Oregon Trail: What’s the Price of Dysentery?
The Oregon Trail is a landmark of educational video games.
I’ll be honest, apart from the occasional reference in several Dorkly videos on YouTube, I had little to no real knowledge of the PC game The Oregon Trail which, before I discovered Fear & Hunger, was known as one of the most difficult games to complete. To call it Dark Souls but set in the 1800s may be a nice description simply because the frequent inevitability of death is so connected to peoples’ experience and memory of the game.
The public library where I work recently decided to host a live-action simulation program based around the game, something that other libraries have done before to great success. Given the fact that I’m being paid to learn about The Oregon Trail it seemed fitting to go ahead and finally play this game.
I didn’t even make it to Fort Boise before my entire family was dead.
It’s important to clarify that I was not playing the original 1971 text-based game designed by Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann, and Paul Dillenberger for the HP 2100 mini-computer system; I was playing the 1985 MECC version of the game designed for DOS, the disk based operating system for IMB PC compatible computers. Most of the articles I found while researching for this essay noted this latter version of the game was often played on the Apple II personal computer. Apple has, throughout its existence regularly donated, or offered discounts, to education facilities which explains why so many people played it on their computer. This isn’t just important for the purpose of showing I know what I’m talking about, or proving that I know how to use Google (it’s pronounced THA-Google by-the-way) (whippersnappers)). The 1985 software program is incorrectly credited as the original version of the game, and given the fact that there have been remakes and sequels even as recent as 2023, the year I’m writing this essay, it’s important to make sure my reader knows which game I’m talking about.
While at work I found a playable copy of the game on ClassicReload.com. For the purpose of research (research he says(Pshaw)) I played a quick round of the game, and I can confirm that my entire family was dead within five minutes.
I had done the thing and went back to reading about Snake River and Fort Kearney.
Putting aside its popular reputation, The Oregon Trail has been a standard example of edutainment (education and entertainment) and arguably one of the most successful educational video games in the history of the medium. I wrote in a previous article how educational videogames typically operate, and also noted that, barring a few examples, they have a tendency to, well…suck. Or at least the ones that I have played. The problem I, like many young players had, was that the games were never terribly compelling, or if they were, the software used to make them was just nowhere near as intuitive as the fun console or for-profit PC games were. I loved the Putt-Putt games when I was small, but compared to say Rise of Nations or Luigi’s Mansion they just couldn’t compare. Nostalgia can cloud judgment as much as it can reinforce bias, but since I had never played The Oregon Trail I went into the experience with an open mind.
I was delighted to find out that, while basic, The Oregon Trail was in fact a fun game.
The Oregon Trail is a text-based role-playing game(rpg), where the player has to make choices about how to prepare for the journey west, and then, as they proceed across the western territory of North America, how to balance resources and manage the numerous obstacles that will occur during travel. The most well known obstacle is disease. At the beginning of the game the player is given an option to decide their main character’s profession, the options being banker, farmer, or carpenter. Like any good rpg each of these professions, which are really classes if we’re going to stick to rpg terminology, come with a benefit or downside. This also will determine the difficulty setting of the game. Once the class is decided the player is told to provide names for the non-playable-characters(npcs) that accompany the protagonist and these are the members of his family.
Small note, because the game is designed to be educational and as true to the times as possible, the starting character will always be a man. This man could die on the journey, and probably will, but even if he passes away the family can continue.
Once the class is picked, and the family members named, the player is given an amount of money. If they chose banker they will go on the journey with the most amount in their pockets for the original investment, up to $1600 (~$36,500 by today’s standard once accounted for inflation).
This is the first lesson the game is offering to the player, not just in terms of gameplay but also for the educational expierience.
Westward expansion of pioneers from the Eastern United States was always an economic endeavor. Most movements are. Looking at my grade school education I was taught a romanticized view of “Manifest Destiny,” the racist philosophical paradigm that it was the role of white citizens to move out West and “conquer the untamed lands” of the western half of the North American continent. Never mind the fact that human beings had been living in this land, and were continuing to do so. As I grew older and read actual histories of this time period I became aware that most of this rhetoric was, being charitable here, nothing but racist and jingoistic bullshit. The pioneer travels and settlements of white peoples into the west were predominantly economic efforts by the government, as well as private citizens, to expand the nation and increase wealth. This demand for new land, and new opportunities were about people trying to make a new life for themselves, and the government of the United States seeing chances for new business and revenue. Money, and the chance to acquire more of it, has always been a motivation for human beings, and the Oregon Trail was no exception.
