Oregon Trail for iOS Is Back
A new version of The Oregon Trail—out now for iOS devices that subscribe to Apple Arcade—begins to wrestle with this tension. Developed by an Australian team at Gameloft, a prominent mobile game developer, the new version mostly plays like the old Oregon Trail you know. You get a wagon, buy supplies, and gather a team to join you on the journey. Along the trail, you ford rivers, break legs, and shoot way too many pounds of buffalo to possibly carry back.
What’s different is that Native American history scholars gave input. That input led to more human, and historically accurate, representations of Indigenous people, culminating in the first playable Native American characters in any Oregon Trail game.
Previously:
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Yet another case of activists and grifters politicizing an established and beloved franchise. Nothing is sacred to these people.
"For many Indigenous people, however, The Oregon Trail told a darker narrative. It was a story of reckless expansion and colonialism, which would displace many Native American populations and fuel a great inequity that lives on today."
Citation needed. Except nowadays, any kind of racial grievance can be asserted as if it were self-evident. Well, all those "history scholars" need jobs, too.
Originally it was an edutainment title, right? Seems fair to spend some time on polishing up the actual historical aspects given the origins of the game franchise.
I was just now (Fri 2, 2021, 7:15 zulu time) following the link to the app. Mac App Store tells me: "The item you’ve requested is not currently available in the U.S. store.". I can search for it in the MAS, but not view it. Same for the "The Pathless", which also turned up as a search result. Anyone else seeing this?
Follow-up:
I can view the app when I use Big Sur, but not when I use High Sierra. If it's because the game just isn't available for HS, shouldn't the MAS say that, instead of saying it's not available at all? Hmpf!
Also, it seems that Apple finally fixed the CSS issue when viewing Updates in the MAS app on High Sierra.
"Yet another case of activists and grifters politicizing an established and beloved franchise."
I mean, this isn't even a real argument. This is a game about expansionism. That's literally what you do in the game; that's the actual goal of the actual game.
If you think that reflecting reality is "politicizing" things, then *you* are the one politicizing this topic. *You* are the activist here, not the people who make a game that reflects reality.
The best course of action for you would be to follow your own advice, stop being an activist, and stop politicizing things.
