I found this linked on another board I post at. I thought it was too brilliant not to share.
On the Oregon Trail

If you've played the game, or if your kids played the game you will get it right away. If you don't know what I'm talking about, Oregon Trail was/is (?) a computer game about the Oregon Trail. In the newer versions, you can start from various points east and end at various points west, travel in different decades and interact with other characters. In the old classic version, you started in Independence and ended up in the Willamette Valley. Your character could start out at various positions in life (farmers had the least cash, bankers the most, can't remember what was in between) and the goal was to getyourself and your family to Oregon. The game featured something like 8 colors, really cheesey and distinctive music, and the graphics themselves were rather...geometric. You got to name the members of your party. You passed various landmarks and dealt with various problems. The story linked is fairly typical for the game - it was hard to win.

I still get the giggles and grins whenever S and I make the drive to Seattle and pass through the Blue Mountains. Almost there! After that it's the Dalles and the river-floating bit! Except, of course, we're in a car, there's a bridge, we're going to Seattle, we've been vaccinated for the measles and aren't worried about dysentery (though the Blue Mountains were almost impassable this year; it was quite harrowing both in the coming and the going). Seriously though, I learned a lot of Western landmarks from that game.

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When you can do nothing what can you do?

Oh, wow. All three of my kids lived through this game in school pretty intensely, which is understandable because we live at the end of the Oregon Trail, in the Willamette Valley, and plenty of people around here have ancestors who arrived that way. (By the time mine arrived, there was a train.)

It taught the kids a lot about history, about the difficulties of planning a trip like that and encountering the unforeseen. And it gave my two oldest kids a real taste for simulation games such as Civilization.

I really like games like this. I can't help but think it's helped give them a better grasp of history—not of the facts, but of the driving forces behind various wars and migrations, and how a place's resources affect its development and even its politics.

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“There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

Oh, the Oregon Trail! I loved that game -- and was SO frustrated by it, at the same time. Of course, I was playing some very early version, but here's what I recall:

I would get totally sucked into thinking about supplies in the General Store: Gosh, how about a little of this to put into our tea later. Golly, maybe a violin would keep people cheerful on the road. Jeepers, can't forget extra mittens and blankets!

And then it turned out it kind of didn't matter what you bought in the store.

You just traveled along, hunted until the rifle exploded and wounded you, and rested rested rested whenever someone got sick. It was very simple and out of your control. I got bored!

So sad and yet so true!

Man, the first time I made it to that point I lost my entire wagon and everyone in it and had to write my own tombstone. My mom was around so I couldn't use cuss words but wow. I was MAD!

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When you can do nothing what can you do?

I haven't played Oregon trail either, but wanted to share

http://p-userpic.livejournal.com/65681039/13728306

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“It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.”

- Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman, Good Omens

I have absolutely no doubt that every word of that is true, Frelga.

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“There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

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“It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.”

- Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman, Good Omens

Frelga beat me to it! I was going to post that

Graphics? The version I played had no graphics!

It was mostly text based, I guess. Maybe there were some really primitive graphics at some point, but I remember you would hunt by having to type in POW or BANG really fast. I liked POW the best because it's just three long and the keys are all in order on the top row.

I missed a lot, seemingly . . .

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Dig deeper.

It's not too late.

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“It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.”

- Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman, Good Omens