In 2004 – two years before Sigil or any other Western role playing simulations appeared in Second Life there was a game being developed and aptly called “Wild West Sim.” To my knowledge this was a failed attempt, but it sounds incredibly ambitious including the ability to support tens-of-thousands of players. Online there are a few interviews with the development team that reveal how bad this was going to be.. which is likely why it never got out of beta.
“WWS is not meant to be 100% accurate to actual history, but rather 100% accurate to the romanticized version of the era, which is fairly close, but makes for better game play. Of course, prostitution was a very integral and accepted part of society in those days, so it will be included in WWS,” commented Anastasia.
The notion that a romanticized version of the era is even remotely close to the reality of the West is ludicrous. The best way to illustrate this is by seeing the only screen capture I’ve found of the game.
I can only imagine what Patricia Limerick or Richard White would say. To WWS’ credit, the game did include many ethnic groups, however they only seem to have been included to intentionally create conflict.
There may be an alternate version with modified elements that will be available for younger players, and possibly even geared for educational purposes in the classroom. ([It would be] a sort of multiplayer “Oregon Trail” where students could interact with other students around the world.)
Great. They wanted to teach a romanticized version of the West to children, and expose them to prostitution when they’re in the 4th grade. It doesn’t surprise me this never took off.
In the mid-eighties, two different educational computer games were released that taught about the hardships of traveling across the American West in the 1840s. The game that first comes to mind is likely The Oregon Trail, however a lesser-known title called Jenny of the Prairie was also released which featured a female protagonist. This revelation has brought me into the world of feminist computing in the early 80′s, a seldom mentioned but fascinating effort very early on in educational computing to exert positive images of women within software, and encourage females to use computers. The New York Times offered this brief description of Jenny of the Prairie:
This program is designed to appeal to girls, who, are told, are less eager to use computers than their male classmates. The heroine, Jenny, becomes separated from the wagon team with which she’s going west in the summer of 1842, and is faced with some challenging problems: how to build a lean-to for the winter, how to gather food and keep warm, how to watch out for dangerous animals.
The Internet Archive has saved episodes from The Computer Chronicles, a popular show that featured computer software. An entire episode is devoted to Women in Computing, and is definitely worth checking out. Elizabeth Scott of Rhiannon Software (who helped create and released Jenny of the Prairie) is among the several female guests on the show. The ridiculous part of the episode isn’t the interviews of these women (which are fantastic and very insightful), but the closing remarks by Paul Schindler near the end of the episode. He says the following:
Frankly, it makes me as mad as hell to see how badly women are underused in the computer business. I think it should make you mad too, whether you’re a man or a woman – let me tell you why. If you’re a woman, you should be mad because the accident of your birth put you at a permanent disadvantage in the computer business.
While the intent of the show was to promote equal opportunities for women and men in computing, the episode is extremely disingenuous. Paul’s closing remark, coupled with the fact that all the hosts are male clearly shows the gender barriers that existed in the 80′s for women in computing. The only female from The Computer Chronicles is a female anchor reading the weekly news off a teleprompter, unlike all the other male hosts on the show.
