Robert Whitaker History Respawned: Games Designers as Historians and Games as History, 1971 – 1991 Digital games – which include computer, mobile, and video games – represent the most valuable entertainment medium in the world, routinely generating more global revenue than music, film, and television. 1 A remarkable facet of the popularity of digital games is the centrality of history as a topic and setting for the most popular digital game titles. For instance, in 2018, five out of the twenty best-selling video games were history titles, including the most popular game, Red Dead Redemption 2. 2 Out of the ten top-selling games of the last decade, half were history games or games with significant historical components. 3 Digital games are big business, and history is often the most profitable and popular setting for digital games. Historians and other scholars have taken notice of this relationship between digital games and history, and have begun to analyze digital history games for their historical content as well as their potential influence on player’s historical knowledge. 4 In addition to traditional academic publications, these scholars also routinely write critiques of popular history games for major publications, including Rock Paper Shotgun and The Guardian. 5 This work has greatly contributed 1 Kevin Webb, “The $120 billion gaming industry is going through more change than it ever has before, and everyone is trying to cash in.” Business Insider, October 1, 2019, https://www.businessinsider.com/video-game-industry-120- billion-future-innovation-2019-9 2 Webb, “‘Red Dead Redemption 2’ beat out ‘Call of Duty’ to become 2018’s best-seller – these were the 20 best- selling games of the year.” Business Insider, January 23, 2019, https://www.businessinsider.com/best-selling-video- games-2018-2019-1 3 Hope Corrigan, “Grand Theft Auto 5 is the USA’s Best-Selling Game of the Decade.” IGN, January 17, 2020, https://www.ign.com/articles/grand-theft-auto-5-is-the-usas-best-selling-game-of-the-decade 4 Key works include Jeremiah McCall, Gaming the Past: Using Video Games to Teach Secondary History (New York: Routledge, 2011); Adam Chapman, Digital Games as History: How Videogames Present the Past and Offer Access to Historical Practice (New York: Routledge, 2016); and Matthew Wilhelm Kapell and Andrew B.R. Elliot, eds. Playing with the Past: Digital Games and the Simulation of History (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013). 5 Holly Nielsen, “Assassin’s Creed Origins: how Ubisoft painstakingly recreated ancient Egypt,” The Guardian, October 5, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/05/assassins-creed-origins-recreated-ancient- egypt-ubisoft; Andreas Inderwildi, “Kingdom Come Deliverance’s quest for historical accuracy is a fool’s errand,” Rock Paper Shotgun, March 5, 2018, https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2018/03/05/kingdom-come-deliverance- historical-accuracy/
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Robert Whitaker
History Respawned: Games Designers as Historians and Games as History, 1971 – 1991
Digital games – which include computer, mobile, and video games – represent the most
valuable entertainment medium in the world, routinely generating more global revenue than music,
film, and television.1 A remarkable facet of the popularity of digital games is the centrality of
history as a topic and setting for the most popular digital game titles. For instance, in 2018, five
out of the twenty best-selling video games were history titles, including the most popular game,
Red Dead Redemption 2.2 Out of the ten top-selling games of the last decade, half were history
games or games with significant historical components.3 Digital games are big business, and
history is often the most profitable and popular setting for digital games.
Historians and other scholars have taken notice of this relationship between digital games
and history, and have begun to analyze digital history games for their historical content as well as
their potential influence on player’s historical knowledge.4 In addition to traditional academic
publications, these scholars also routinely write critiques of popular history games for major
publications, including Rock Paper Shotgun and The Guardian.5 This work has greatly contributed
1 Kevin Webb, “The $120 billion gaming industry is going through more change than it ever has before, and everyone
is trying to cash in.” Business Insider, October 1, 2019, https://www.businessinsider.com/video-game-industry-120-
billion-future-innovation-2019-9 2 Webb, “‘Red Dead Redemption 2’ beat out ‘Call of Duty’ to become 2018’s best-seller – these were the 20 best-
selling games of the year.” Business Insider, January 23, 2019, https://www.businessinsider.com/best-selling-video-
games-2018-2019-1 3 Hope Corrigan, “Grand Theft Auto 5 is the USA’s Best-Selling Game of the Decade.” IGN, January 17, 2020,
https://www.ign.com/articles/grand-theft-auto-5-is-the-usas-best-selling-game-of-the-decade 4 Key works include Jeremiah McCall, Gaming the Past: Using Video Games to Teach Secondary History (New York:
Routledge, 2011); Adam Chapman, Digital Games as History: How Videogames Present the Past and Offer Access
to Historical Practice (New York: Routledge, 2016); and Matthew Wilhelm Kapell and Andrew B.R. Elliot, eds.
