From the introduction:
This game introduces students to a past that is in some ways familiar: the game is set in Boston, Massachusetts; the central text is the Bible; and students are assigned roles as puritans, whom they may have “played” in their fourth grade Thanksgiving pageant. On the other hand, the puritans in seventeenth-century Boston inhabited a mental universe that bears little similarity to that of most students—or faculty, for that matter. This intellectual remoteness is both the attraction of the game and its challenge. Students learn much by internalizing ideas and values far different from those with which they are familiar; and yet learning this “difference” is not easy. Among faculty who teach “Reacting,” The Trial of Anne Hutchinson is often the favorite because it so often succeeds in drawing students into this remote and intellectually demanding world.