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Pixel Cowboys and Silicon Gold Mines: Videogames of the American West
Abstract
This article explores representations of the American West in computer and videogames from the late 1970s through 2006. The article reveals how several titles, including the early Boot Hill (1977), invoked classic nineteenth-century western motifs, employing the six-shooter, wagon train, and iron horse to sell late twentieth-century entertainment technology to a global audience. Such games allowed players, typically adolescent males, to recreate a version of history and to participate actively in the more violent aspects of the "Wild West." The arcade Western emerged as a subgenre within computer entertainment, offering a distinctive, interactive amalgam of popular frontier-based fictions, including the nineteenth-century dime novel, Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West show, and the modern Hollywood western. Computer technology thus served established myths surrounding the "Wild West," even as New Western History was challenging their authenticity.
... Scholarly work in the field varies from issues of historical textual representation to videogames' function as a sort of historical representation in and of itself; archeogaming [20]- [22]; using videogames to teach students about history [23], and research into player reception of historical accuracy and heritage in videogames [24] [25]. Individual studies are often carried out on popular franchises such as Assassin's Creed [26]- [28] and Sid Meier's Civilisation [20], or the excessive amount of videogames concerned with representing the American West [29], World Wars [20], [30]- [32] or other lesserrepresented conflicts(Sterczewski 2016). In contrast, academics are interested in the history of particular games, the industry, and technological or hardware improvements. ...
Virtual environments have numerous potentials for assisting the general public in experiencing cultural heritage, complementing current tools and practices centered on tangible goods such as museums, exhibitions, books, and visual content. Video games designed for educational purposes, which are becoming increasingly popular, have emerged as a new method of learning cultural content engagingly. The learning experience's specific goal distinguishes the educational use of video games. There is little doubt that we can learn from video games, but the more difficult questions about who, what, where, why, and how quickly we learn are not easily answered. This study examines the role of commercial video games in history learning and aims to enhance their effectiveness by analyzing their potential and limitations, using strategic planning and network analysis models. Through a case study on the Lotf Ali Khan game, it identifies strategies for improving history education through commercial video games. In this case study, it can be utilized to establish a conceptual framework for current trends in deployments of the past in historically focused video games, as well as a SWOT-ANP analysis to determine the major ways in which historical video games can aid in learning the subject matter under assessment. The data for this case study includes secondary sources and documents, fieldwork, observations, and semi-structured interviews with fifteen participants, as with other case studies (experts and children). Following the results, successful implementation occurs when a video game fully utilizes the following opportunities: antiquarian, monumental, and critical elements; wish story; composite imagination; borrowed authenticity; historical provenance; and legitimacy
... CIVILIZATION, unsurprisingly, is at the top of the pile with scholars examining everything from its Western bias to its ability to create utopias (Ghys, 2012;Henthorne, 2003;Owens, 2011;Poblocki, 2002). SID MEIER'S COLONIZATION, games depicting the American West and those depicting the Second World War have also been considered (Donaldson, 1996;Gish, 2010;Wills, 2008). Several volumes of essays explore a wide variety of intersections between history, the past, and video games including Playing the Past (Whalen & Taylor, 2008), Playing with the Past (Kapell & Elliott, 2013), Greek and Roman Games in the Computer Age (Thorsen, 2013), and Digital Gaming Re-imagines the Middle Ages (Kline, 2014). ...
Background: Writing about the theory and best practices of using history-themed video games in the classroom stretches back at least to the 1980s. However, the literature on the subject is scattered, making it difficult for history educators considering the use of historical games.
Purpose: This article provides an introduction for history educators to the use of computer-based historical games in history education. In this article, I provide differing definitions for types of historical games and discuss the importance of such distinctions for the history educator. I provide the strengths and biases inherent in the medium of computer-based historical games.
Results: This article surveys best practices from the literature concerning the use of historical games in history class. The article concludes with a brief survey of potentially useful historical games.
... CIVILIZATION, unsurprisingly, is at the top of the pile with scholars examining everything from its Western bias to its ability to create utopias (Ghys, 2012;Henthorne, 2003;Owens, 2011;Poblocki, 2002). SID MEIER'S COLONIZATION, games depicting the American West and those depicting the Second World War have also been considered (Donaldson, 1996;Gish, 2010;Wills, 2008). Several volumes of essays explore a wide variety of intersections between history, the past, and video games including Playing the Past (Whalen & Taylor, 2008), Playing with the Past (Kapell & Elliott, 2013), Greek and Roman Games in the Computer Age (Thorsen, 2013), and Digital Gaming Re-imagines the Middle Ages (Kline, 2014). ...