Playing with the Past: Digital Games and the Simulation of History (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013). 5 Holly Nielsen, “Assassin’s Creed Origins: how Ubisoft painstakingly recreated ancient Egypt,” The Guardian,
October 5, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/05/assassins-creed-origins-recreated-ancient-
egypt-ubisoft; Andreas Inderwildi, “Kingdom Come Deliverance’s quest for historical accuracy is a fool’s errand,”
Rock Paper Shotgun, March 5, 2018, https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2018/03/05/kingdom-come-deliverance-
historical-accuracy/
Whitaker 2
to informed critique of history games, and built a foundation for analyzing the influence of history
games on popular historical memory. However, this work has failed, thus far, to develop in two
important ways: first, understanding the creative process and intentions of history game developers
and, second, understanding the long history of digital history games, outside of the last decade.
With regard to understanding development, scholars have succeeded in bringing their
knowledge to bear on the history presented by recent popular games. Yet only rarely are those
critiques of history games informed by the intent of developers, or, perhaps more importantly, the
historical sources that developers used when developing their history games. Building a knowledge
of this topic through archival research and oral histories could greatly change the consideration of
published history games and enliven the increasingly stale analysis of representations of history
by digital titles. Moreover, archival research and oral interviews would allow scholars to envision
history game creators as historians rather than solely as game developers. This distinction is
important because of the popularity of history games and their influence on the historical memories
of game players. We know that history games represent important touchstones for historical
knowledge among players. Yet when it comes to games, we do not yet know how to answer
questions related to authorship. We assume and infer the perspective of game developers. We
assume and infer their biases. We need to do more in order to understand game development and
learn how the development process plays into a game’s representation of the past.
With regard to the long history of digital games, the current analysis of history titles is,
unsurprisingly, focused on the last ten to fifteen years. This period witnessed the emergence of big
budget, “Triple A” history games, including Assassin’s Creed, BioShock, and Call of Duty. Yet
this focus on recent history often leads scholars to miss the longer history of analog and digital
history games. This is an important problem for two reasons. First, game development is an
Whitaker 3
iterative process in which new games build upon the design techniques and methods of previous
titles. To ignore the past, in this regard, is to ignore how the genres and gameplay types we discuss
in the present are the result of long-term trends in development. Second, much like game
development, the representation of history is an iterative process. Scholars of historical games
often write about the history in these titles as though they are solely a product of current conditions
and concerns rather than iterations on longstanding tropes and themes within the history of
historical games. If we can accept that digital games are a medium for influential historical
knowledge, then historical games also have a historiography, in the same way as historical films,
documentaries, and scholarly monographs. To be sure, the representation of the past in current
history game owes much to contemporary circumstances. Those representations, however, also
draw inspiration and respond to the history depicted in foundational titles of the late 20th century,
particularly Age of Empires, Sid Meier’s Civilization, and the sine qua non of digital history games,
The Oregon Trail. Current history titles not only respond to these games, but also often share
developers or development teams with those classic titles.
The purpose of this study is to consider the long history of digital history games through
archival and oral history sources. It will focus on the critical period from 1971 to 1991, which saw
the early development of digital games as well as the personal computer and the first video game
consoles. Although this work will consider elements of game design, the primary focus will be on
the development of digital games as a medium for historical knowledge. Furthermore, this project
will study the academic and pedagogical backgrounds of many early game designers associated
with history games, and reveal how their backgrounds influenced the development of digital games
more generally.
Whitaker 4
History hits the Trail
One of the more common and pernicious aspects of games studies is the habit of mind of scholars
to cordon off educational games from the history of digital games more generally. This habit often
results from a narrow focus on the last twenty years, during which time educational games became
poorly funded, over produced, and easily forgettable. Yet by extending one’s focus into the late
twentieth century and avoiding the teleology of reading the history of educational games through
their current state, it is impossible to escape the importance and popularity of educational titles.
Indeed, there is an argument to be made that digital games as we know them today would not exist
without the educational game industry of the late twentieth century. In the years when computers
were prohibitively expensive and even more prohibitively large, schools and universities
represented one of the few places people could use a computer, let alone play a computer game.
