Reacting to the Podcast

Today is the third and last of our interviews with winners of Reacting's Brilliancy Prize. I talk with Kyle Lincoln about the Fourth Crusade game he and John Giebfried co-authored. John was in the middle of a move to Austria and wasn't available to talk. But Kyle and I had a great conversation about the game, about the the ways he and John tried to encourage creativity in his students, and about the importance of providing students the opportunity to fail.

This week's interview is with Terri Nelson. Terri has contributed to Reacting in all kinds of ways. She's an invaluable resource for integrating technology into the classroom. She has hint after hint about gamemastering game after game. And so on and on and so on. And she's the winner of the 2020 Brilliancy Prize. This is the second of a three part series of interviews with Brilliancy Prize winners. Be sure to listen to part one with Martha Attridge Bufton and Pamela Walker and part three...

This week we feature an interview with Pamela Walker and Martha Attridge Bufton, winners of the Reacting Brilliancy Prize. This is the first of three episodes featuring winners of the prize.

I first played the Mexican Revolution game at Barnard in, I think, 2015. I have a very clear memory of someone (I don't remember who) taking advantage of a distraction to sneak around the back of the room to steal the entire Mexican treasury. Needless to say, that someone wasn't me. And, again needless to say, I lost that game. That's a particularly vivid memory. But it reminds me of all the many things I learned about the Mexican Revolution from playing the game. So I'm thrilled that...

If you're anything like me, you rued the cancellation of the 2020 Annual Institute and wondered what could possibly replace it. Well, that was the Summer of Reacting. And was it ever cool. Today I talk with Jenn Worth, Maddie Provo and Tony Crider about how Reacting tried to fill the void left by the Annual Institute, what we learned from a summer spent on-line, and what plans exist for the fall and winter. It reminds us of the way empty spaces can be filled with something new and...

Play a game about a plague in the middle of a pandemic? Who would want to do that? Lots of people, it turns out. So I thought we should talk to Amy Curry, the designer of 1349,: The Black Death Comes to Norwich. In our interview, we chat about why Amy decided to write a game about the topic, how the game evolved over time and how it changed when Amy started teaching it on-line. But Amy is also one of Reacting's resident experts at running asynchronous games. So I asked her for tips and...

Every couple weeks, there's a question on the facebook faculty lounge about how to recruit, compensate and utilize student preceptors. A few, or a lot, of faculty then respond. But we never hear from students themselves. This episode lets you do just that. Leanne Vastbinder, Jessica Howell and Elliot Morelli join me to talk about why they decided they wanted to be a preceptor, what they've learned from the experience, and how they want to work with professors. It's worth listening to the...

The Reacting community has had many discussions about playing and running games involving controversial or difficult content. Inevitably, after a break in the conversation, someone will say "But what about the Weimar game?" Today's guest is Robbie Goodrich, professor of History at Northern Michigan University and author of said Weimar game. He and I had a fascinating discussion about how the game came about, how it has changed over time, and why the label "the Weimar game" is really...

Ever wonder what happens behind the Reacting Editorial Board curtain? Or just confused about what REB stands for? This week I chat with Nick Proctor about the Reacting Editorial Board. Nick got into Reacting very early and has been an active participant for years. He's an author, and sometime he'll be back on the pod to talk about his experiences writing games. But today I asked him to talk about his role helping game authors improve their games and moving them toward publication. We talk...

For years after I first played Mary Jane Treacy's Greenwich Village game, Judith Shapiro, the former president of Barnard College, called me Emma (for Emma Goldman) whenever she saw me. Our experience playing the game was that memorable. A second edition of GV is now in the works. In this interview, I talked with Mary Jane about how she became a game author, what led her to invent Personal Influence Points, about her other games (Paterson and Argentina) and about what will be new in v. 2.0...

In this episode I talk with John Moser, the author of the Japan and July Crisis games and co-author of the Yalta game. We talk about how he learned about reacting, how to write games about diplomacy and politics, and his favorite Reacting story.

On what would have been the 20th RttP Annual Institute, Mark Carnes, John Burney, Pat Coby, Jenn Worth, Michaele Ferguson, David Worthington and Violet Lumani reflect on how the conference came to be, how it's changed since it began, and why it's so meaningful to them.