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A L S O__T O D A Y
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ETHICS OF THE CROSS HAIRS | PAGE 1, 2
To be honest, though, I had my sneering muscles all limbered up long before I took a closer look at Trophy Buck. I've never been a fan of hunting or of guns, and the very idea of sitting in front of a computer screen pretending to be out in the woods sniffing for deer scat struck me as ludicrous. At least when my Protoss Archons are unleashing devastating psionic shock waves against rampaging mutated Zerg Ultralisks (kind of a cross between a wooly mammoth and a scorpion), I am experiencing something that can't be readily duplicated in real life. (At least I hope not.) But while spending many a fruitless hour chasing virtual deer through the Colorado mountains, I had time to reflect on my trigger-happy scorn toward simulated deer hunting. And I had to 'fess up to some change of heart. First of all, when you get right down to it, there isn't all that much moral difference between exploding a nuclear bomb on a Terran command center (even if it did belong to the perfidious General Duke) and popping an artificially intelligent mule deer with a simulated beanfield rifle. In the virtual world, killing is still killing. It actually began to strike me as somewhat dishonest to sublimate my primordial hunting urges by raining death down on aliens when I could be doing it the old-fashioned way, by pretending to stalk game animals like my ancestors did. More intriguing, however, was the realization that Trophy Buck, despite the game's introductory act of deer-death worship, isn't just about killing deer -- it's about a whole way of life. Trophy Buck is a well-executed reflection and reinforcement of a set of values that are integral to American culture, whether I subscribe to them or not. From the sound of the pickup truck's engine to the passionate help-menu discussion of the differences between various rifle models, it's obvious that the makers of Trophy Buck are paying close attention to at least one version of what it means to be an American. It's no accident that the original Deer Hunter was a runaway bestseller. There's a mess of deer hunters in the United States -- as many as 12 million, according to Trophy Buck. And it's very easy to see how a well-designed game can work as an effective adjunct to the hunting life. I don't have enough experience with hunting simulations to know how well Trophy Buck compares to others in this genre, but there's certainly no question that the game enriched my understanding of hunting. Did you know, for example, that while there may be more white-tailed deer in the United States than ever before (some 25 million), the much larger (and more cutely antlered) mule deer are on the retreat, a victim of increasing development in their Western wintering homelands? It may be easy to dismiss Trophy Buck's constant enjoinders to safe gun handling and law-abiding behavior as cagy National Rifle Association propaganda aimed at keeping deer hunters' flanks safe from criticism. But it still came as something of a surprise when I fired a shot at the ground and a stern voice told me, with scorn dripping, "Not smart! You're gonna hurt somebody doing that." Jeez, Dad, lighten up! I'm not really used to being scolded by my computer games for inappropriate gunfire. It was as if Clint Eastwood had just dissed me, bad. I was the alien in this game. The question then became: If Trophy Buck celebrates a particular -- and real -- strand of American culture, what does a game like Broodwars represent? Is the mass murder inherent in every game of Starcraft harmless escapism, without strings attached? Or is it something darker -- repressed xenophobia, slaughter without responsibility? Where is the voice saying, "Watch it with that photon blaster -- you could take somebody's eye out?" Nowhere. In the Starcraft universe, death is cheap and easy. Not so in the world of Trophy Buck, where death really is death -- at least for the deer.
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