I think Oregon Trail was so popular because of its innate ability to bring players into a world that has stakes, and out of the reality they live in. Being an adventure game, players want to do well. There is an instant connection they have to their player and in turn they will make decisions…
Surviving Elements of the Original Computer Interfaces
Many of the familiar commands and interface elements we encounter everyday in modern technology are not too far from what was introduced in the first graphical user interfaces. Even the terms like window and desktop have survived from the early interfaces and are used commonly in conversations today. Back in the 1980’s when Xerox Star…
How Oregon Trail Became a Favorite
Wow, this brings back some memories. I remember playing this for the first time in elementary school as personal desktops made its way into classrooms and this is probably one of the reasons why it became popular; being able to play a video game at school, where we spend most of our day at as…
Make Game to Stick – the Oregon Trail
After successfully playing the Oregon Trail for one round (Yep, I died 1/3 of the way in the first run playing a poor villager), I started to extract elements that make this game so addicting. One thing about this earliest version of the RPG game is that it has alluring storytelling with an authentic setting….
Visual and Musical
After playing Oregon Trail, this game delivers people to imagine what the 19th century was. The country background music of strings and flute makes gamers get immersed in the gameplay. Graphic elements are another key factor for the immersive experience. Icons are easy to link up with the labeled text. The overview of the status…
Ctrl+C, V to Behaviour
In the 1980s, the personal computer emerged with a preliminary desktop interface. The graphic metaphors for the computers, such as icons of a folder and disk, floppy disk to the hard drive, exist these days. There is a menu bar at the top in a demo of the Macintosh desktop interface, which still is found…
What Interface was, is, and will be?
As we can see, the graphic metaphors being used in those systems are still being used today. These include icons of document, folder, disk, and drawer. However, as the video introduces, there is no real “hierarchy” in which all the documents get organized in those earlier versions. Everything lays out flat on the desktop. I…