Woe unto the American university: hyper-specialized faculty, indifferent students, and “the inherent laziness of the human animal” have all conspired to create a “deathly indifference” that “hangs like a fog bank” over the once-hallowed lawns. Finally, in desperation, “the best thinkers in the educational world are spending their energies not in lengthening, but in shortening, the period of education; in cutting down waste, in increasing efficiency.” Or at least they were in 1915, when Henry Seidel Canby, an assistant professor at Yale, published these warnings. Without such reforms, he argued, America would soon graduate its dumbest, most shallow generation yet. One hundred years later, Mark C. Carnes finds himself issuing the same warning in Minds on Fire: How Role-Immersion Games Transform College.

For a system careening toward disaster, very little seems to have changed since Canby’s time. “The undergraduate whose interests are confined to football, musical comedy, and the success of his fraternity,” Canby lamented in 1915, “is easily persuaded that the man who tries to teach him government or geology takes his subject too seriously.” Substitute “Facebook” or “internet porn” for “musical comedy,” and I’m sure I’ve heard the same thing a dozen times this year. According to Carnes, this long history of student disengagement and professorial frustration reaches back at least as far as Plato, who warned that frivolous play would corrupt children’s minds. But from Greek drama, to medieval carnival, to beer pong, students have always been ingenious at devising new ways to ignore Plato’s advice. Carnes calls this “subversive play”—a kind of initiation rite where young people prepare for the workaday world of order and authority by lampooning and parodying it. Rather than throwing up his hands, Carnes suggests that we make subversive play the cornerstone of the classroom experience.

This doesn’t mean breaking out the Jell-O shots for History 101, but rather introducing students to “Reacting to the Past,” a set of games and supplemental materials. Faced with his own listless classes at Barnard, where he has been a professor of history since 1982, Carnes pioneered the method, in which students reenact various moments of historic crisis and controversy. “Reacting” has since developed into a movement, with dozens of games implemented at over 300 universities across the country. Nearly 700 Reacting instructors maintain an active online discussion group, and 36 universities, from the colossal University of Texas Austin to the tiny Brevard College, signed on as official members of a consortium to develop and support the curriculum.

Reacting class are all about roleplaying. A student in “The Trial of Anne Hutchinson: Liberty, Law, and Intolerance in Puritan New England,” might become John Winthrop. In a game on the French Revolution, students lead factions in the National Assembly, studying up on their parts by reading Rousseau’s Social Contract and Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. The professor takes on the role of “Gamemaster,” occasionally rolling dice to determine the outcome of a spontaneous event (mob uprising!). Otherwise, professors turn their classes over to the students, moving to the back of the room to watch and take notes.

Carnes is the first to admit that such classes can seem a little crazy, but it is an ingenious pedagogy for engaging students reared on World of Warcraft, and he includes ample testimonials from students whose lives were changed by their roles. A conservative Muslim student assigned the role of Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion found it “a little bit scary” to feel such a strong “connection to the political personality” of a figure whose views she had initially rejected. Likewise, a committed Zionist who was assigned the role of Awni Abd al-Hadi, head of the Arab Independence Party, later reflected that Awni “stood by his principles in a moment of crisis.” Shy students became confident speakers, and isolated students became friends. At least one group was still holding an annual reunion dinner six years after their class ended.