And given the limited availability of computers, early digital game developers, unsurprisingly,
often began their careers using campus-based machines and working on educational software. The
game genres and gameplay modes we take for granted today often existed first in educational titles.
No title better represents this fact than The Oregon Trail, a game which most people
associate with the 1985 Apple II version, but which began life in a junior high classroom in
Minnesota in 1971.6 The game was the brainchild of Don Rawitsch, a senior history undergraduate
at Carleton College (Northfield, MN) working as a student teacher at Bryant Junior High School
in Minneapolis. For his student teaching assignment, Rawitsch had been tasked with instructing
junior high students on the history of 19th century westward expansion. His training at Carleton
had encouraged the use of innovative techniques to reach students and “get their noses out of the
6 Jessica Lussenhop, “Oregon Trail: How three Minnesotans forged its path,” City Pages, January 19, 2011,
http://www.citypages.com/news/oregon-trail-how-three-minnesotans-forged-its-path-6745749; “Classic Game
Postmortem: Oregon Trail.” YouTube video, 1:02:01. “GDC, Don Rawtisch,” March 15, 2017,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdGNFhKhoKY
Whitaker 5
textbook.”7 During previous student teaching assignments, Rawitsch and another instructor had
roleplayed as Lewis and Clark, and had students interview them while they were dressed and
speaking in character.8 In another session, he participated in a mock trial, which began with Don
and another instructor getting into a heated argument followed by Don being “shot” with a track
coach’s starter pistol – a pedagogical technique that is probably best left in the 1970s. After the
“murder,” students would then take on the roles of attorney, judge, or jury to determine the legal
response. For westward expansion, Rawitsch quickly latched on to games as a possible way to
achieve his goal of engaging students. His first solo teaching assignment had involved leading a
lesson on the American Revolution at a local high school, for which he created a rudimentary paper
and pencil game to illustrate the collection of colonial taxes. Rawitsch initially envisioned a new
analog game for westward expansion with pioneer trails drawn on large sheets of butcher paper.
Students, playing as pioneer families, would move along the trails using dice rolls while attempting
to avoid various disasters, including disease, injury, and theft.9
Rawitsch began outlining the game he called “Oregon Trail” at his apartment in the
Minneapolis suburb of Crystal, Minnesota. He shared this apartment with two other student
teachers from Carleton, Bill Heinemann and Paul Dillenberger, who taught math at another area
school. Both Heinemann and Dillenberger studied computer programming at Carleton, and
Heinemann suggested to Rawitsch that they could use their programming knowledge to turn
“Oregon Trail,” with its unwieldy butcher paper map, into a computer application.10 Over the next
7 Jeremy Shea, “An Interview with the Teacher-Turned-Developer Behind ‘Oregon Trai,” Yester: Then for Now,
February 24, 2014, https://yesterthenfornow.kinja.com/an-interview-with-the-teacher-turned-developer-behind-o-
1529659314 8 Robert Whitaker, “History at GDC: Don Rawitsch on The Oregon Trail,” March 5, 2017,
and they would be much more likely to run into other people on the trail, called “riders,” when
they were closer to the start of the game at Independence, Missouri.13
With this first version of “Oregon Trail,” Rawitsch, Heinemann, and Dillenberger
established a number of gameplay elements that would become inextricably linked with digital
history games, and digital games more generally, going forward. They became the first developers
to apply analog game notions of turns and resources management to a digital title, while also being
the first to apply those notions to a digital game where history was the primary topic and setting.
Today, turn-based resource management history games, including Sid Meier’s Civilization series
and the Total War series, make up some of the most popular digital games. Moreover, because of
the random nature of the game’s events set along a repeatable journey, “Oregon Trail” became the
first digital example of a roguelike, a genre of gameplay associated with randomized, procedurally
generated levels that are designed to be replayed over and over again for a new experience. Current
popular examples of this genre include Spelunky, Rogue Legacy, FTL: Faster Than Light, and
Dead Cells. In his postmortem presentation for the Game Developers Conference in 2017,
Rawitsch argued that “Oregon Trail” could even be considered the first shooter game based on the
title’s hunting mechanic.14 In this mechanic, the teletype would print out “Type BANG” and the
player’s success in hunting would be based on how quickly and accurately they typed out and
entered the word “BANG,” “POW,” or “BLAM.” If the player typed the word incorrectly, the
result would be no food; if they spelled the word correctly but typed slowly, the result would be
some food; and if they spelled the word correctly and typed quickly, there would be “Good eatin’
tonight.”
