The Oregon Trail

Lesson plan — playing The Oregon Trail

The following lesson is aimed at upper comprehensive school students (ages 13–15) and developed out of a need to motivate pupils with a more interactive learning experience.

The subject is American history and the Myth of the Pioneer (or the Frontier Myth, alternatively), into which I wanted to bring a microhistorical, experiental perspective.

I was reflecting on different ways to enable students to empathise and get involved with the Pioneer's narrative (in the span of a short lesson) when I was reminded of The Oregon Trail, the infamously merciless video game known for its realist interpretation of the Frontier Myth. The game was originally released in 1971 for the express purpose of teaching eighth-graders about pioneer life in the United States.

Luckily the game is widely available these days, — for free at that — and after a short investigation I settled on the 1990 version hosted on the Internet Archive.

The objective of the game is to lead a group of settlers safely from the Midwest to the Pacific coast via the eponymous Oregon Trail.

Succeeding in this ordeal entails many difficult decisions; the player must make calls on resource management, river crossings (careful! — lest you drown), which routes to take, the speed of travel, when to depart, and so forth.

The Oregon Trail is unrelenting and uncompromising in its realism, the travelers facing extreme trials — disease and famine are regular visitors, with death looming at every twist and turn. Very little of this is actually visualised, however, so the game makes for a "safe" way to introduce these difficult topics to students and to encourage them to empathise with the struggles of people from a bygone era.

One of the best things about The Oregon Trail is the way it leaves ample room for students themselves to create — not by any game mechanic, mind you, but on an imaginative level: the stories that write themselves through this primitive game that doesn't really show or tell.

"John died of dysentery" is so wonderfully, nihilistically laconic that it invites one to connect the dots in one's imagination.

The interactive nature of video games facilitates this further: students name their own characters and choose their professions, which immediately creates a more personal connection to all these things unravelling in the Frontier.

The active role that the student-player adopts allows for an extraordinary learning experience, where one has to try out various solutions, observe the consequences and evaluate the results.

This approaches enquiry-based learning in a fundamental way — the ball is in the students' court, and they create their own historical narratives.

The greatest advantage of this teaching method, the gamification, can also be a major disadvantage: everything happens within the confines of the game's programming. When the game mechanics and their limitations need to be learned (in addition to the actual learning), the means risk becoming the goal in and of itself.

This is where the teacher's role and responsibility is at its most significant — to guide the students to learn about the actual pioneer life instead of just the game itself.

Posing the following questions to students can be quite helpful:

• What is the objective of the game?
• What kind of challenges do the settlers face on their journey?
• What role do indigenous people play in the game?
• How credible or believable do you find the game — and why?

You may even challenge your students to write a story based on their experience with the game. The story could be based on a family of settlers, for example:

• What kind of a background does the family have? What are the circumstances in which they left for Oregon?
• What kind of trials do they face on their journey? How does it make them feel?
• What kind of encounters do they have with other people (such as other travelers and indogenous people), both good and bad?
• How does the family's story end?