Bringing the Black Death to NASAGA 2024
By Franklin “Frank” Rausch, PhD
I had the privilege of running a Black Death Simulation at NASAGA 2024. The version I ran had long been in development, and I think a brief history of it might be helpful for thinking about how NASAGA helps people design and utilize their games in an educational environment.
Some background: I’m a professor of history at Lander University, a public regional institution of 4000+ students. Like most faculty at a teaching/student-focused institution, I teach a 4/4 load, typically two 100-level world history classes and two upper-level classes each semester. Though I’m a specialist in Korea (particularly the history of Catholicism), I teach courses on that subject, China, Japan, religion and warfare, world Christianity, public history, and the history of comics and anime.
My style of teaching was pretty traditional—lectures with occasional short videos (it’s quaint to think about it now, but at the time, students really loved the clips—cutting edge stuff then!) and some discussions. I had some experience with online teaching. That helped quite a bit when COVID-19 hit in the middle of the 2020 Spring semester and, like universities all over the nation, we sent our students home. And like other schools, our university had to figure out what to do when students came back in the Fall. Briefly stated, the solution was that faculty were given the option to go completely online, and if they taught in-person classes, those courses had to be run in such a way that students could attend online. Moreover, classrooms could only be filled to half capacity. However, course enrollment was still set at full capacity. In other words, a class could have 30 students registered for it, but only 15 could be in the room at any one time. Since I had online experience and a summer to prepare, I decided to teach in an online hybrid format. A typical class schedule looked something like this: a study guide based on video lectures would be due Sunday, half the class would come on Monday and half on Wednesday and I would teach the same material for each—just with different students. Then there would be a quiz due Thursday.
Considering everything, most students did very well. However, there was a noticeable increase in students struggling with low grades, mental issues, and disengagement. It was hard to understand and “read” each other while we were wearing masks. I also wasn’t sure what to do when we did meet. I tried showing video clips and having discussions based on them, which had worked well in the past. However, I could tell it didn’t have the same impact as it did before. That led me to talk to students to try and get a better sense of what they wanted, and I was struck by one student’s statement that she thought that we should do things in the classroom that couldn’t really be done online.
That student’s statement dovetailed with a social trend at the time: an increase in online gaming. While I was a university student in Indiana, I was part of a group that played Dungeons and Dragons (2e) and Call of Cthulhu. After graduation, the group would occasionally play together, but eventually we became too spread out and many joined new groups wherever they ended up. Out of the blue, one of my old gaming group members contacted me to join in a Warhammer RPG campaign. So based on my student’s comments and that recent experience, I decided to try running games in my class. And around that time, I discovered that our university’s print shop could make cards.
My first game was a simple Viking raid simulation built using simplified 5e Dungeons and Dragons rules. Students really liked it, so I decided to try something more complex: a Black Death Simulation in which students took the roles of family members in an Italian town soon to be afflicted by the Bubonic Plague. I was running another course on disease and history and was really excited to bring in what I was learning. In particular, I wanted to incorporate the idea that a pandemic was not simply a biological event, but also a social and economic one. To do this, I planned to not only talk about the Black Death, but look at how it led to social breakdown, as seen in the attacks on Jewish people and the flagellant movement. Moreover, I wanted to show how disease disrupted trade and food production, which could lead to or exacerbate malnutrition, making people more vulnerable to disease. I therefore developed complex rules for the family economy, incorporated multiple video clips, and had the simulation set up so that students drew from a deck of cards that included one that stated that a student had contracted the Black Death.
As the reader can guess, I tried to do way too much. For instance, since it was random when people contracted the disease, I had to stop the simulation when any group drew that card to work with that one group. Students struggled to keep track of complex rules governing what the family produced and consumed and how it impacted their health. That taught me the need to keep things simple. However, I learned something else. Despite how bad of a game it was in terms of mechanics, students genuinely enjoyed it! Based on their feedback, they learned not just facts, but a deeper understanding of how disease worked. That, in turn, seemed to help at least some better make sense of the reality of life during the pandemic. This is one of the powers of gaming: it can engage and teach even when a game is far from perfect.
Such experiences made me want to learn more. I began to study as I created more games. I reached out to people, such as Jared Fishman, who helped clue me into other groups, like NASAGA. And when I saw NASAGA was going to have its 2024 annual conference in Atlanta, I decided to submit my Black Death simulation, which thankfully, was accepted (and kindly received an award). I worked with the Experiencing History Lab at Lander to polish the simulation (thanks Cassy, Elias, Jackson, and Jessi!) and then came to NASAGA. I had a great audience to run the game for. The simulation did not go quite as planned. For instance, I still couldn’t quite get the health mechanic to work (people should lose some health before the Black Death hits so that they suffer penalties when they roll to see if they contract it and if they survive). I also could not quite get the mechanics for keeping track of family resources right. But that is one of the beauties of NASAGA: having experienced and creative gamers playing my simulation led to some excellent advice, which I have now incorporated.
I’ll run a “Gaming History” class in the Fall, and I’ll use this as an introductory game. My hope one day is to develop a website where I can distribute the games I develop, and hopefully this one will be polished enough that I will feel comfortable including it. So needless to say, I had a great time at my first NASAGA, and though it can be difficult for me to travel, I’m hoping to attend more in the near future.
Dr. Franklin Rausch is Professor of History at Lander University. For his Black Death Simulation, he was awarded the NASAGA Rising Star Award at NASAGA 2024 for the best first-time presenter.