Monthly Archives: May 2007

Rob MacDougall recently posted a pre-history of roleplaying games that thoroughly describes its origins in far greater detail than my previous post on early war gaming and Wild West roleplaying. Studying Wild West roleplaying simulations in Second Life I’ve continuously asked myself where this pattern of behavior came from, and why people represent themselves in specific ways while roleplaying. Rob wrote the following:

There was a vogue for simulation gaming at this exact moment much bigger than the wargaming hobby we all think we know. Yeah, there were the wargamers. But there was also, at just this time, a surge of interest in using simulation games, role-plays, and similar exercises in education. A little digging in education libraries turns up literally hundreds of simulation games for use in elementary, high school, and university classrooms—and they all date from the same era.

I have a big heavy tome in front of me. Two tomes, actually: the Handbook of Social Education Simulation Gaming, published 1972. It contains hundreds of games and goes into considerable details about the rules. Some are just “educational” versions of board games: you know, like “Congressopoly” and things of that nature. Some are un-games: free-form roleplays of a sort I associate more with therapy than gaming. But a lot of them and these are clearly the ones the author of this particular handbook was most excited by [what] sound an awful lot like what we would call RPGs.

Educational roleplaying games? Educational simulations? Rob is onto something that I’ve been uncovering in my own research as well – an interest in roleplaying and simulations within education in the very early 70′s. What I find interesting is how he is studying board and “pen and paper” roleplaying games and simulations – while my own research focuses on computer simulations and roleplaying. I’m not sure the medium matters as much as the concept of using this within the classroom. Remember that in my brief outline of the origins of the Oregon Trail computer game, I explained the original version was released in 1971 – right at this same time. Coincidence? Probably not.

The question I’ve been building to the past several weeks combines this early history of roleplaying games, the Oregon Trail computer simulation’s goals of teaching history, and Wild West roleplaying in Second Life. How can history teachers use Second Life and roleplaying within virtual worlds to teach history? As I (and others, such as Rob) uncover a greater-detailed history of educational roleplaying and educational uses of simulations my gut reaction is that the use of Second Life in this manner seems completely logical. Just as the Oregon Trail computer game adapted educational simulations to the teletype machine, we can do the same with Second Life – in an environment that I would argue overcomes many traditional shortcomings of educational computer simulations.

We must take steps to preserve virtual worlds, or their histories may be lost forever. With the increasing popularity of virtual worlds such as Second Life, an incredible amount of user-generated content has been created within these worlds – avatars, houses, clothes, games, and animations among other things. The establishment of subcultural groups that meet virtually and collaborate to make content fascinates me, including the Wild West role-playing simulation of Sigil. What can these sims tell us about this time of pivotal changes in human interaction? What questions will we have in 10 years looking back at this point? Will we have preserved these environments so the study of them is even possible? All too often these sims exist for several months, then completely disappear with no historical record kept. All of the daily interactions, the groups and people involved, stories and the wide arrange of content created by individuals instantly becomes invisible. Why are we letting this happen? I urge others to take an interest in preserving the histories of the virtual world, before many of these sims become “ghost towns” as Sigil did.

I’m not sure if the title is fitting, however I may be the first Second Life historian. In the very least, The Sigil Archive seems to be the first of its kind – attempting to preserve the history of an entire Second Life sim. A search on Technorati for “Second Life historian” came up with nothing, and a Google search only returned one vague result. Historians, why aren’t you doing research on Second Life? In today’s Web 2.0 world, if is doing anything remotely interesting on Second Life it usually appears in a blog somewhere, but I hope that I’m wrong and others are out there. History informs our identity and culture, which makes the preservation and understanding of history a crucial part of life. The history of Second Life simulations is no different. The importance of this became evident when I was recently in the Wild West sim called Tombstone. Tombstone is one of several Wild West simulations that appeared following the demise of Sigil, and the basic narrative structure (time period, location, etc) is incredibly close to Sigil. I had a discussion with a citizen, where I asked if he had ever been to Sigil – he responded no. To my surprise and delight, he explained how he is starting a virtual newspaper in this Wild West simulation – without realizing that there had been the Sigil Tribune at one point. Without having history to root our experiences, everything we do seems new.

