes, the clergy were powerful, but in comparison to other characters, we had to be very careful with what we said. We got points for maintaining our composure,” she said, before adding that playing Maury was good practice for her role as Boleyn.

Simard’s Boleyn had to communicate mainly through letters to her father, played by a female friend, and Henry, played by Walker, who did not respond to Boleyn’s entreaties.

Further, Simard had to maintain her composure in the face of rumours, sometimes written on the blackboard, that she had slept with a variety of men, including her brother.

In a few instances, friends warned her before she came into class about the attacks on Boleyn, and there were moments when “we broke out of character to make sure that everyone was feeling secure and that no one was taking anything too much to heart,” Simard explained.

Simard, who calls herself “a diehard feminist”, then went on to explain that if she arrived to class early, she also tried to dispel the rumours herself: “I would go before the class and tell them what the actual truth was, my truth as Anne Boleyn.”

For his part, Morgan, who says of his avatar, “Everything I do is for His Majesty the King”, was a spreader of rumours, in particular that other members of Henry’s Privy Council were greedy and dishonest.

One of their favourite tactics was to leave anonymous notes on chairs, the 16th century’s version of today’s misinformation campaigns on social media.

Guardrails

Much more problematic than playing personages from the opposite gender are race, ethnicity, and nationality, said Walker, who for a number of years was on Reacting Consortium’s committee that deals with questions of gender and race.

“One of the guardrails that we put in place is that you are not embodying a person. You are embodying ideas. So, you don’t do accents, and you don’t wear costumes because what you are doing is thinking about what these people believe and understand.

“In Harlem, 1919, don’t try to sound like Marcus Garvey, the Black American leader of the ‘Back to Africa’ movement,” Walker noted.

Students playing Garvey and Dr Martin Luther King could wear suits, clergy could wear white, and French revolutionaries the tricolour. In Lamarre’s game, Lafayette wore a T-shirt with his name on it, while Lamarre, who is a metal worker, made himself a simple steel crown.

Learning from experience

Simard, Morgan, and Lamarre each spoke about how they became immersed in the game, and how they worked hard on their speeches (which were graded and, in some cases, became the basis for essays), which earned extra marks if they convinced other players to support a deviation from history, such as Boleyn’s survival.

They also said that they believed that they got more out of the games they played than they would have from lectures.

“It’s really interesting to see just how small an effect it takes to change things,” said Morgan about seeing history occur from the inside, so to speak. “It only takes a little tip and then it butterflies out,” he said, referring to the ‘Butterfly Effect’.

Lamarre told University World News he can now look at historical events not through the objective lens of an academic historian but from the point of view of individual people, who may have been mean and stupid, but he can understand why they did what they did. “I can understand their motivations better,” he said.

“We can use this,” Lamarre added, “not just to study the French Revolution but also to look at political events throughout history, be it Ancient Rome or Turkey, because we’ve experienced what politicians fear. We’ve experienced the emotions, the logic, and the clash of what happens within a parliament or any political setting.”

Simard also told me about her experience playing a Catholic who was not a supporter of the Irish Republican Army in Ending the Troubles: Religion, Nationalism, and the Search for Peace and Democracy in Northern Island, 1997-98. She said playing the games has given her a much more nuanced perspective and understanding of the past and political leaders.

“I don’t agree with how people did things or how some people acted. But, now, I do see where they are coming from.

“When I was playing the clergyman, I saw much more than just the revolution. I saw what they had to deal with behind the scenes. Even though I disagreed with most of what I had to do, I did get a better understanding of it,” said Simard.

Simard, who took her BA in English Literature in May and started teachers’ college this semester, concluded by crediting the games with changing her career path.

“My teachables are English and history. I wouldn’t be [planning] on teaching history if it weren’t for that game,” said Simard.