Back on the Oregon Trail. Sort of.
I’m sure you’ll remember sweet Betsy from Pike,
Who crossed the wide prairie with her lover, Ike.
With two yoke of cattle and one spotted hog,
A tall Shanghai rooster, and an old yellow dog.
For reasons that probably shouldn’t be explored at this juncture but which have to do with going to a lot of shows this spring and needing to run credit cards through PayPal, I have become the proud and perplexed owner of an iPhone. I’ve also become the owner of the $30 per month data package that goes with the iPhone. This gadget does everything. It tells you where to go. It tells you what the weather is going to be when you get there. It would check the stock market if I had any stocks. It gets my email when I want it, allows me to surf the Interwebs, and plays my iTunes complete with cover art.
You can download a million and one applications for this thing. I haven’t been doing that because I’ve bankrupted us merely by getting it. But there’s one application I just had to have: The new, 21st Century version of the venerable old Oregon Trail. I’ve been with this game since we acquired the old DOS 3.0 version for our kids. I didn’t like the very last version they published, but the one just before that–ah, the 1996 version called Oregon Trail II. Now that was a game. I loved it even though I was supposed to be an adult, and I played it up until two years ago when I got this Intel Mac.
This new iPhone version is different–very, very different. For one thing, you don’t get a lot of decisions. There’s only one year of travel–1848–and one jumping-off place. While you can pick your profession among banker, carpenter, and farmer, you don’t get to shop for your supplies. And there are far fewer people to talk with along the way. The video game components–berry picking, fishing, hunting, telegraphy, wagon fixing, and panning for gold–are fun, and floating down rivers is a hoot. I’m an excellent berry picker, hunter, and carpenter. I’m a so-so gold panning expert, and I’m abysmal at fishing and telegraphy.
What’s fascinating to me is that there’s been a sort of moral shift in the game between the Eighties, the Nineties, and now. Hunting was always fun, but it was a guilty pleasure. OTII accompanied every hunting trip with a little sermon about the scarcity of game or the demise of the buffalo. Another fascinating change is that everybody in this game, with the exception of the Indians, is white and American. No more African Americans, either free or enslaved. No Hispanics (even though their accents in the old game were pretty lame). No Europeans newly arrived on our shores. And as for the above-mentioned Indians, on our iPod we have two–Sitting Bull and a young kid named Light Hair. All the others are skulking around in their villages, and spooky music plays as you pass by. If you don’t trade with them, they’ll rob your wagon, and occasionally they ride in for an attack. I’ll only mention in passing that I think I heard the words, “Ugh! Paleface!” They do get a mention in one of the factoids that scroll by as parts of the game are loading. Did you know that 3/5 of the crops under cultivation in the world today were cultivated by Native Americans? Mormons are another group that gets mentioned only in passing. They get two factoids: One says that they moved West to escape persecution. The other asserts that they were in the habit of tying bells to their oxen in case they ran off. Clever Mormons! In all fairness, Salt Lake City is a destination in the game, and I haven’t been there yet.
They’ve brought back some of the elements from the DOS game (and presumably its mainframe predecessors) that I thought were fun. Useta was, when you went hunting, you had to type in the word BANG and hope you hit the animal. Now you tap your touch screen where the animal is and hope you hit it. The updates are also nostalgic: “From Point A, it is 100 miles to Point B.” They’ve gotten rid of the sad music when somebody dies. And in this game, children seem to be forever getting carried off by vultures–sometimes never to be seen again.
The game is a lot of fun. It’s more fun than it should be, and I’m going to have to avoid wasting too much time with it. But I could use a little more of that 1970′s social consciousness. Maybe that was part of the fun of the original game.