Many Second Life amateur historians exist, in fact it’s increasingly popular. Individuals will maintain a blog for their avatar, where they account their journeys into the vast corners of the metaverse – often cataloging what they witnessed along-side images to document the experience. Historians must focus contextualize the accounts of individuals, as well as preserve documentation of these environments and individuals involved. SLHistory is a wiki that offers a space for community knowledge building regarding the history of Second Life, but at this point lacks any comprehensive research and documentation of simulations. In my research of Sigil, I began by traveling through the simulation documenting images of buildings and people, and recording their names. After the sim went offline, I contacted several former citizens including the mayor, who have provided me with a great deal of information including primary documents regarding the sim’s creation. These documents instantly became invisible to the virtual world when the sim became inactive – but many copies were stored in the inventory of users. As digital historians we must take active steps to preserve these documents.

Let me close by saying that there are individuals studying the history of virtual worlds (broadly speaking). Bruce Damer is compiling a virtual worlds timeline, cataloging the origins and evolution of social virtual worlds. Timothy Burke has a great blog posting regarding virtual world methodology and the lack of textual sources that influenced me a great deal. If we agree that virtual worlds are becoming increasingly important within society including education, then the need to archive and record the history of these emerging new media environments becomes clear.

Many games were inspired by the success of the Oregon Trail computer game, including a series of simulations in the 80′s written in BASIC that have uncanny similarities (more on that in an upcoming entry). Here are two examples of contemporary web-based games that were undoubtedly inspired by OT.

Westward Trail
The Oregon Trail Online

Tombstone is a Wild West RP sim in Second Life that popped up shortly after Sigil became a ghost town. Here is a short video I put together (this was my first cinematographic attempt in SL). Take the music with a grain of salt – I thought it would be funny. Unfortunately there weren’t many active people role-playing when I was there – but I was able to capture a nice walk-through.

Two honors American History II students uploaded a short documentary focusing on The Oregon Trail. There’s a blurring of the history the Oregon Trail, and the Oregon Trail II game with much of the visual content borrowed directly from the game. At times it’s very formal, but at other moments (when one of the students narrates in a Borat-like voice at 6:21) it has a melodramatic quality.

Sigil has been bought by virtual real estate mogul Anshe Chung, whose company Dreamland is selling the sim for 500,000 linden. You can also rent it for 112,000 linden/month. For those who don’t use Second Life, the cost to buy the land translates to roughly $1,880 US currency. Anshe was the first Second Life millionaire, and has been featured on the covers of Business Week and Fortune magazines.

It will be interesting to follow the future of Sigil – during its existence it changed hands due to the high costs of running the sim, and eventually folded for that reason. I’ve seen other historical sims follow the same path. I’ll be disappointed if its replaced with a virtual casino or something along the same vein. While it remains for sale, Dreamland has changed to the “Sigil Mall & Sex Garden.” Perhaps Anshe herself will develop something if she’s unable to sell it.

Many of the ideas I’ll share regarding The Oregon Trail computer game have developed over the past 18 months and after a series of conversations with Don Rawitsch, the game’s creator and Wayne Studer, the project manager overseeing the development of Oregon Trail II. I will continue to build upon these ideas within my blog, and hope to have portions published in the future.

In 1971, Don Rawitsch was student teaching as a senior education major at Carleton College. There he observed several peers bringing home teletype machines on the weekends to connect to a computer mainframe. Based upon the interest of his peers, Don concluded that he should use these computers in the classroom, and he quickly began working on a computer simulation called Oregon with two other Carleton students, Paul Dillenberger and Bill Heinemann (Rawitsch). The game was purely text-based, but this meager beginning proved the viability of computer simulations within the classroom. In Oregon, students would cooperate with users networked together all around the state of Minnesota to simulate the westward journey of pioneers on the Oregon Trail. While hunting, users would have to type “bang” to shoot their gun without actually ever seeing what they were shooting (Studer 5). It offered a glimpse of the future of educational gaming.

