For the 2026 Winter Conference, we are featuring a series of interviews with the authors of the Reacting Games being played at the event. For this one, Intern Kyla Toombs sat down with Dr. Rebecca Livingstone, co-author of Versailles 1919, to ask questions about the game and Livingstone's involvement with Reacting to the Past.
Can you introduce yourself for me and tell me how you got involved with Reacting to the Past?
I'm Rebecca Livingstone, and I am a professor of history at Simpson College. I've been at Simpson since 2007. I got interested in Reacting because of Nick Proctor who is heavily involved in Reacting. During my first year teaching at Simpson, I was wondering ‘what is this Reacting thing?’ so Nick invited me into one of his upper-level history classes that was playing the French Revolution. He gave me a role to play – an Indeterminate, I think – with the students. I got killed pretty quickly…. But I was intrigued about this highly engaging pedagogy.
To someone who's unfamiliar with the Versailles Peace Conferences, what is the Versailles 1919 about and why should they play it?
Versailles 1919 is about the Paris Peace Conference that meets in 1919 to figure out the diplomatic conclusion to World War I. What is to be done to settle the war and ensure that such a war won’t happen again? The game centers on questions about the justness of war, the ethics of warfare, and what should be done with emerging new nations and establishing borders based on nationalism and national identity. There are questions of reparations and war guilt for this horrible war - who's responsible for the fact that ‘we’ had a war and do ‘we’ punish them? – and as a result, what agreements can nations to make waging war the absolute last resort for settling problems. The Paris Peace Conference challenges students to make decisions by consensus rather than simple majority voting. So it requires students to have to listen to each other as well as weigh different types of influence and power as they seek to find common ground.
The game involves the Great Powers – the United States, France, Britain, Italy, and Japan, but has a lot of smaller powers like smaller European states, newly emerging nations, and British dominions. It makes for a really interesting combination of actors debating what we expect for going forward. How should nations deal with each other when they have conflict? What role do these small nations play? Should we care about their opinion or not, or should we just go and make decisions because we're the ‘Great Powers’? So the Paris Peace Conference is dealing with a lot of these issues that are coming from the outbreak and waging of the war itself but also with questions of how to create a lasting peace.
Who is your favorite character in your game?
There are a couple of different answers. I like the Borden character. He's the Prime Minister of Canada and I'm Canadian. So I was excited to be able to write a Canadian into a Reacting Game.
But I think if I really had to think about my favorite character I can't pick just one; instead, I can pick a category - the delegates coming from the Small Powers, like Belgium, Canada, Poland, Czechoslovakia. They're trying to figure out who they are and who they can be in relation to the Great Powers. I like them is because of what their roles are; they're have the idea of ‘we have or want a nation state for our people and here’s what we think our people deserve’ but are rubbing up against what other nations want, particularly the Great Powers who are playing a sort of chess game and see these smaller powers as pawns in the larger game of re-establishing world order. They’re not Indeterminate roles as they multi-faceted agendas of what they want to achieve so I like the pluckiness that these small power roles embody. I also like how I’ve seen students play them, especially if you put some competitive students in these roles; if they want to win, they have to get their voices heard, just like the historical actors. And sometimes that is annoying to those playing the Great Powers, just like it was historically.
It's often said in design/creative spaces that you have to kill your babies. Was there a concept, character, or mechanic that you desperately wanted to be in the final game but didn't make the cut?
There's a lot of stuff that I cut because it's so complicated. There are so many different issues, and you have to make choices as an author. I could have students talk about this issue or that issue, but had to stop and ask if was really getting too technical, too in the weeds? Did it really serve the main purpose of the game? Or was it a mechanic that is just like, ‘yeah, that's fun’, but not really doing much else. Assassination is one of those game mechanics where students always ask, ‘can we kill people in this game?’ No matter what the game is, I always get asked that. I did think about it, but ultimately, sorry, no assassinations in Versailles 1919 – it just doesn’t serve the game as a learning tool.
Okay, are you working on any other projects, Reacting or otherwise at the moment?
I think every person who's designed a game or two has thought, ‘oh, I have an idea for that.’ I always have ideas, but I’m not always sure how to translate them into a game. I’ve been working on a project set later in 18th century Britain centering on questions of liberty and tyranny, but I am still feeling my way through it. I also have an idea for a British suffragette game. I think that there might be some other people that have games in the works on that though, but I don't know where they are in the process. But yeah, I've got an idea percolating about that.
If you want to try out Versailles 1919 for yourself, and find out about the exciting changes coming in Reacting 3.0, be sure to sign up for the Reacting Consortium 2026 Winter Conference before December 21st!
