All video game franchises attempt to improve with time. With PBS’ Mission:US, however, the delays were making us question whether there was going to be a second mission after all.
It has been a long time coming, but the second installment marks a solid improvement on the original.
The Neighborhood last visited this PBS interactive history game with its inaugural mission, which dealt with a young Boston boy dealing with the events leading up to the American Revolution. While we found it a worthy start, the mission was somewhat flawed with excessive dialogue, cartoonish, anime-like characters and lack of visceral action.
In this second mission, “Flight to Freedom”, the game moves to the mid-1800s as the slavery issue divides Americans. Lucy is an enslaved girl on the King plantation in northern Kentucky, near the Ohio River and the free state of Ohio. The story follows her daily life on the plantation, assisting fellow slaves escape north, escaping to freedom, being recaptured and sold at an auction, and hopefully fleeing again to freedom. Along the way, Lucy encounters abolitionists, free blacks, other slaves, overseers, haughty masters, slave catchers and others in American society with varied views on slavery.
Many of the flaws of the first mission have resurfaced. The Japanese-like characters and the excessive dialogue have remained. Also, certain aspects of the background seem somewhat sanitized. The slave quarters seem a little too spiffy (they look so well-built they resemble Levittown tract-housing), the fields seem a little too tidy, and the overseer and slave catchers seem a little too diplomatic (I’m sure they probably cussed more in real life).
The choice of crop at the plantation, furthermore, is interesting. Instead of cotton, tobacco or rice, the King plantation grows hemp, a once-valuable crop used in making bags, coarse clothes and especially rope.
I just wonder if my more street-savvy students would snicker at such a harvest, given hemp’s more potent and illegal cousin. Is that Snoop Dogg hanging out a little too long around those burning leaves?
Yet besides the cartoons, the sanitation and the subtle references to illicit drugs, Mission: US’ second mission does have marked improvements on its predecessor.
“Flight to Freedom” now allows the main character Lucy to say and do a wider variety of things. Unlike previous missions, which tend to move the story forward a little too linearly, Lucy can now be sneaky, aggressive, persuasive, obedient…even violent if she wants to. The game allows you to collect badges based on how you interact with characters and the situation. The badges also help you finalize the ending of the story the way you want it to end.
This makes the action more human and realistic—making the story all that more relatable to today’s students. After all, to make all enslaved people and free blacks look and act the same is a gross disservice. These people reacted to their situation in varied ways. It was a fine line between a seemingly obedient house servant and a Nat Turner-like insurrection.
Also, the dialogue is remarkably apt for the period. The first mission had colonists that sounded more like Nebraska than Boston. This time around, you can hear the twangs of the Ohio valley, from the drawls of the Kentucky planters and slave catchers to the Midwest nasal airs of Ohio abolitionists.
Lastly, the developers added a nice feature called Think Fast! About the Past for each mission. It’s a timed trivia game that allows you to learn more background information about each time period. Thankfully, the second mission game includes brutally honest information about the nineteenth century.
No, most northern whites were not abolitionists. Most abolitionists didn’t necessarily believe in racial equality. And life for free blacks in Canada was not exactly peaches and hockey sticks.
I hope in the future, PBS will develop missions with more action, longer plotlines and more realism. Yet “Flight to Freedom” is a great leap forward for the Mission:US franchise and it bodes well for upcoming installments.
Let’s see how long it takes to release Mission 3…let’s suppose by the end of the decade 😉
Mr. D's Neighborhood 
Secrets from the Confederate Constitution
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So many bad ideas have festered south of the Mason-Dixon Line that we often overlook the good.
In case you’ve forgotten, here’s a short list of the South’s contributions to American life: Slavery, secession, civil war, debutantes overcome by “the vapors”, segregation, racism, bigotry, Hee Haw, Colonel Sanders, the tractor pull, Jeff Foxworthy, mullets, Larry the Cable Guy, furniture on top of RVs, furniture anywhere outside the house, toilets as lawn ornaments, and the nifty little Confederate battle flag most kids simply think is a keen rooftop decal for a certain Dodge Charger on the Dukes of Hazzard.
