About Freedom!

Players are presented a randomly generated protagonist; a slave during the 1830s. You have no choice in circumstances, skills, equipment, or name provided to you. A back-story is generated and your family members from it might be nearby to offer help or perhaps betray you for a variety of reasons. Two choices are provided, Male or Female and which zone in the southeastern United States the plantation you are held at. The zone represents difficulty level for the game. Some people will act differently to a male or female. The goal is to escape to freedom in the northern states. You might be blessed with literacy, swimming or a variety of other practical skills, or none. Money might come in handy (or not), if you can even get some. Nourishment, stamina, health, and injury level will be important factors to notice. Also the position of the sun during the day and the starts during the night will help, if You know how to use them. Or perhaps which side of the tree the moss is growing on. You will need to keep oriented somehow. If only you could obtain a compass. You will need sleep, food, and rest. If injured, you must tend to yourself somehow. You can also wait, knock on doors to ask for help, run, hide, fight, go around areas, people, houses, rivers and obstacles or go through them (not advised to go through a river if you cant swim). There's three ways to bring the game to an intended conclusion. Make it to freedom, get captured, or get killed.

MECC had released many versions of the The Oregon Trail. They followed the very successful Apple II version of it with The Africa Trail, The Amazon Trail, and the Yukon Trail. It took a while, but someone at MECC finally noticed a disturbing pattern. This series of games were about colonialism and white people. The game engine for these games was promptly used for something a bit different. As MECC put it, Freedom was about providing "inclusive instructional materials," and their goal to "portray the experiences and perspectives of people from various cultures." Granted, MECC had an large non-white customer base; a fact that most certainly had not been ignored at the time of the game's release. Well, no good deed goes unpunished, as they say. Something very important to note is that regardless of MECC's profit-seeking and catering to an audience, the roots of this game were in place and the game designed long before anyone in the marketing department knew about it. It was motivated by history, not demographics. It was Kamau Kambui's Slavery Reenactments in the early 1980s in Minnesota that inspired the game. MECC began by enlisting Kamau Kambui as a consultant for a game to play out his simulations on a computer. Kamau Kambui pushed the idea of having characters speak in historical dialect, which often made the characters difficult to understand. But there was a problem, historical dialect of slaves, is not what history has recorded for us. Instead, those who wrote history were, in one way or another, selective when they recorded the dialect of the day. But the problem goes deeper that recording the history of 'outsiders'. Authors who were slaves were quite conscious of their image and many did not write as they spoke or even as they once spoke. They were careful to use standard English even though they probably spoke or had spoken a local dialect of an outside culture or of their own culture. But there was another option, and that was to write, or even speak, as they were expected to, in an effort to gain acceptance in one way or another. A phenomenon that Frederick Douglass called "Negro Masking". Outside observers, for both historical and entertainment purposes, were clearly biased to the second option. But, both options share a problem, the actual dialects used were not recorded. Kamau Kambui and MECC decided to go with the dialects as improperly recorded by history. And, well, the problems didn't end there. For any given Apple II hardware (though not IIgs), a developer can only count on 6 distinct colors to work with. 15 colors on luxurious models, but that's not what schools tended to have. Depicting human skin tones cannot be done accurately even with 15 available colors. Kamau Kambui wanted the slaves in the game to look distinctly 'African'. The best the Apple could do ended up looking more like a minstrel show (blackface depictions). But, there's more. Some very well intentioned people a MECC created teacher's materials, same as with all their games, to offer helpful suggestions to classroom instructors. While most of MECC's descriptions of the game carefully adhere to 'political correctness' (almost ridiculously so), the teacher's materials did not contain carefully crafted words. The language was blunt, clumsy, naive and managed to offend many who saw it. Finally, MECC crafted the entire product for use in an classroom with children under instructor guidance (clearly, they understood the game could be misinterpreted). The reality of the vast majority of educational software in schools was that it was used as an unassigned activity and often with minimum to no supervision. Group participation and instructor guidance for individual titles rarely happened. It wasn't long before parents who never played the game heard of it. A few quick glances at the screen was enough for many parents to condemn this "Nintendoized" slavery. Those wanting a more in-depth study of the game didn't seem to play it at all, they instead asked for the game's instructor materials. Which of course described activities invoking "white children" and "black children" etc... MECC attended one meeting with one parent group and an NAACP representative and promptly retreated from the situation. MECC stated all copies of Freedom were recommend to be returned or destroyed and it was no longer offered to sell. The Oregon Trail, The Africa Trail, The Amazon Trail, and the Yukon Trail continued to sell well and let children play as colonizing white people.