Learning
August 12, 2008
In the fourth grade they told us we were allowed to play computer games during our free time at the library. Computer games! At school!
Our excitement was fierce but short-lived; we soon learned we could only play games with “educational value,” and the librarians’ narrow interpretation of that phrase excluded a spate of important life skills: lightning-fast reflexes, uncanny hand-eye coordination, blasting apart aliens with ray guns. The usual standbys — that is to say, actual games — were out.
In their place the librarians offered us more unsavory titles: Reader Rabbit, Math Blaster, Word Munchers. But we had our standards; given the choice, we would rather just look at books. And for a long time, that’s what we did. Spending our free time doing actual reading was of course out of the question, so we busied ourselves with lighter fare like Magic Eye, Where’s Waldo?, and I Spy.
Then came The Oregon Trail.
You already know about The Oregon Trail, so I’ll spare the details. Suffice it to say that its great accomplishment was how perfectly it walked the line between making learning fun and making gaming educational. As such, it appealed equally to parents, teachers, and students; it was like the Kix of “edutainment” software. But for me the game’s greatest lesson had nothing to do with American history.
You see, even though we fourth graders enjoyed The Oregon Trail on its own merits, the foul specter of education still loomed over the experience. To be safe, we came up with our own learning-free way to play the game: rather than making the long trek to the Willamette Valley, we loaded up on ammunition, parked our covered wagons just outside of Independence, and held hunting contests on the fertile plains of Missouri. Who could kill the most rabbits? Who could fell the largest buffalo? Who, in a display of flagrant wastefulness, could leave the biggest pile of meat rotting in the sun while carrying only two hundred pounds back to the wagon?
Of course, reducing the game to a mess of frenetic clicking made it little more than virtual whack-a-mole — but that only made us happier. Not only had we had gotten a quality game by our censors, but we’d managed to take it a step further by stripping the thing of any redeeming qualities. Fun without education! Best of all, we had pulled the wool over the librarians’ eyes; as far as we could tell, they still thought we were happily reading about Chimney Rock and Soda Springs. We had beaten the system.
Our house rules may sound anti-intellectual on the surface, but after years of taking standardized tests mismatched to their curricula I can say with confidence that the experience was valuable. Even beyond school the ability to thrive within a system while simultaneously rejecting it is an important skill, whether you’re working while at odds with your boss or just keeping yourself entertained at the airport. Video games sometimes get a bad rap for stifling imaginations and stunting education, but if those critics would look closer I think they’d discover what I found out firsthand: games do indeed teach us, but it’s not always about what we expect.
This post is a contribution to Corvus Elrod’s Blogs of the Round Table. The other entries for this month are available below:
13 comments
Wow, we didn’t get The Oregon Trail – but we *did* have a similar Australian History game, which drove me to insane heights of speedy work-finishing in year 5 just so I could spend another 20 minutes on my fictional Gold Mine. Man, now I’ve gotta find that game. It was semi-turn based, black & white and the easiest way to win was to work up enough cash in the grocery stores at the goldfields to buy the “big” mine and upgrade it until it was safe to mine. Heheh, I spent so much time on that game. I think we were only supposed to play through it once, too but they couldn’t stop me – I was hungry for the gold!! =D
Er, anyway, I love what you learned about ‘the system’ from videogames, by the way. Very astute observation.
by Ben Abraham on August 12, 2008 at 11:06 pm #
You were lucky to have Oregon Trail. We had Northwest Fur Trader (on ICON computers) and let me tell you: there is no way to jazz up portaging.
Really though, when I was a kid I was so into the idea of computer games I’d type up BASIC programs from books just to play a dumb number game or experience a simple word generator. And my TI/994a couldn’t save so I’d type a new one up whenever I wanted to try it.
Most of my math education came at the hands of some Math dungeon program on the ICONs that I can’t remember the name of.
by Brad on August 13, 2008 at 12:03 am #
Ha! I suppose it should have occurred to me that the non-Americans would obviously not have played Oregon Trail in school. I’m an idiot sometimes.
by Dan Bruno on August 13, 2008 at 12:14 am #
For some reason we did play Oregon Trail in school, in New Zealand. Probably it came preinstalled on the computers. I don’t believe I learnt anything about US history from it.
by brog on August 13, 2008 at 6:33 am #
I think the question may be how many across the nation actually played the game for the merit it was supposed to have? I seem to recall a sadistic game of seeing who could have the most elaborate deaths for his or her families among my peers.
by Denis on August 13, 2008 at 9:52 am #
Are you telling me all those hours spent on the Oregon Trail was not an educational experience??
