The era of the Oregon Trail was less than two centuries ago, pretty much no-time by any standard. A couple of lifetimes.

Almost half a million people took that trail, facing cholera and starvation and drowning and other disasters, and poured into the Willamette Valley and points nearby. La, Civilization.

150 years after they did, The Oregon Trail was just … a video game.

In our postmodernist world of video games, the mythos says that typhoid and malnutrition and all the other hardships are imaginary objects in a rearview mirror.

But the mythos is mistaken about that.

And about most everything else too.