Tag Archives: Oregon Trail

Hat tip to Found History for this modern remake of the Oregon Trail computer game — The Thule Trail. It mimics the visual style and structure of the original Apple II game, while traveling West in 2007, by car. Here’s the game’s description:

Load up your car for the classic American getaway: the road trip. Feel the nostalgia as you experience all the ups and downs of the road. And if you have what it takes to be a true road warrior, you’ll score some great prizes from Thule.

I’ve previously blogged about the Oregon Trail computer and how it represents history; the Thule Trail game has no ambitions of teaching but instead is just a fun game to play. For example, the hardships of the Oregon Trail are replaced with ridiculous situations with your friends who are tagging along on the trip:

“Kris auditions for a reality show and abandons the trip”

“Tom is summoned for jury duty and must return home” or

“Jeremy just fainted from lack of food. Maybe you should hunt”

In the survey I performed about the game, students most-often said they enjoyed the hunting portion of the game so I tried it out in the Thule Trail. Visually its similar, but instead of hunting Buffalo you are aiming at candy bars and cheeseburgers; interesting social commentary in itself.

From I Can Has Cheezburger, hat tip to Trevor Owens. For readers who are confused, you may want to read up on image macros and a brief history of how they’ve evolved.

The Oregon Trail computer game’s gender bias is narratively implicit, but visually explicit. Users control a character that is never textually referred to as a specific gender, however its visual representation is indisputably that of a male figure. In the game, the wagon leader makes the decisions along the journey and is presented as male, apart from the rest of the company. With his hand on the yoke of the oxen, it’s clear that the male is both leading the oxen and holding the gun. When hunting, the pixilated character the user controls can only be discerned as having a male appearance. While the user is able to choose the name of the character for him or herself, the visual representations of the game’s protagonist remain male.

Women only appear to have subservient roles and are pictured wearing pink dresses and bonnets; usually beside the children. They are absent from hunting, and infrequently appear throughout the game. By focusing on male-oriented jobs within the game, the role of females is erased (Bigelow 86). Along the journey, the user playing the game can choose to “ask for advice”, where another character in the game offers advice on how to get to Oregon safely, or shares his or her fears of the journey. The only time female characters are featured is to offer advice, for example, Aunt Rebecca Sims tells you:

I hear terrible stories about wagon parties running out of food before Oregon – the whole party starving to death. We must check our supplies often; we might not get there as soon as we think. Always plan for the worst, I say.

While she offers helpful advice along the trail, such concerns are consistently voiced only by female characters. The recurrence of female characters in this role portrays them as powerless and unable to contribute toward the journey. Conversely, men are portrayed as workers and decision makers on the trail. However, in 1848 and in preindustrial America when the game’s narrative takes place, there was no developed ideology of a “woman’s place.” Women often contributed to a family’s income and did physical labor on the farm (Faragher and Stansell 152). This role is wholly absent from the characterization of women in the game.

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An enthusiast recently created The Oregon Trail Shrine, archiving images and downloadable copies of both the Oregon Trail and Oregon Trail Deluxe computer games. Similar to the oral histories I collected with my Oregon Trail Survey, the site shares game reviews and stories submitted by fans. This review struck me:

After playing this game it made [me] want to learn even more about the Oregon Trail and all about the pioneers who walked and did their best to survive. To know that they survived sickness and weather and Indians was amazing to me

The reviewer was amazed that pioneers survived amid the threat of Native Americans, however that threat wasn’t present in the game. Yes, in the game thieves sometimes attacked your wagon train – but they weren’t Native Americans. Moreover, Native Americans offered food in the game – a far cry from any threat the reviewer perceived. The reviewer’s subtle reference parallels many of the inaccurate and more explicit responses I received from my survey. When asked to describe Native Americans in the game, survey respondents occasionally wrote, “they attack you”, “bad”, or “savages.” These descriptions indicated a disconnect between the history represented within the game, and the knowledge retained by the game’s users. Individuals unintentionally saw the past through racist stereotypes, engendered by other forms of media and culture.

The reoccurrence of these inaccuracies and stereotypes is intriguing. Are they due to the inherent limitations of computer simulations? Are stereotypes foundational to how we see the past? Are there other examples of history and the past becoming abstracted in the minds of individuals – being replaced by stereotypes? Is this a phenomenon that could be studied further? Am I unduly extrapolating upon a perceived pattern and is this all just a waste of time? I already have preliminary answers to several of these questions – but I would appreciate feedback from my readers regarding ways to approach this.

In her 2005 presidential address to the American Studies Association, Karen Halttunen delivered a speech that would be published in American Quarterly the following year, entitled “Groundwork: American Studies in Place.” She discussed the “disneyfication” of American place-making; the replacement of reality with an idealized vision that engenders racism and sexism. What occurs in disneyfication is the substitution of place with an idea – one that is idealized, homogenous, and limiting. Disneyfication is problematic in that it only presents a simplified version of reality. The name obviously comes from Disney, whose presentation of ideas to children has traditionally been an idealized, optimistic representation of the world that doesnt engage the realities of the world. This amounts to the filtration or censorship of ideas – ideas that fall outside a utopian vision of reality are eliminated.

I’ve been witnessing the disneyfication of historical roleplaying in Second Life. Since the closing of the first Wild West roleplaying sim, Sigil, a number of new RP sims have been created to take its place. It’s difficult to keep track of these sims – they briefly appear and then, just like Sigil, completely vanish. Their significance is not in the number of simulations that have followed, but the manner which they conduct business. Many of these new environments resemble historical amusement parks or shopping malls more than they do roleplaying environments. A good example of this is Sand Ranch, where the streets are lined with small shops selling “authentic” avatar clothing, as well as stylized clothing that can make you look like a Country singer. The historical accuracy of these environments isn’t necessarily intended nor desired – their goal is to create a profit.

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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.

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

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.

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.

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.