PJH Studios

Tag: video games

  • The story of Oregon Trail, the game

    If you went to school in the 80s and 90s, you most likely played the game Oregon Trail. It influenced video gaming in numerous ways, such as naming your companion characters.

    Fifty years after it was created, The Oregon Trail’s legacy remains powerful and, in many ways, surprising. Hundreds of millions of players have attempted the journey – though most never make it to Oregon. The phrase “You have died of dysentery”, a common end for voyagers, has spawned t-shirts and countless memes in its wake. The quote is even referenced in a bestselling 2022 novel, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, about an age bracket of Americans she calls “The Oregon Trail Generation“. The game has also seen dozens of sequels, spinoffs and parodies, and now an upcoming live-action movie.

  • Video games bleeding into real life

    The term Game Transfer Phenomenon, or GTP, was first coined by Angelica Ortiz de Gortari, a psychologist at the University of Bergen in Norway. She first proposed the concept a decade ago while working on her doctoral thesis under the supervision of Mark Griffiths, head of Nottingham Trent University’s International Gaming Research Unit. Ortiz de Gortari was motivated by her own experience of GTP. One day, she was walking around her local supermarket and realised that she was imagining peering at products on the shelves through a rifle scope.

    “I thought, ‘Wow! This is interesting’,” she recalls. “A phenomenon that changes your perception by encouraging you to see objects through the lens of the game you’re playing,” she says, adding that her response had felt involuntary, leaving her with serious questions about what it meant.

    I’m sure we’ve all done something like this after a long Tetris or Super Mario session.