Rob MacDougall recently posted a pre-history of roleplaying games that thoroughly describes its origins in far greater detail than my previous post on early war gaming and Wild West roleplaying. Studying Wild West roleplaying simulations in Second Life I’ve continuously asked myself where this pattern of behavior came from, and why people represent themselves in [...]
We must take steps to preserve virtual worlds, or their histories may be lost forever. With the increasing popularity of virtual worlds such as Second Life, an incredible amount of user-generated content has been created within these worlds - avatars, houses, clothes, games, and animations among other things. The establishment of subcultural groups [...]
Many games were inspired by the success of the Oregon Trail computer game, including a series of simulations in the 80’s written in BASIC that have uncanny similarities (more on that in an upcoming entry). Here are two examples of contemporary web-based games that were undoubtedly inspired by OT.
Westward Trail
The Oregon Trail Online
Tombstone is a Wild West RP sim in Second Life that popped up shortly after Sigil became a ghost town. Here is a short video I put together (this was my first cinematographic attempt in SL). Take the music with a grain of salt - I thought it would be funny. Unfortunately [...]
Two honors American History II students uploaded a short documentary focusing on The Oregon Trail. There’s a blurring of the history the Oregon Trail, and the Oregon Trail II game with much of the visual content borrowed directly from the game. At times it’s very formal, but at other moments (when one of [...]
Sigil has been bought by virtual real estate mogul Anshe Chung, whose company Dreamland is selling the sim for 500,000 linden. You can also rent it for 112,000 linden/month. For those who don’t use Second Life, the cost to buy the land translates to roughly $1,880 US currency. Anshe was the first Second [...]
Many of the ideas I’ll share regarding The Oregon Trail computer game have developed over the past 18 months and after a series of conversations with Don Rawitsch, the game’s creator and Wayne Studer, the project manager overseeing the development of Oregon Trail II. I will continue to build upon these ideas within my [...]
I’d like to welcome everyone who recently began aggregating my feed, and encourage those who read my site to subscribe to Finding America to have my entries delivered directly to you. Another recent change is that users can now leave comments without logging in. These were suggestions made in an blog entry by [...]
In 1913 H.G. Wells published Little Wars, a set of rules for playing with toy soldiers. His book would be the first in a new genre of gaming, commonly referred to as war gaming. In the 70’s, war gaming was adapted by TSR for the popular release of the role-playing game Dungeons & [...]
The past several weeks Paleo-Future has shared great posts about robots, which I’ve looked at in The “savage” robot in 1937 and Decoding Al Capp’s Robot, Continued. The brief timeline of pre-Asimov robot history I created began with Capek’s Rossum’s Universal Robots - which is featured in the most recent Paleo-Future post, a 1922 [...]
I'm a digital humanist and graduate of American Studies, currently working as a web developer and Omeka community liaison for the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. Finding America is my professional blog, and an amalgamation of the many hats I wear ranging from theorist to practitioner. I explore the confluence of American Culture and information technology in the archives, the classroom, and our digital lives.