This is a topic I’ve stumbled across a few times and would like to see more people think about. I was reading a book on the history of text games1¹ 50 Years of Text Games: From Oregon Trail to AI Dungeon; Reed; Changeful Tales; 2023., one chapter of which covered the early computer game The Oregon Trail.

This is a game where the player takes the role of a family of settlers traversing North America westward, while carefully managing their supplies to avoid running out during critical events. The game is a great success, but it paints a one-sided picture of what life along the Oregon trail was like. A lot of people who were not travelling settlers lived there, and the game tells us nothing of their lives. It’s as if they didn’t exist. The author phrases this particularly well:

The scope of the stories The Oregon Trail could include was naturally limited by the capabilities of early computers. But those limitations had more than mere technical implications: games have the power to bring ideas to life in a more experiential and immediate way than any prior medium.

In later decades, game scholars would advance theories of procedural rhetoric: the notion that an algorithm can encode an opinion, and make playable a theory of how the world works. We’re still coming to terms with the way games can concretize dangerous misconceptions – or omissions – when they claim their small simulations encode truths about the complexities of the world outside their code.

They reference another book2² Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Video Games; Bogost; The mit Press; 2010. which goes on to more clearly define

Procedural rhetoric is the practise of using processes persuasively. […] It is a general name for the practice of authoring arguments through processes; its arguments are made through the authorship of rules of behaviour and the construction of dynamic models. Procedural rhetorics afford a new and promising way to make claims about how things work.

Whether we look at The Oregon Trail as doing a bad job of fairly representing history, or intentionally forwarding an opinion on history, we’re also looking at a statement about limited gameplay. Wouldn’t it be great if The Oregon Trail had captured more of what happened in the world around that time?

What if one could play The Oregon Trail as a Shawnee, adopting the customs of settlers? Or a Winnebago, trying to make do with fewer buffalo? Or a Pawnee, working out a mutual protective deal with settlers to get out of wars with the Sioux? Or indeed a nomadic Sioux, responding with violence to the intrusion of settlers? Wouldn’t it be much more interesting to view the conflict from such diverse perspectives?

Or at least if the game would let us know their perspectives exist?

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Games have traditionally been made for children and children are uncomfortable with conflicting perspectives. But I think we are starting to see a generation of gaming children grow up and become adults, and surely they would be interested in games for adults?

We need to set higher standards for representing the complexity of reality in games. Realism doesn’t mean high-fidelity graphics, it means high-fidelity systems, high-fidelity models of the world. It means sublety, it means ambiguity. More Spec Ops: The Line, more The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind. Less Call of Duty and less Skyrim.