13 “Classic Game Postmortem: Oregon Trail.” YouTube video. 14 “Classic Game Postmortem: Oregon Trail.” YouTube video.
Whitaker 8
Remarkably, these gameplay elements that would become the mainstay of popular digital
games were first developed for use in a junior high history class. They were the result of innovative
history pedagogy rather than commercial development under the umbrella of a large, publicly
traded company. Given the original purpose of the game, however, the question must be asked:
did “Oregon Trail” work as a pedagogical tool? There were obvious flaws with how the game
portrayed westward expansion, most notably related to what the game lacked, including any
mention of Native Americans or slavery. These problems can be tied back to the way westward
expansion was taught in public schools at the time; the age, perspective, and education of the
developers; the two week development period; and, to a certain extent, the technological
limitations of the hardware involved. As with any other history – whether it be a book, film, or
game – there is room for improvement and often an inability to cover all facets of a topic in a
complete and satisfying manner. With these important content issues set, temporarily, aside, how
well did “Oregon Trail” achieve Rawitsch’s goal of getting “noses out of the textbook” and
students engaged with the past?
In his class, Rawitsch divided his students into small groups to play the game, and they
followed their pioneer’s progress using a separate printed map. Because of the nature of the
teletype system, student groups often had to wait up to thirty minutes to play their turn on the
machine. While one group had a turn on the teletype, the other groups would be occupied with
westward expansion source readings or a map exercise. According to Rawitsch, this rotation from
game to non-game activity worked for the benefit of the class because “Oregon Trail” was never
designed to be used in isolation, but instead as part of other classroom activities and instruction.15
Although the students encountered several bugs in the code and were annoyed with having to wait
15 Whitaker, “History at GDC: Don Rawitsch on The Oregon Trail.”
Whitaker 9
for their turn on the teletype machine, the game was an instant hit. Rawitsch discovered that his
students, after much initial bickering, developed an order for decision making on the trail, with
certain groups even having assigned roles like wagon leader or supply accountant.16 After the
initial class, Rawitsch loaded the program onto the teletype system’s mainframe so that it could be
accessed outside of class. Bryant students, many of them from other classes, were soon “lined up
six or seven deep outside the janitor’s closet. They began arriving early to play and staying until
teachers kicked them out.”17 Students found the game fascinating not only because of its content,
but also because of the game’s medium: for many of them, playing “Oregon Trail” represented the
first time they had used a computer. For those that had used a computer already, it was the first
time they realized it could be used for something other than mathematics.18
From our current perspective, the promise and potential of this first version of “Oregon
Trail” is obvious, but from Rawitsch’s view at the time, it was merely a successful element of his
westward expansion lesson plan that he used for a temporary student teacher position. As Paul
Dillenberger later put it, the three developers “were student teachers…our world was our
supervising teachers and our classrooms. We didn’t have enough political savvy to share it with
the faculty or the principal at the time.”19 After the semester ended in December 1971, Rawitsch
used Bryant Junior High’s teletype machine to print out the code for the game. He removed the
printout, deleted the game from the teletype system mainframe, and went home. A game that would
go on to sell 65 million copies spent the next three years as a rolled-up piece of paper in Don
Rawitsch’s desk drawer.
16 Whitaker, “History at GDC: Don Rawitsch on The Oregon Trail.” 17 Lussenhop, “Oregon Trail.” 18 “Classic Game Postmortem: Oregon Trail.” YouTube video. 19 Kevin Wong, “The Forgotten History of ‘The Oregon Trail,” As Told By Its Creators,” February 15, 2017.
Indians.”26 Rawitsch used this count to create event probabilities for the updated game, so that the
player would experience these events at a frequency similar to historic settlers. Furthermore, he
used detailed maps to include actual mileposts and locations (e.g. forts, rivers, and towns) from
the historic trails.27 He completed this process by writing a user manual, which included not just
information about how to run the application and play the game, but also suggestions for how to
incorporate the game into a lesson plan.28
22 Whitaker, “History at GDC: Don Rawitsch on The Oregon Trail.” 23 Shea, “An Interview With the Teacher-Turned-Developer Behind ‘Oregon Trail.’” 24 Minnesota Educational Computing Corporation (MECC) collection, Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of
Play at the Strong, Box 1, Folder 11, “Oregon User Manual, 1977.” 25 MECC collection, “Oregon User Manual.” 26 MECC collection, “Oregon User Manual.” 27 “Classic Game Postmortem: Oregon Trail.” YouTube video. 28 MECC collection, “Oregon User Manual.”
