Choose Your Own Adventure: A Virtual Alternative to Model UN

• In Event: Diversified Approaches to Simulations and Games in the Classroom II (Livestreamed)

Abstract

This is for Games and Submissions:

Nearly every year, LaGrange College puts on a Model United Nations (MUN) for the local community, either for high schools in West Georgia and East Alabama, or college students and faculty at LaGrange College. Participants play countries while my college students help me write the scenario these countries find themselves in. Players are put on various committees related to the crisis in the scenario (political, military, economic and environmental); they have to pass resolutions in committee, and then take them to the full assembly of countries for debate and possible passage. All of this is run by the LaGrange College students on MUN day, with my role being one of judge for participation and awards. Then, COVID-19 struck. LaGrange College, and local high schools, shut down a month before the Model UN was to take place. Everything went from in-person to Zoom. Our carefully crafted scenario all went down the drain, just like so much in academia in 2020 across the country. Or had it? Even as debates raged across the country about what to do, I met together with my students, before the campus went down on lockdown. I had just been reading a “Choose Your Own Adventure” (CYOA) book to my kids, niece and nephew the prior weekend, a series of books written where the reader makes a series of choices, which determines the outcome of the stories. These books sold 150 million copies in 34 languages from 1981 to 1998, according to a CYOA source. I pitched a novel idea to our students, so to speak. This paper documents how we converted the Model UN to a Choose Your Own Adventure for the high schools to play, and enables attendees to play the game itself, and to provide suggestions and critiques.

Author

• John A. Tures, Lagrange College