Bill Bigelow, "On the Road to Cultural Bias: A Critique of The Oregon Trail."

  Experiencing a Computer Game as a Primary Source     Read this article:   Bill Bigelow, "On the Road to Cultural Bias: A Critique of The Oregon Trail." Negotiating Critical Literacies in Classrooms. Mahwah: Erlbaum, 2001, pp. 1-13. On UM Learn.   After you have read the article, play The Oregon Trail (1990) on the MS DOS games collection of the Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/msdos_Oregon_Trail_The_1990). As you play the game, think about Bigelow’s analysis of the representations of women, African Americans and Indigenous peoples. Think about the series of questions he poses in the final section of the paper (“Data Deception and What to Do About It”, pp. 10-12). As well, think about how historical representations are different in books, movies and games.   Write your own response to the game. You may base your response on one or more of Bigelow’s questions, or you may want to go in your own direction – for example, considering how the nature of the gameplay in The Oregon Trail shapes its historical narrative and characterizations; or considering how historical representations in games differ from those in movies or history textbooks. However you decide to structure your response, you must make reference to Bigelow’s article.   Always remember while playing this game and other games for this course that you are doing so as a form of historical investigation. You are experiencing the games as a primary source. Whether you find the games enjoyable or tedious is not as important as how you think about them as historical sources. \