But, this is also a game.
So it’s important to note that choice is as much about history as it is about game design.
The player who decides to be a banker rather than a farmer or carpenter is going to begin the game with far more money to spend which means more money for food, more oxen for traveling, more wagon parts for when (not if) the wagon breaks, and ammunition. What’s unique however is that while the banker option means more money, it can also mean your character is less prepared for the realities of frontier life.
Which brings me to the obstacles.
Most of the gameplay of The Oregon Trail is watching the wagon move in place set against a pixelated background until a new obstacle, event, or location occurs. In the latter case this is usually encountering a famous landmark that is, honestly, well rendered for the technology of the time. And if I’m being completely honest, I actually enjoy pixelated games as much as I love beautifully rendered 3-dimensional realities. Sometimes a player may come across a fort or small town, and these are usually “safe zones” for the player who has likely reached one battered and barely clinging to life.
That is assuming of course that you haven’t died.
How can you die in the game?
Well, there’s several fun ways.
I really like bullet points and don’t get much opportunity to use them in my daily writing, so I’m gonna carpe diem and list the ways you can die in The Oregon Trail:
Fever
Dysentery
Measles
Cholera
Typhoid
Exhaustion
A snakebite
A broken leg
A broken arm
Drowning
I don’t know why bullet points are so satisfying. Regardless, my itch has been scratched. Thank you for indulging me.
When I played The Oregon Trail my family died almost entirely from Dysentery. I don’t remember any of them getting a fever at first. I never encountered any wild animals. I forded at least one river without having anyone drown. My wagon even caught on fire twice and my family emerged unscathed. Nevertheless my family of Jammer, Grover, Elmo, Ernie, and Bert all perished, Bert being the first to die of Dysentery, and my beloved wife Grover being the last member of the family to die of the same disease somewhere between Fort Boise and Oklahoma.
I had such high hopes for Bert. I didn’t think he’d be the first one to perish on my trip to the west, but alas Dysentery spares no one, and especially nobody’s britches.
All of this death in The Oregon Trail is fodder for some beautiful memes, but players would be mistaken if they treated this death as an empty gag. From the comfort of my air conditioned home, sitting in front of my Macbook Pro, I can laugh at the death of Bert because I’m divorced from that kind of experience. My contemporary survival is not a moment-by-moment trial.The Oregon Trail is a game that tries, to the best of its ability and technology, to create the simulation of actually traveling to the West coast in 1848, and the realities that families would experience. In an article from Mental Floss titled “The Legacy of The Oregon Trail” I found during my research, Jed Lipinski writes how one of the original designers took extra care to research the actual ways people could die on the journeys. There was a real effort to make sure that these deaths weren’t just about good game design, they were as much an effort to actually educate students.
Obstacles are a key component of video game design and narrative structure, and The Oregon Trail succeeded because its design was centered around obstacles. Rivers, disease, malnutrition, natural elements, fire, and fragility of transportation methods are variables the player has to consider, just as pioneers did, as they navigate the western territories. These obstacles are random, and sometimes seem terribly unfair.
But that’s life.
As much as it is a historical edutainment software program, The Oregon Trail also prepared students for the absurdity that is survival.
Sometimes human beings will encounter elements that seem random or unjust, and while I may try to find some meaning behind it, the reality is it’s one’s ability to encounter these obstacles and manage to survive that demonstrates real emotional and intellectual growth. My child may drown because I chose to ford the river instead of locating a ferry, or I might break an arm because of a mistake made while trying to fix a wheel. These events challenge my resolve to keep going and trying to survive. And sometimes I don’t. My tombstone bearing the name Jammer is a lesson that I tried and failed.
Many people in the 1800s hoping for a new life on the Pacific coast tried, and failed, their bones becoming dust in or on the earth. More than a century later their experiences became the fodder for a videogame franchise which still continues to attract players hungry to see how they would fare on the same trial, or maybe just trying to play the game so they can be part of the meme.
Joshua “Jammer” Smith
11.27.2023
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