My buddy Dominic and I ordered 200 feet of Ethernet cable (what internet signal used to be carried on before it floated in the air) and buried it in a clandestine trench between our houses. We system linked our original Xboxes and played Halo over that homemade local network. Our home phones allowed us to talk smack while we hunted each other down…a precursor to Xbox Live. That was back in the early 2000s and though my gaming time has been cut way back since those days, I’m not too ashamed to say that I’m an adult who contributes to society, and also plays video games.
Twenty years ago being a grown up gamer would have put me in a subculture rubbing elbows with the likes of Dungeons and Dragons players and guys who collect “figurines”. According to a recent article on global gaming stats, today gaming revenues rival those of the movie industry and the average gamer is in their 30s. Hey, looky there! I’m normal!
All of this is to say that I enjoy a good video game. My gamertag is grandma99 on Xbox Live.
But hunting does not make for a good video game. As much as I’ve wanted to, I haven’t found one title that captures even a fraction of the outdoor experience or the exhilaration of getting up close to an animal. What I have been able to find are cheap, crappy shoot’em ups where animals are either simply moving targets, or worse, enemies to be destroyed. I’m just waiting for a game that includes a grenade in your default kit (for suppressing flocks of turkeys in close quarters).
I know this may make me sound like a codger, but not all experiences should be translated into the digital world. It may be a novel diversion, but hunting games will never reproduce the transformational nature of the hunt. In fact, they probably give people unrealistic expectations of what hunting is really like. If you’re in the field and not seeing anything, you can’t pause to lower the difficulty setting. In real life, if you kill an animal, the work has only just begun. You’re not just powering down a console and walking away.
The challenge of creating a representative hunting game might be along the lines of a fine dining simulator or a birth-of-your-first-child role playing game (Do you go now, or wait to leave for the hospital? [YES or NO]). You’ll never understand the complexity and power of the real thing through a virtual experience.
When all the seasons are closed and you’re looking for something to kill a little time, maybe booting up a hunting game is a guilty pleasure, but I’m confident that they’ll never replace the real thing. Hopefully, piles of these discs languishing in bargain bins will tip off the gaming industry that they should stick to killing aliens, not charging, blood-thirsty antelope.
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