Working Title: Oregon Trail, Carmen Sandiego and the Shared Realities We’ve Lost - and How We Can Find Our Way Back
The other day, I introduced my son to The Oregon Trail - the 1980s version.
Because we don’t own a television, our interactions with screens look different: family “movie nights” or occasional tv show viewing involve intentionality. We set a projector up together, curate what we’re about to experience, and create a shared frame around it. The process is as important as the content - mindfulness to offset the temptation of blind consumption. Awareness of self, awareness of time.
Oregon Trail is flawed. It carries remnants of a morally repugnant time - Native peoples reduced to “Indians,” history written through a single lens. And yet, within the game there is value: planning carefully, weighing trade-offs, ensuring your party of five makes it through the trail intact.
Normally, we allow a block of 35 minutes for iPad. But this time, because seeing the journey through mattered, we gave him an hour. He understood why continuity, completion, and care for his “community” on the trail warranted more.
Decades ago, Oregon Trail was one of the only games children were allowed to play in school. They sat shoulder to shoulder, peeking at one another’s screens, united in the small tragedies of dysentery, snake bites, and broken wagon axles. They shared a cultural reality, not just a digital one.
The same was true with “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?”- not the app or later iterations, but the live-action game show version. There was a time when children across New York City (if not the country) were sent home with an unusual assignment: “Go home and watch this new show. Tell your parents it’s OK - it’s educational. We’ll discuss it tomorrow.” A classroom, a school, a city - a country? - all primed to tune in, together.
Fragmented Attention, Fragmented Realities
What strikes me is not nostalgia for retro games or TV shows. It is the recognition that those shared cultural spaces - intentionally crafted, collective, reality-building experiences - have fractured. Instead of expanding, the shared imaginative stage for children has contracted.
Where we once built common reference points - “Did your wagon make it to Oregon?” “Did you watch Carmen Sandiego?” - we now confront infinite individualized feeds, algorithmically sorted fragments, designed to capture attention but not to anchor meaning.
Carl Sagan once wrote that “we are a way for the cosmos to know itself.” But how can we know ourselves - as children, as communities - if every young mind is living in a separate feed, their attention scattered, their sense of reality unshared?
The Call
The Oregon Trail reminds us: continuity matters. Carmen Sandiego reminds us: cultural permission matters. Together, they reminds us that children deserve a stage big enough for imagination and community to meet. We must design for that again.
cc: Wesley Clark
Sincerely,
Amber Eltaieb