History Professor Pamela Walker‘s use of game play in her courses has been featured in University World News. A short excerpt has been included below with the full article, “How games can teach students more history than lectures,” by Nathan M. Greenfield, is available online.
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.