Not kidding; wish I was: oh god i was just reading an article on the slavery game from the folks who made oregon trail…

I'm usually resistant to nostalgia takes, but I actually do think that the 90s and early 2000s were a bit of a golden age for educational software. It feels like a lot of the educational apps for kids today don't hit that same level of quality and thoughtfulness.

oh god i was just reading an article on the slavery game from the folks who made oregon trail…

this isn’t the article i was reading (that one had interesting details about what Minnesota educational corp was all about), but here’s another interesting one

The 'Oregon Trail' Studio Made a Game About Slavery. Then Parents Saw Itwww.vice.com 'Freedom!' tried to show the horrors of antebellum slavery and the courage of escaping slaves. But neither schools nor audiences were ready for it.

Decoder Ring had an amazing episode all about this slate.com/podcasts/dec...

In 1992, a Video Game Tried to Teach Black History. It Didn’t Go Well.slate.com The fate of a computer game about the Underground Railroad is a reminder that teaching Black history has always been fraught.

Thanks!

The possibilities! This game! obscuritory.com/strategy/fre...

Freedom: Rebels in the Darkness | The Obscuritoryobscuritory.com Muriel Tramis's slave rebellion strategy game confronts history with a cathartic rage never encountered in games – and it came out in the 80s.

Alyssa Sepinwall's got a chapter about this and one of Tramis' other games in her book -- enormously ambitious.

📌

If you want to play it, archive.org has it in webMAME. But yeah, be prepared, and keep in mind why it went over like a lead balloon and MECC pulled it.

MECC-A315 Freedom! v1.0 (4am crack) : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archivearchive.org Freedom! is a 1992 educational game by Rich Bergerson, Beth Daniels, Charolyn Kapplinger, John Ojanen, and John Wlazlo, and distributed by MECC.

Huh. I read a bunch of pieces on Colonisation (the game), on how it entirely whitewashed slavery out of the picture (bad), but that making a game where you were incentivised to do plantation slavery would be... unthinkably worse? This seems like an interesting and thoughtful approach.

Good podcast episode on that: slate.com/podcasts/dec...

In 1992, a Video Game Tried to Teach Black History. It Didn’t Go Well.slate.com The fate of a computer game about the Underground Railroad is a reminder that teaching Black history has always been fraught.

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