Generation XX
When players write history, games have to be organised thoughtfully.
This month, I got thoroughly obsessed with The Curious Expedition 2. After finishing my two page review, which you will find in A Collection Aside, I started reading what other reviewers thought of it. On average, I was more positive than many. Almost all mentioned the uncomfortable colonial context, although interpretations varied. Rock Paper Shotgun referred to it as a “machine for making rip-roaring adventure stories” which makes sense to me. And, many reviewers compared it to The Oregon Trail, which I had heard of, but never played.
And so, I played The Oregon Trail. It was awesome. I decided to be a banker from Boston because the carpenter from Ohio and the farmer from Illinois sounded poor. I bought significantly more than the recommended amounts of food, clothing and spare parts in Independence, Missouri, listened to some townsfolk discussing weather conditions and set off in March. I had money left over to pay people to help me cross rivers. I could buy increasingly more expensive food at forts. I reached Willamette Valley with three dollars to spare.
My entire family was alive, too, which (I believe) is because I kept food rations high the entire time and rested when they were ill. Again, the abundance of food was all thanks to starting with sixteen hundred dollars, rather than eight or four. Would I like to try with one of the other characters? No, I would not. I played the hunting minigame once, shot one squirrel worth three pounds of meat, and decided it wasn’t for me. My final score wasn’t incredibly high, but I survived what was, nonetheless, a very tense experience, despite my rich start.
I appreciated the gory, incidental stories people told along the way, about whole families starving to death, drowning and so on. Those unfortunate were clearly a lot poorer than me. I was reading, in a Vox article, “9 myths you learned from Oregon Trail”, that people who couldn’t afford a durable wagon often failed to complete the journey and that poor families would have been unlikely to consider it in the first place. In a game, death is fun. In reality, estimates suggest between nine and twenty-one thousand people didn’t survive the trail. That’s amazingly sad. (Not to mention the impact on indigenous people and their environment, too.)
The overpowered banker is interesting because (intentionally or otherwise) he’s a nod to the obvious privilege required for any endeavour to have worked out well in nineteenth century America. The 1985 version of The Oregon Trail (that I played) isn’t overly culturally sensitive. Yet, I’m interested in how these kinds of historical game contexts are structured around player agency. I’ve read criticisms of Sid Meier’s Colonization which mention everything from a potentially exploitative use of “natives”, to the lack of a slave trade, both problematic in different ways.
In a “fictional” context, like The Curious Expedition 2, I’m confused by why all of the “natives” have darker skin, or are animals. Offensive? Probably. Perhaps the point is to highlight the “scientific racism” prevalent in nineteenth century Europe but, even if so, is that a context that is properly “fun”, even if the game is otherwise “fun”? I made the mistake of playing Australia in Civilization VI on an Earth map, a while back. I soon realised who the “barbarians” were on my starting content and that there was no role for them, except to be obliterated.
Games like The Oregon Trail (which was first made for a Year 8 class in 1971), Colonization and Sierra’s Gold Rush present uniquely engaging versions (however questionable) of history. As a modern offering, CE2 does so too, in its own (perhaps not entirely better) way. When musing whether there was ever an Australian equivalent, a friend mentioned Crossing the (Blue) Mountains (presumably as Blaxland, Lawson and Wentworth). I attempted to source a copy but was told the programmers have retired and the software is no longer distributed.
Having grown up in Blaxland, and still not knowing any real history of the area, I’m dubious about whether an old game could have told that story well. I’m unsure about whether it could be told well now. Obviously, the question is, who should tell these stories? I’m reminded of Path Out, by Syrian refugee Abdullah Karam. And Meena Shamaly’s GCAP talk titled, “Cultural Integrity and Indigenous Collaboration on the Innchanted Soundtrack”. Imagine an Australian, historical game that was poignant and real. Perhaps there will be more ways to support this kind of collaborative development in future.