Despite the growing number of books designed to radically reconsider the educational value of video games as powerful learning tools, there are very few practical guidelines conveniently available for prospective history and social studies teachers who actually want to use these teaching and learning tools in their classes. As the games and learning field continues to grow in importance, Gaming the Past provides social studies teachers and teacher educators help in implementing this unique and engaging new pedagogy. This book focuses on specific examples to help social studies educators effectively use computer simulation games to teach critical thinking and historical analysis. Chapters cover the core parts of conceiving, planning, designing, and implementing simulation based lessons. Additional topics covered include:
Combining a historical perspective and game studies and using information from the BoardGameGeek online database, we analyze how board wargames simulate the Indian wars and represent Native North Americans. Based on 125 games published between 1960 and 2023, first, we identified the main historical moments reproduced, followed by an iconographic and formal analysis of these games. The conclusions reveal that, like other cultural products (novels, films, or video games), the focus is on the mythical founding moments of the history of the United States, mainly the late 19th-century war on the prairies and conflicts between European powers to gain control of the continent. Despite everything, it is observed that board wargames do not avoid traumatic themes such as raids on settlements and that in recent years there have been dynamics that offer new themes and perspectives dealing with the subject.
This article explores the video game Western and its relationship with ideas of temporality surrounding the American West. The fledgling video game industry first put ‘Cowboys and Indians’ on arcade screens in the 1970s, creating a playable digital West for gamers. Content and aesthetics proved decidedly simple, with game worlds reliant on prior filmic presentations. By the 2000s, thanks largely to technological advances, video game Westerns began to offer quantifiable depth and complexity, with Rockstar Games’s Red Dead Redemption series (2004–18) being a leading example. Video game Westerns represent the next technological as well as cultural representation of the ‘Wild West’ in all its complexities. In this article, I explore how both old and new video game Westerns have toyed with notions of ‘time’ and how we experience ‘the frontier’ a century on from the lived historic period. I argue that games not only invite players to (re)visit a distinctive ‘frontier time’, but also, by their coding and mechanics, actively encourage players to subvert the temporal flow of Western history on-screen and even disrupt the West’s larger cultural meaning.
Para o imaginário estadunidense, a "Fronteira" (Frontier) foi o espaço quase mítico em disputa no Oeste, no qual o Progresso foi entendido como uma luz que chegava à escuridão da wilderness, renovando-a através do combate ao mundo selvagem e seus habitantes. O herói do Oeste Americano foi, de diferentes formas, representado como alguém que não só matava indígenas, símbolos e adversários pertencentes ao mundo selvagem, mas também os "fora-da-lei" que desafiavam as leis da civilização. A literatura dos séculos XVII ao XIX indicou muitas vezes a violência como uma batalha entre o sagrado e o profano, e a ocupação do Oeste como um modo de levar a palavra divina, e regenerar o espírito e a pureza racial. No decorrer do século XX e XXI, o gênero dos Westerns, também em filmes, e em games, deu continuidade a esse processo e tematizou o papel ideológico e simbólico da violência como prática regenerativa da ordem social. Diferentes narrativas alegorizaram o papel dos Estados Unidos nas disputas internas e globais e valorizaram o homem armado como herói que resolveria tais conflitos. Os desdobramentos do Mito da Fronteira podem ser um prisma para entender também o conflito com o Outro no Oriente Médio, assim como os paradigmas de uma utopia espacial.
The Indian in American Southern Literature - by Melanie Benson Taylor July 2020
When Rivers Were Trails is a 2D adventure game wherein The Oregon Trail meets Where the Water Tastes Like Wine through an Indigenous lens. The game depicts a myriad of cultures during the player’s journey from Minnesota to California amidst the impact of land allotment in the 1890s. Initiated by the Indian Land Tenure Foundation, the game was developed in collaboration with the Games for Entertainment and Learning Lab at Michigan State University thanks to support from the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians and the many Indigenous creatives who contributed design, art, music, and writing. Uniquely, When Rivers Were Trails is a sovereign game, meaning that it was directed and informed by Indigenous creatives who maintained the role of final decisions during development. Merging design research and close reading methods, this study sets out to describe the game’s design, development process in regards to the game writing, and the resulting themes which emerged as a result of engaging Indigenous writers in self-determined representations.
Following the George Armstrong Custer myth through print, literary, visual, and digital genres, this chapter addresses the modal and social changes in American perception of Custer since his defeat along the banks of the Little Bighorn River. A discussion of popular culture regarding Native Americans in the United States requires a discussion of hegemony, or the relations between culture and power. While a more balanced approach to Custer and the Little Bighorn campaign is far from complete, the lionization of Custer is decidedly out of scholarly vogue. The Print and Visual Custer so enraptured the American public that the myths they perpetuated permeated the film industry from its inception. Custer's cinematic persona originated in dime novels and Buffalo Bill's Wild West shows. As the American public better understands Native cultures and their unique legal status as sovereigns in the United States, Custer's image will continue to morph.