Yet over at the New York Times’ online blog The Opinionator, John Miller of National Review noticed some rather interesting ideas in the constitution of the Confederate States of America.
In his contribution to the Disunion series on the Civil War, Miller mentions that, by and large, the Confederate constitution was a carbon copy of our own. Yet he also notes two important “improvements” made by the Confederate founding fathers: the line-item veto and the 6-year presidential term.
The first is a power that Presidents have coveted for years. According to the constitution, any bill brought to the President, especially the budget, has to be signed into law as it is. It cannot be amended, or vetoed in part, by the executive–it’s a take-it-or-leave-it situation. According to the Confederate Constitution, Article I, Section VII states that:
Its a pretty nifty gadget for old Jeff Davis to strike off all those pesky earmarks that get in the way of funding the inevitable Confederate defeat.
The second idea is one that, according to Miller, goes back to the original 1787 convention. The Founding Fathers hemmed and hawed about the the power of the Presidency: some thought it should be limited further, others felt the honor should be for life. The sons of Dixie managed to solve this situation with a one-term presidency of six years. History shows that the second term of a two-term president is usually worse than the first: time, changing attitudes and midterm elections usually make the honeymoon period short. The single term of longer duration allows the President more time to work, but not so much time as to drag on like a claim horse on the last race at Saratoga.
Miller does some pretty good work, and in perusing the Confederate Constitution myself (linked here) I found these other curiosities:
Article I, Section VIII, subsection 18: “Congress shall have the power to make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers, and all other powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the Confederate States, or in any department or officer thereof.” – all that business about states’ rights, and they kept the Elastic Clause? Its like leaving rat traps with no bait on them.
Article I, Section IX, subsection 1: “The importation of negroes of the African race from any foreign country other than the slaveholding States or Territories of the United States of America, is hereby forbidden; and Congress is required to pass such laws as shall effectually prevent the same.” – Nice to know the slaveholding planters had a heart and kept the 1808 prohibition of the transatlantic slave trade in place. A little too late for Harriet Tubman, Nat Turner, Uncle Tom and Kunta Kinte, don’t you think?
Article I, Section IX, subsection 10: “All bills appropriating money shall specify in Federal currency the exact amount of each appropriation and the purposes for which it is made…” – you know, if you want to be your own country, man up and use your own currency. Don’t mooch off the greenback for fiscal solvency. If you’re going to secede, then fucking SECEDE!
Article I, Section IX, subsections 11-19: Now here is an actual good idea. Unlike the original Constitution, that needed to tack on a Bill of Rights after the fact as a bargaining chip, the Confederate Constitution folded them right into the original document. Sure, it buries them somewhere where they can’t be found easily, but it also allowed future jurists to interpret them without sanctimonious drooling as if they were brought down from Sinai.
Article II, Section II, subsection 1: “The President shall be Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy of the Confederate States, and of the militia of the several States, when called into the actual service of the Confederate States…” – again, big talk for a country that claimed to respect states’ rights. I’m sure the state governors were really pleased when Jeff Davis invoked this codicil.
Article IV, Section II, subsection 3: “No slave or other person held to service or labor in any State or Territory of the Confederate States, under the laws thereof, escaping or lawfully carried into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor; but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such slave belongs; or to whom such service or labor may be due.” – Well, you kind of half-expected this one. This is the 1857 Dred Scott decision codified into constitutional law. Slaves were property, and nothing was going to change that…except for half a million armed men in blue uniforms.
Article IV, Section III, subsection 3: “The Confederate States may acquire new territory…In all such territory the institution of negro slavery, as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected by Congress and by the Territorial government; and the inhabitants of the several Confederate States and Territories shall have the right to take to such Territory any slaves lawfully held by them in any of the States or Territories of the Confederate States.” – again, this is your textbook explanation for the Civil War itself: the South wanted to expand slavery to the new territories in the West.
And finally we have Article VI, Section VI: “The powers not delegated to the Confederate States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States, respectively, or to the people thereof.”
That 10th Amendment–the states’ rights one that segregationists and literal-minded judges loved so much.
What was funny was…well…Jeff Davis and the CSA were a tad confused as to who had the power.
Here’s a hint at who did–they wore blue coats.
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