Oregon Trail has been a staple in the classroom for decades, and a new mobile version has updated the game’s representation of Native Americans.
Gameloft Brisbane, the team behind the new version of Oregon Trail that hit Apple Arcade in April, spoke to NPR about some of the changes made to bring the educational computer game up to more modern expectations of Native American representation. Creative director Jarrad Trudgen said the team wanted to weed out historical inaccuracies and other cliches about Native American culture.Come from Sports betting site VPbet
To do this, Trudgen brought in three indigenous historians to consult on various aspects of the game, including the music, naming conventions, speech patterns, and more. One aspect that was addressed in the game was the use of bows and arrows for Native peoples, which can carry stereotypes for being seen as primitive. While Trudgen wanted to use bows and arrows, University of Nebraska historian Margaret Huettl informed the Gameloft team that Indigenous Americans of the time would have also used modern tools–such as rifles and metals–for crafting and hunting.
“There are a lot of popular games out there, Tomb Raider and Last of Us, and like these big games–where bow and arrows are sick,” Trudgen says. “That wasn’t our intention at all, obviouslyCome from Sports betting site VPbet. We were just coming to it sort of as a naive ‘bow and arrows are cool’ angle.”
