‘Oregon Trail’ at 50: How Three Teachers Created the Computer Game That Inspired — and Diverted — Generations of Students
‘Oregon Trail’ at 50: How Three Teachers Created the Computer Game That Inspired — and Diverted — Generations of Students
‘Oregon Trail’ at 50: How Three Teachers Created the Computer Game That Inspired — and Diverted — Generations of Students
December 2, 2021
By Greg Toppo
Summary
The Oregon Trail is that rarest of artifacts, a computer game that predates the rise of the personal computer by about five years - even the first rudimentary video arcade and TV computer games were still a year off. Rawitsch had moved on, but in 1995, a decade after the game first appeared on Apple II computers, MECC President Dale LaFrenz told an interviewer that The Oregon Trail accounted for about one-third of MECC's $30 million in annual revenue. If not for MECC, Rawitsch said, the original game would have had no home at all, with no way to convert it a few years later from mainframe to PCs. The consortium's subscription system also made it possible for the game to find fans among students and teachers nationwide in the 1980s and 1990s.That honor goes to a group of IBM programmers and teachers in Westchester County, N.Y., who in the mid-1960s developed The Sumerian Game, a sort of Dungeons and Dragons in the Fertile Crescent, said Jon-Paul Dyson, director of the International Center for the History of Electronic Games at the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, N.Y. But The Oregon Trail stands out for being sensitive to its players - many of Rawitsch's students were Native American, and the designers were aware of that. The Oregon Trail may have been a one-player game, but he and his friends "Just played it as a collective. We would always do group decision-making, which is kind of the model that I like in general. It's something we put into our games: How do we get people to talk outside of the game? And how do we have collaboration?". A good game like The Oregon Trail makes that happen immediately by dropping players into situations where their decisions matter. He said a game like The Oregon Trail can similarly "Micro-target" students with content that sticks.
Reference
Toppo, G. (2021, December 2). 'oregon trail' at 50: How three teachers created the computer game that inspired - and diverted - generations of students. Retrieved February 03, 2022, from https://www.the74million.org/article/oregon-trail-at-50-how-three-teachers-created-the-computer-game-that-inspired-and-diverted-generations-of-students/