Whitaker 12
Released, for free, on MECC’s mainframe in 1975, Oregon became the organization’s most
played title. Rawitsch remembered that “it was accessed thousands of times a month,” and that
“the only other program on the large system that was used more was an early [version of] email.”29
Despite the popularity of the game, he maintained that it was designed to work with additional
pedagogical techniques rather than as an independent classroom exercise. In the user manual,
Rawitsch wrote:
The OREGON simulation was not designed to simply stand alone as a classroom activity,
a game of “beat the computer.” Nor was it intended to be the focal point of a historical unit.
It is assumed that the study of the Oregon Trail in a class is used as a case study of some
larger theme, such as the American westward movement, human emigration in history, or
people’s ventures into the unknown. Within such a theme, the OREGON simulation would
be used as a source of information which provides the student the chance to personally
experience what he has previously read or heard about.30
In his “suggested activities” to go along with the title, Rawitsch recommended giving students
background lectures and documents related to the history of westward migration, including
primary sources. He also suggested students use pioneer diaries as a model for keeping their own
journals about their experiences on the trail. After the in-class playthrough, students could share
their stories with others as a way to develop strategies for playing the game as well as a way for
all students to experience the trail hardships they may have missed because of chance. For a
“synthesis” assignment, Rawitsch recommended talking with the students about “different
impressions one gets from [pioneer] diaries, the simulation, paintings from the late 1880’s, TV and
movies of what it was really like to make the journey.”31 In these recommendations, Rawitsch
hoped teachers would place the game in a larger pedagogical context – using not just the game,
not just a lecture, but a collection of exercises, mediums, and sources.
29 Lussenhop, “Oregon Trail.” 30 MECC collection, “Oregon User Manual.” 31 MECC collection, “Oregon User Manual.”
Whitaker 13
Despite (or perhaps, because of) Rawitsch’s use of printed primary and secondary sources,
Oregon carried forward many of the problems related to a white settler perspective that were
present in the original version of the game. Yet it is also undeniable that with the addition of this
research as well as the user manual’s suggested classroom activities, Oregon represented a useful
tool for instruction and a solid foundation for further iterations on the concept. Moreover, with the
inclusion of primary and secondary material in the creation of this new version, the game now
represented a history of the past in the same way as a textbook, a lecture, or any other traditional
medium for the transmission of historical knowledge. But if the game merely replicated the
abilities of a textbook or lecture, and simultaneously could not offer a more comprehensive view
of the past, what made the game worthwhile for teachers and students in the first place? Writing
in 1978, Rawitsch provided an answer:
Oregon does not attempt to replicate exactly a trip on a wagon train in the 1840’s. But it
does attempt to present students with some of the resources, decisions, and events that
faced the pioneers of that day. Although students can find out about the Oregon Trail by
reading books, visiting museums, watching movies, and similar activities, the simulation
allows them to learn from actively participating in the simulated experience of people from
another era.32
The game was worthwhile because it encouraged active participation, but, importantly, it was not
simply participation in the absorption of historical knowledge. Through their playthrough of the
game and their accompanying written trail diaries, students were both making history and serving
as the historians of that history. For all the celebration of The Oregon Trail’s mechanics – strategy,
resources management, roguelike, even first-person shooter – the game’s success also rests on its
historical content and its ability to make the player feel like a history maker. Much like the analog
wargames of the past, Oregon established, in the digital realm, that the player was not merely
learning about “great people.” The game gave players the ability to become them.
32 Don Rawitsch, “Oregon Trail,” Creative Computing, vol 4, no 3 (May-June 1978), 132.
Whitaker 14
History fords Edutainment River
Oregon was a runaway success on MECC’s teletype mainframe during the late 1970s, but it is
clear that the organization did not yet give much thought to the commercial potential of the game.
