We All Died of Dysentery in Computer Class

Computer class had one rule, and it wasn’t written anywhere: if you got to play The Oregon Trail, you were having a good day.

You’d sit down at a big, clunky computer, load the game from a floppy disk, and suddenly you were in charge of a wagon, a family, and a whole lot of bad decisions. You’d name everybody after your friends, buy too many bullets and not enough food, and then try to ford a river you absolutely should not have forded.

And then, inevitably, somebody died of dysentery. Usually everybody died of dysentery. The screen would tell you, very matter-of-factly, and the whole class would groan like it was a tragedy — because, in that moment, it was.

We learned nothing about computers and everything about the Oregon Trail.

Did you die of dysentery too, or did your wagon actually make it to Oregon?