I thought it was so cool you ‘wanted’ to play the game.
….. educational and fun, my ass!
by korkie on August 13, 2008 at 10:58 am #
Oh we did have Oregon Trail but it was on the school’s one Apple ][ which lived on a rolling cart and could never be reliably tracked down (by me). But we had Northwest Fur Trader in every classroom, so you know, do you want any pelts.
by Brad on August 13, 2008 at 11:39 am #
My family had a supposedly puzzle-oriented board game called “Quest of the Philosopher’s Stone” (oh, look: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/1636). Officially, you win by reaching the center of the board and answering logic questions in the included “Book of Knowledge.” But there was also a gambling minigame.
The idea was to force players to choose between riches or wisdom, but since it was so easy to win money and so tedious to gain wisdom, we ALWAYS started the game with a mad dash to the “money market,” then stayed there accumulating wealth. Occasionally one of us would actually leave the money market and try to win the game according to its rules. Then it usually went something like this:
“Hey, I win! I have attained ultimate wisdom in the philosopher’s stone!”
“Pssh, whatever. My turn. C’mon, seven seven seven — gimme a seven — ARGH”
“No, the game’s over! I won.”
“Right, so maybe you should go away and let us keep playing.”
by Peter on August 13, 2008 at 2:46 pm #
My mom would buy me games that were educational. One way to satisfy that was to get any game that had been translated into French; Le Prisionnier was great. (But my French wasn’t up to the task; I really should try that in English.) I also really liked Robot Odyssey; I don’t particularly care about circuit design in real life, but the game was a lot of fun.
by David Carlton on August 13, 2008 at 11:32 pm #
Denis mentioned: «I seem to recall a sadistic game of seeing who could have the most elaborate eaths for his or her families among my peers.»
The game would record gravestones where people recently died, and passing a gravestone would prompt a “You passed the gravestone of so-and-so…” mention as you played. Weirdly enough LAN builds of the game had a central store leading to an almost MMO-type thing where you would pass the gravestones of your classmates across the room, sometimes only shortly after they died…
It was probably intended something as a score/competition marker, with a mix of learning the morbid nature of the actual Oregon Trial (where something like a third of the people that attempted the trail died on the trail, IIRC from the game’s text however many years ago that was)…
However, given the fact that players could name their own characters it always seemed like the most immature died the earliest on the trail just so you’d pass markers like “You passed the gravestone of YOUR MOMMA”, to use one of the least offensive ones that I can recall…
The Oregon Trail shall forever live in the bastion of children’s computer games both for all the things it did right and the few things it did wrong, like let elementary school kids type in their own names for family members…
by Max Battcher on August 14, 2008 at 1:18 am #
I love these stories of other ways kids adapt games to make them more fun. As I said in the post, I think that appropriating a system for your own ends is just as valuable as following the rules, or creating a world from whole cloth. Thanks for all the feedback!
brog and Brad: I’m glad that The Oregon Trail did gain some traction outside of the US. Irrespective of any historical content, it’s just a cool game. There’s a reason people are still nostalgic for it now! (See, e.g., Busted Tees’ You Have Died of Dysentery shirt.)
by Dan Bruno on August 14, 2008 at 12:41 pm #
I actually did learn one very important thing from Oregon Trail 2. Namely: Medicine. All the medicines cost, like $0.02 each. Even if you only had two extra dollars, why wouldn’t you buy ten doses of every available medicine? It’s not like they weighed anything.
That was the first instance I can remember of me going, “Wait a second, everybody else doesn’t do this, but I’m going to sit down and figure out for myself if it’s a good idea.”. Pretty damn valuable lesson, I’d say.
by William on August 14, 2008 at 6:30 pm #
Sometimes even the less educational and more fun games break down into weird minigames as well. I recall playing Halo with you and/or John and seeing how far off a cliff we could blast each other with plasma grenades. Then there was the Warthog game that you, and I think your dad, created. The rules escape me, but the general concept is probably easily surmised from the name.
by Matt on August 15, 2008 at 5:01 pm #