Case in point: Don’s 1978 article about the game for Creative Computing shared the entire teletype
code for Oregon, complete with a typed-out example playthrough.33 In our age of fierce
competition over digital content and vindictive patent infringement lawsuits between Silicon
Valley companies, it is not every day that you see a multi-million dollar idea given away for free
in a magazine, but such was the nature of the early digital revolution. MECC’s perspective began
to change, however, near the end of the decade with the advent of the “microcomputer,” what we
now refer to as the personal computer (PC).34 Equipped with its own onboard memory system as
well as a monitor to visualize data, PCs represented the death knell to MECC’s cumbersome
teletype mainframe system. Thanks to the organization’s success up to that point, however, the
state of Minnesota decided to fund MECC’s conversion to the microcomputer era. Although the
state’s intention was to better the tools available to its teachers and students, this decision would
end up netting Minnesota an incredible financial windfall.
After taking bids from several companies, MECC decided to order their first set of PCs in
1978 from a new business based in Los Altos, California: Apple Computer Company. In a deal
brokered by Dale LaFrenz and Steve Jobs, Apple sent 500 Apple IIs designed and built by Steve
Wozniak to Minnesota. The deal represented one of Apple Computer Company’s biggest sales up
to that point, and it helped to establish the Apple II as the de facto PC for the American classroom.35
made these license agreements with individual departments of education from other states, with
the idea being that those departments could then disseminate MECC software in every school
district in their territory.
By the end of the 1980s, almost a third of all school districts in the United States were part
of the MECC licensing program.38 Each license was worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in
annual revenue, quickly turning MECC into a multi-million-dollar organization. Having accidently
created one of the most successful game development companies in the world, the state of
Minnesota quickly began to reduce its annual contributions to MECC’s budget. In 1982, less than
four years after their deal with Apple Computer Company, 90% of MECC’s budget was covered
by out-of-state sales.39 This tide increased in 1983, when MECC began to port their software to
competitor PCs, including the Commodore 64 and the IBM PC. In 1984, the Minnesota legislature
converted MECC into a state-owned self-funded tax paying public corporation and dropped
“Consortium” for “Corporation” at the end of the group’s name.40
Oregon represented a key part of MECC’s transition from consortium to corporation.
MECC published the first Apple II version of Oregon in 1979 as part of a collection of software
called Elementary Volume 6.41 The game became the most requested floppy disk in the state of
Minnesota as well as the most purchased floppy disk by out-of-state customers. When MECC
became independent in 1984, one of their first moves was to begin development of a new version
of Oregon for use with the updated Apple II, which featured color graphics. By this point, however,
Don Rawitsch had moved into upper management at MECC and was responsible for running the
38 Lussenhop, “Oregon Trail.” 39 R. Philip Bouchard, You Have Died of Dysentery: The creation of The Oregon Trail – the iconic educational game
of the 1980s (R. Philip Bouchard, Kindle Edition, 2016), location 862 out of 5847. 40 Bouchard, location 878. 41 “Classic Game Postmortem: Oregon Trail.” YouTube video.
Whitaker 17
organization’s annual conference.42 Needing a new lead developer, MECC turned to a young
programmer named R. Philip Bouchard, a masters graduate from the University of Texas at Austin
with a background in computer science and education. Bouchard and a small team began work on
The Oregon Trail in October 1984.
MECC management gave Bouchard the freedom to redesign Oregon, under the provision
that he did not ruin what made the game popular to begin with.43 According to Bouchard, this
mandate proved “overwhelming at first”:
For 13 years, from 1971 to 1984, the Oregon game had remained essentially
unchanged…never had the product been completely re-imagined and redesigned. Never
had the underlying models been changed – the core of the product that makes it all work.
For the very first time, we were going to throw out all of the underlying models, along with
all of the existing software programming…and start completely from scratch. Every detail
was up for reconsideration.44
Bouchard knew that the core element of the game – a repeatable journey featuring various
randomized misfortunes – needed to remain intact. Yet he immediately saw areas for improvement
in terms of both mechanics and content.45 In terms of mechanics, The Oregon Trail included an
updated, arcade-style version of hunting, an arcade-style scoring system to judge a player’s success
on the trail, river crossings, river rafting sequences, a more detailed resource management system,
and the ability to adopt different strategies for winning the game. The last change was a particular
point of emphasis because MECC research revealed that Oregon tended to be much more popular
with boys than with girls in the classroom. In order to address this gender imbalance, Bouchard
attempted to include features that would allow for different playstyles. For example, the new