I am beginning to get a little frantic on building my educational game, but working through. The project has some challenges I did not completely anticipate and have forced me to pivot a little on how the game will go. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as I ended up following a lot of trails in directions I did not fully expect. Laura Ingalls Wider and I, exploring new lands.

The Good: In the past few years, a lot of people have taken up her books as a framework for their arguments, whether it be societal expectations, misunderstanding or misrepresenting illnesses, or the hard truth that her stories also tell about the large scale displacement of Native Americans. To find the ideas I wanted to follow in the game, I reread all the books except Farmer Boy about Almanzo Wilder’s childhood and The First Four Years covering the early days of marriage. Reading as an adult, the stories are very different, for while Laura remains a plucky heroine, it is inescapable to look at the racism, varying from mild to very; think about child labor as she goes to work at fourteen to help her family; and how hard life as a homesteader was and how economically tenuous. I cannot add all these in a game, but it was interesting. I was able to fix some of that she tells to events happening in the world, which will help the game play.

The Bad: In spite of all the work being done, few of her letters are digitized and online. There are a handful, and some family correspondence online at in the excellent Turning Points in Wisconsin History collection at https://www.wisconsinhistory.org. I have had to work the edges of the problem, leading me to focus more on the story through the lens of treaties and legislation, combined with periodicals and maps more than letters. It has been tough, but I think workable.

The Ugly: I am behind schedule, fixating on how to use FigJam for storyboarding and starting to use Twine. I can catch up, but me next few weeks will be a little ugly.