The CW network series Supernatural (2005–) draws its text from the horror and fantasy genres as well as religious mythology. Concurrently, it transmits a core “American” mythos. As its protagonists keep watch along a supernatural frontier and eradicate threats to the American way of life, this program both reinforces and alters aspects of the frontier myth and the myth of American exceptionalism by depicting its main characters as representations of America writ large whose mission has grown from an appointment by God to being equals to God. In this manner, Supernatural forwards a new American exceptionalism through the notion that America is exceptional because it is not just divinely appointed by God, but is divine itself.
Despite an extensive and expanding body of scholarly studies, myths and myth-making remain a central element of the American West. After placing myth-making about the American West in a wider context, this article explores recent literature about the centrality of myths in envisioning
the region. For example, scholars have debunked three of the West's central myths, rugged individualism, American exceptionalism and frontier violence, but all remain alive and well in popular culture and political rhetoric. Among the specific topics analysed are mythologized people (George
Armstrong Custer, Buffalo Bill Cody), places (Monument Valley) and cultural production (political, commercial, visual and print). The article also probes the motives and varieties of myth-makers, past and present, and the ways in which women and Native American writers today challenge mythical
depictures in traditional western popular culture.
Mirror for pre-war America - "Stagecoach" and the Western, 1939-1941 puritan paradigms - "My Darling Clementine" and "Duel in the Sun" "The Lonely Crowd", Catholicism and consensus on the prairie - "Red River", "Fort Apache" and "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon" dysfunctional family structures in classic westerns, 1950-1961 - "The Gunfighter", "Shane", "The Searchers" and "The Last Sunset" politics and codes of masculinity in late 1950s star westerns - "The Big Country" and "Warlock" "No More West to Win" - "How the West Was Won" and the elegiac westerns of 1962 a genre in flux, a nation in turmoil - the Vietnamization of the western in mid-1960s America receding frontiers, narrowing options - "The Wild Bunch" and the western in Richard Nixon's America legends revisited, legends revised in "Bicentennial Westerns" - "Buffalo Bill and the Indians", "The Outlaw Josey Wales" and "The Shootist".
In this essay, a historical geographer and cartographic historian interprets Walt Disney's Frontierland as both a miniaturized environment and a stylized map. He speculates that Frontierland perpetuates deeply rooted, and widely shared, mainstream American attitudes toward United States expansionism from the late nineteenth century through the Cold War.
This essay explores the ways in which the electronic frontier builds upon the mythology of frontier expansion generally and the western American frontier in particular, including economic opportunity, danger/uncertainty, individualism, outlaw behavior, vigilantism, and nostalgia.
Field emitter array-based display technology offers CRT-like characteristics in a thin flat-panel display with many potential applications for vehicle-mounted, crew workstation, and helmet-mounted displays, as well as many other military and commercial applications. In addition to thinness, high brightness, wide viewing angle, wide temperature range, and low weight, field emitter array displays also offer potential advantages such as row-at-a-time matrix addressability and the ability to be segmented.
Ranging from the novels of James Fenimore Cooper to Louis L'Amour, and from classic films like Stagecoach to spaghetti Westerns like A Fistful of Dollars, Mitchell shows how Westerns helped assuage a series of crises in American culture. This landmark study shows that the Western owes its perennial appeal not to unchanging conventions but to the deftness with which it responds to the obsessions and fears of its audience. And no obsession, Lee Mitchell argues, has figured more prominently in the Western than what it means to be a man. "Elegantly written. . . . provocative . . . characterized by [Mitchell's] own tendency to shoot from the hip."âJ. Hoberman, London Review of Books "[Mitchell's] book would be worth reading just for the way he relates Benjamin Spock's Baby and Child to the postwar Western."âThe Observer "Integrating a careful handling of historical context with a keen eye for textual nuances, Mitchell reconstructs the Western's aesthetic tradition of the 19th century."âAaron M. Wehner, San Francisco Review
The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cam-bridge, Mass., 1950), 90. Along with Virgin Land, valuable work on the dime novel in-cludes Albert Johannsen, The House of Beadle and Adams and its Dime and Nickel Novels: The Story of a Vanished Literature
- Henry Smith
- Land
Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cam-bridge, Mass., 1950), 90. Along with Virgin Land, valuable work on the dime novel in-cludes Albert Johannsen, The House of Beadle and Adams and its Dime and Nickel Novels: The Story of a Vanished Literature (2 vols., Norman, Okla., 1950);
Malaeska's Revenge; or, The Dime Novel Tradition in Popular Fic-tion
- Christine Bold
Christine Bold, " Malaeska's Revenge; or, The Dime Novel Tradition in Popular Fic-tion, " in Aquila, ed., Wanted Dead or Alive, 21–42;
The Reel Cowboy: Essays on the Myth in Movie and Literature
- B Rainey
B. Rainey, The Reel Cowboy: Essays on the Myth in Movie and Literature (Jefferson, N.C., 1995);