What Led The Oregon Trail to Be a Successful Educational Game
Being an Education Technology major, I was curious about the best educational games of all time. As I started my search on Google, I saw a consistent trend — most of the games that appear in the different articles and blogs are from the 80’s. I would understand if a game or two from the old days kept its place over the years as new educational games arose. After all, that is the case when you look for the best games of all times and drop the word ‘educational’ from the equation. You would see some games from the 90’s such as Final Fantasy VII, some from 2000–09 like Super Mario Galaxy, and some are recent games like Grand Theft Auto V.
To appease my curiosity, I decided to look into what factors led a game like The Oregon Trail to be extremely successful at the time. The general goal of the game was for students to learn about the history and story behind the Oregon Trail journey.
There are several factors that might come into play to create that wide spread success.
Novelty
In the 80’s, having a computer game in itself was exciting, let alone having it in school as a learning method. It probably elicited the same excitement as having an advanced VR headset in today’s classroom. No matter the time period, people are attracted to new technology. Bringing an element of fun into the classroom and breaking the routine of traditional lessons helped make it a wide-spread game. The game gave the students a lot of control and put them at the center of the learning as they make a lot of the choices and feel responsible for the outcome.
Integration
In order to reflect a more realistic representation of the actual Oregon Trail experience, the game includes some activities that are not necessarily part of the learning goal. For example, you have the hunting option. You hunt to provide food that will help you survive. To do that, you use bullets that you gathered or bought on your way. In the hunting process, you control a man who aims a rifle and shoots at different animals. The whole process of buying supplies and controlling the man to hunt doesn’t necessarily add much to the learning. We could argue that it taught students that life was hard on the trail, but that’s a bit of a stretch. However, it gives the players/students a sense of coherence and completeness of the game that it is not just filled with one learning task after the other.
Iteration
The Oregon Trail went through many iterations in its development. The First release in 1970 was by the author Don Rawitsch, who was teaching an 8th grade history class. In 1974, the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC) hired Rawitsch to develop the game further by adding choices and events based on the probability from the actual history. As the game was successful and popular, MECC kept releasing new versions. The game witnessed development in many aspects, including the graphics and narrative. It is similar to developing a game as minimal viable product (MVP) where the game has the bare minimum functionality to be playable and validate the concept, before developing a full-fledged game. That is a luxury that I don’t think educational games have at this time. It is true that games go through rigorous playtesting before the release, but that is not the same as releasing it to a sample of you audience (schools in Minnesota in this case) with no pressure of time or money to develop it further.
Risk
Not being able to take the same iterative approach to developing an educational game makes it very risky to attempt. Games in their nature are costly and expensive to make. Every time you develop a game, you are risking the capital you invest and the time and effort you and your team are spending on the game. It is true that if the game is a success, it will be worthwhile to take that risk, but with educational games the equation is more difficult. In educational games, you have to worry about the educational part too, which complicates things even more. Your task is not only to develop a game that is fun and engaging, but a game that makes students learn a specific subject or topic too. Students know when you are teaching them something and can smell the “instruction and school feel” from a mile away. To have a successful game, you have to integrate the learning in the gameplay itself. The design has to account for the fun and the learning at the same time. The Oregon Trail does a good job with that — the game flows with a narrative, and engages players by giving them a choice even in simple things like their names and people in their family. Most importantly, the player receives feedback based on his/her choices, and later gets to know the consequences of the actions he/she made. Incorporating all those engaging elements without forgetting about the learning objectives is a challenge.
Conclusion
There are many factors that made it easier for educational games such as The Oregon Trail to be vastly successful. Novelty of the idea of using games in education is a big factor that made the market more forgiving and allowed games to go through several iterations. That reduced the risk of investing a lot of time and money on the game before validating the players’ reaction to it. However, that raises an important question regarding the learning that is happening when students are playing such games. Learning Science (LS) have advanced significantly in recent years. Thus, educational games are held to higher standards now. I wonder if a game like The Oregon Trail will still hold its ground under the lens of LS.