Don would bring the game with him to MECC in 1973, the Minnesota Educational Computer Consortium. Minnesota was the “clear leader” in the field of educational computing, budgeting more than $5 million annually to MECC (Zucker 400). They proved to be instrumental in the educational movement to implement computers into school districts in the early 1980′s, and software produced by MECC would be used in classrooms across the nation. Beyond word processing, innovation in technology made it possible for computers to run games, and as a result, educators sought new ways to embrace technology and games into the classroom. What emerged was a new genre of software development, called edutainment software (a hybrid of education and entertainment software). The advent of the personal computer made this technology available and affordable, notably the Apple II which early on became the de facto educational standard (Pillar 3). In 1985 MECC released the original Oregon Trail version, that now included sound and was visualized to a far-greater degree. The software released by MECC including The Oregon Trail was more popular than all other educational software companies combined (Studer XI).

Works Cited

Pillar, Charles. “Apple Will Surely Reap What it Sows on the Education Front.” Los Angeles Times. 1 Sept. 1997: 3.

Rawitsch, Don. “Oregon Trail Research.” Email to Dave Lester. 30 March. 2006.

Studer, Wayne. Oregon Trail II: The Official Strategy Guide. N.P.: Prima Publishing, 1995.

Zucker, Andrew. “Computers in Education: National Policy in the USA.” European Journal of Education 17.4 (1982): 395-410.

I’d like to welcome everyone who recently began aggregating my feed, and encourage those who read my site to subscribe to Finding America to have my entries delivered directly to you. Another recent change is that users can now leave comments without logging in. These were suggestions made in an blog entry by Tom Johnson called “Twenty Usability Tips for Your Blog” – I’d highly reccomend it. Thanks Tom for sharing this link on this week’s Digital Campus podcast.

This past week I began a position at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. I’m currently doing web programming and working on an up-and-coming CHNM project that’s very exciting. I’ll also continue to work on the Crossroads Project at CNDLS as the Digital Curator in charge of a series of online exhibitions we’ll launch in the next year.

This upcoming Wednesday I’ll be joining Rob Pongsajapan and Garrison LeMasters to discuss research in Second Life at the TLISI Virtual Worlds workshop at Georgetown. In preparation – expect one or two SL-related posts in the upcoming days. And yes, Jeremy, I have some future posts on the Oregon Trail in the works as well.

In 1913 H.G. Wells published Little Wars, a set of rules for playing with toy soldiers. His book would be the first in a new genre of gaming, commonly referred to as war gaming. In the 70′s, war gaming was adapted by TSR for the popular release of the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons. TSR’s second role-playing game, Boot Hill, was a Wild West RPG released the following year. While the Old West role-playing I witnessed in Second Life’s Sigil seemed very random at first glance, it proceeded a 30-year tradition of Wild West role-playing.

Eric Hotz has assembled an incredible online resource of Wild West Game Rules. The page acts as both a directory of Wild West role-playing and wargames, and also links to rules if they’re available online. There are so many games available that I’ve only begun to read about each one individually – their instructions even offer maps of how towns should be oriented and characters act. Eric owns a store called Whitewash City that sells 3D Wild West Paper/Card-Stock PDF models to use within these games. The image above is a town created using his kits.

The incredible variation in representations of historical architecture parallels the inaccuracies I’ve witnessed within Second Life – an uncompromising tendency to blend ideas of the past with modern-day architecture to create something holding salient historical traits but often out of context.

The past several weeks Paleo-Future has shared great posts about robots, which I’ve looked at in The “savage” robot in 1937 and Decoding Al Capp’s Robot, Continued. The brief timeline of pre-Asimov robot history I created began with Capek’s Rossum’s Universal Robots – which is featured in the most recent Paleo-Future post, a 1922 review of the play. I’m not sure where Matt digs up these primary sources, but they’re great. Check it out for a scan of the original article.

I should probably add the 1934 Fresno Bee article “Giant Robots, controlled by wireless, to fight our battles” to my timeline, a reoccurring idea during this early period of robot history. Matt highlights the following quote from the R.U.R. review:

After they are assembled he can be sold in wholesale lots to various industrial concerns and to nations as soldiers against the Robot armies of other nations

Beyond fantasies of robots fighting wars for us, what seems to be at play are issues of power. There was the fear of robots obtaining too much power. There was also the desire to control and enslave robots. Tracing the roots of R.U.R. back to Frankenstein, there’s certainly a strong message regarding power and the desire to control. Most importantly, these visions of the future didn’t have to be plausible – they served a purpose within the culture of the time. The question remains, what was the purpose of the robot within our culture at that time?