Reacting to the Podcast Kelly McFall

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 with Kyle Lincoln.

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 Norton decided to publish the game.  It appeared a few months ago in a substantially revised and improved version (quite an achievement, since it was a great game when I first encountered it).

So I asked Jon and Stephany to be on the podcast to talk about the game. We chat about the way the game has evolved over time, about how best to prepare as an instructor to play the game, and about what aspects of the game are most likely to challenge students. And we discover briefly that Stephany and I both attended Ohio State University for our doctoral degrees (even if I was just a few years earlier than she was).  

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 improvisations become opportunities.

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 warnings about taking games designed to be played in-person and running them on-line.

Amy had fascinating things to say about both topics.  I can't wait to play her game myself. And she made me feel just a bit more at ease about running games on-line in my own classes.