User:Pokelego999/sandbox/Dysentery (Oregon Trail)

Dysentery is a disease featured in the 1985 video game The Oregon Trail. It is a fictionalized version of the real-life dysentery, a disease that causes inflammation in the large intestine, which can eventually lead to death.

Appearances

Dysentery does not appear in the original 1971 Oregon Trail game, though unnamed illness can infect travelers in that game. In the original board game that served as inspiration for the 1971 game, dysentery was explicitly named as a danger that players would face on the trail. Dysentery first appears in a named role in the video game in the 1985 release of The Oregon Trail. The game places players in the role of travelers on the real life Oregon Trail, with one of the many dangers present to travelers being dysentery. Players will be notified by text on-screen if dysentery has infected a traveler, indicating which of their travelers has contracted dysentery, with a follow-up message being given if the traveler dies of the disease. Following this, players will be allowed to bury the dead traveler, with a funeral that the player has the choice of performing or not.

Reception

Dysentery was analyzed by Jamie Banks as part of the book 100 Greatest Video Game Characters, analyzing how the disease highlights the educational aspects of The Oregon Trail. He noted how death by dysentery was impactful on players because the in-game travelers were often named after people players knew. Banks also noted the more humorous reactions to death by dysentery as a result of unserious character names or phrase. He further stated that dysentery's perception in-game in a backdrop of real world disease outbreaks made it so many saw dysentery as a "nostalgic" figure, positing that "The Oregon Trail offers players a space where they can stare mortality in the face and respond with the epithet “peperony and chease.” Priscilla Wald, writing in the book Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative, described dysentery as central to the game's "outbreak narrative." Wald noted that while the more simplistic usage of dysentery in-game was an effective tool at educating children of dysentery's significance, she noted that it downplayed the true severity of the disease overall. She noted that portrayals of diseases like dysentery in video games often influenced the real world, primarily in how people respond to such outbreaks and diseases.

Dysentery was noted as being a highly memorable part of the original game, to the extent where it became an internet meme and phrases related to the player's contraction of dysentery became a highly iconic video game quote. Brittany Vincent of Newsweek noted that, like other iconic video game quotes, references to dysentery "aren't particularly funny" but are so highly recognizable that "those who have been gaming for years know exactly [what] they mean." Due to the popularity of the joke, Woe Industries produced an alteration of the game titled You Have Not Died of Dysentery, which attempts to depict a more realistic form of dysentery, which necessitates having the player's travelers perform actions such as taking bathroom breaks in order to survive dysentery. Though the game primarily relies on humor associated with using the bathroom, it also interjects gameplay with articles from the 1800s for players to read.

Potential sources to look at later:

• Miner, Joshua D (2020). "Monitoring Simulated Worlds in Indigenous Strategy Games". The Computer Games Journal. Academia.edu.
• Slater, Katharine (Winter 2017). "Who Gets to Die of Dysentery?: Ideology, Geography, and The Oregon Trail". Children's Literature Association Quarterly. 42 (4). Johns Hopkins University Press: 374–395.