Vassar Quarterly - Fall 2017 - 45

Sean Twomey

Alsup began designing the game in 2015.
"This was a career change, and I was thrilled,"
he says. "It was a dream job, bringing
together all the stuff I learned from my
hobbies, things I thought were fun, and also
my experience as a filmmaker, writer, and
editor. Suddenly, being a generalist had a lot
of advantages, which is rare in the professional world."
He took the Library's idea and tweaked it
for modern teenagers. "It was very important
to the Library, as part of the National Archives,
to use their primary source material," he
says. "It also helped me settle on a design
philosophy that everything in the game has
a direct historical analog to something that
happened in 1981. Nothing was created out
of whole cloth."
In the winter of 2016, members of the
Vassar Club of Southern California chose
the Situation Room Experience for an outing.
Eddie Gamarra '94 organized the trip, along
with his spouse, Katrina Knudson '96.
Gamarra played the White House Press
Secretary.

"Mine was the Melissa McCarthy/Sean
Spicer role," he jokes.
"I learned that we don't really know what
government does, how it works," Gamarra
adds. "For me, this was a crash course. It is a
humanizing experience. And I didn't expect
how intense it was. I was literally sweating.
It was a three-hour workout."
Matt Patterson '92 played a reporter. One
of his colleagues reported, incorrectly, that
the President had been shot in the head. "It
so demoralized and overwhelmed her, she
stopped playing," he says. The entire experience taught him that, when these events
happen, "you only see part of the picture.
Real events don't happen like in a documentary. It's not cut up nicely and presented
clearly. It tests you as a person-what do you
do in this situation, what are you good at?
I spent hours afterward thinking about it."
Turns out, the role-play encounter is
expanding. Its newest iteration-the Situation
Room Experience: Leadership Challenge-
is geared to corporate executives and
employees of federal agencies (think Depart-

Where the action happens: A reassembled White
House Briefing Room and Situation Room.

ment of Homeland Security and NASA).
Vassar alumna Cynthia Patton '83, Senior
Vice President and Chief Compliance Officer
of the biotech company Amgen, provided
feedback on the pilot executive program.
Alsup has carved out a unique niche in the
entertainment world. He's gone from Dungeons
and Dragons to cinema to LARPs. He's now
working on projects at the Pacific Aviation
Museum in Hawaii and George Washington's
Mount Vernon estate in Virginia.
"There was some apprehension that we
weren't going to get emotional buy-in," he
admits, "but the truth is, everyone enjoys
playing a role. We are social creatures. Social
games are almost in our DNA. This is counterprogramming to virtual reality. We are about
taking off the goggles and working together
toward solutions."
-David Levine is a freelance writer based
in Albany, NY.
VA S S A R Q U A R T E R lY

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Vassar Quarterly - Fall 2017

Contents
Vassar Quarterly - Fall 2017 - Cover1
Vassar Quarterly - Fall 2017 - Cover2
Vassar Quarterly - Fall 2017 - Contents
Vassar Quarterly - Fall 2017 - 2
Vassar Quarterly - Fall 2017 - 3
Vassar Quarterly - Fall 2017 - 4
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Vassar Quarterly - Fall 2017 - Cover3
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