History is No Game Part 2 -- "The Oregon Trail" and "When Rivers Were Trails"

Introduction

It's time for the next installment in my hit history gaming series! I am a chronic procrastinator. I meant to share this a couple weeks ago, but life happened and I'm taking a particularly emotionally taxing class about 9/11 as my senior capstone, studying how 9/11 changed pop culture of games and TV/movies. It is absolutely wild to be surrounded by people who weren't even alive when that happened. Going back to school as an Old One is a trip. I'll share more on that class at a later date, I promise.

This one is a bit different. We actually played two games: The Oregon Trail and When Rivers Were Trails. The first game requires no introduction (but here's a handy article explaining just how that game came to be), but the second one might. When Rivers Were Trails tells the story of a member of an Anishinaabeg who is displaced by the government's system of land allotment in 1890.

The Games--A Tale of Two Westward Journeys

The Oregon Trail and When Rivers Were Trails are both educational games that aim to teach the player about the experiences and hardships of people in the 19^th century. The Oregon Trail is about a group of presumably white settlers heading west in a wagon train in 1848. When Rivers Were Trails tells a story that takes place more than a generation later, with a very different type of westward journey. Although there are gameplay and narrative differences between the two games, the most important differences are in the stories that these two games set out to tell about American history.

An image of the map screen in When Rivers Were Trails. The player selects a direction and encounters various characters or events. (Image Source: LaPensée 289)

Oregon is much more interested in the simulation of economic forces, whereas Rivers tracks your character’s resources in a more abstract way. Oregon begins by having the player select their difficulty, in the form of profession, which directly correlates to the amount of money one starts with. More money means more power to purchase life-saving supplies from the start. Resources such as food, bullets, clothing, and extra wagon parts are accounted for, as are the days and miles between landmarks. Rivers takes a different approach. Only three resources are tracked by the game: food, medicine, and well-being. Food and medicine can be found and traded for, while well-being is a more abstract concept. Oregon depicts “rocks, plants, waters, and animals, as resources to be attained and used for the player’s sole purposes” (LaPensée 283). Distances and time traveled in Rivers are not closely tracked. Both games feature a variety of events that can help or hinder the player’s journey. Characters met along the way in both games offer advice and commentary, which can help the player understand game mechanics or provide historical background information. Somewhat amusingly, both games feature a poorly-explained and poorly-controlled river crossing mechanic.

The most surprising thing about Oregon was that indigenous people do not present an obstacle to the player in Oregon. Members of at least three different tribal nations can be encountered. In fact, Oregon seems to go out of its way to present Indigenous people as harmless to American westward expansion. A Sioux “brave” encountered along the way says that he would not hesitate to kill a Pawnee, the mortal enemy of the Sioux, but that he has never killed a white man, who he says should simply leave him and his buffalo alone. It is worth noting here that The Oregon Trail takes place in 1848, two decades before the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, and 29 years before the US government blatantly violated that treaty in 1877. One wonders if a Sioux encountered later on would have a different view of American westward expansion. Rivers takes place in 1890, after decades of treaty violations.

This is where the true differences in the games lie. The Oregon Trail is an economic simulation of the westward journey. In contrast to this, When Rivers Were Trails is a social commentary on the effects of that westward expansion on Indigenous peoples. Oregon is firmly a product of its era, essentially uninterested in examining social history. Rivers is a response to that, written by the people whose ancestors were affected by the settlers who took the westward journey depicted in Oregon. In Oregon, members of Indigenous nations are not fully realized people, and they exist only to aid the player in achieving their settler colonialist goals.

I do not believe that these games necessarily exist in opposition to one another. Within historical recreation, there is room for both economic simulation and social simulation, and each game achieves its goal in that regard. The level of detail dedicated to each aspect is going to differ between teams of creators that have different goals. When played together, these two games show us that care must be taken by game developers to prevent unintentional narratives (such as the uncritiqued narrative of manifest destiny) from showing up.

Today

I'm putting the finishing touches on this post at about 4 PM on February 21, 2023. In six days, members of Indigenous tribes and nations will commemorate the 50th anniversary of the 71-day occupation of Wounded Knee. History is all around us. We can choose to treat it as the past, as entertainment, as trivia. Or we can choose to engage with it, and try to make our world a better place.

Thanks for reading.

Free Leonard Peltier.

Sources and Additional Reading

A note about sources: this course is largely curated. In other words, the source readings are provided by the professor. However, all of the writing here is my own original work and interpretation of the source material, with quotations noted where used.

First, I highly recommend this article. If you have time, listen to the fantastic audio narration. It includes a story about a little-known game by the makers of The Oregon Trail, a game that simulated an enslaved person's journey to freedom. It's not as egregious as it sounds, I promise.

Introduction

The Games--A Tale of Two Westward Journeys

Today

Sources and Additional Reading

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