Ethics of the cross hairs

On your computer screen, which is worse -- blasting an alien or shooting a deer?

By Andrew Leonard

Jan 12, 1999 | Two state-of-the-slaughter computer games arrived in my mailbox last week. I looked at the first, the Broodwars expansion pack for Blizzard Entertainment's hugely successful Starcraft, and rubbed my hands with glee. It had been far too long since I last battled against the insectoid Zerg and the fearsome psionic Protoss warriors. How I yearned to see my Behemoth Battlecruisers wreak havoc on the alien swarms! Or even better, to play turnabout, and unleash my feral waves of Zerglings on pathetic Terran marines, and hear their death screams ring from my computer speakers.

The other game box in the mail was Field & Stream's Trophy Buck -- a super-realistic deer hunting simulation game. Yuck, I thought -- how awful. What kind of sicko wants to simulate killing Bambi on a computer?

Don't get me wrong -- I know deer are little more than over-sized rodents. If I caught them eating my roses I'd be happy to mow them down with a 30-ought-6. And I'm sure venison tastes great when you're hungry enough. But to simulate the murder of those poor little darlings for sheer sport? Sheesh -- at least with aliens you can pretend that it's all just a fantasy.

Trophy Buck is no fantasy; the cinematic live-action intro to the game is proof enough of that. Four men wake up in their tents, put on their camouflage outfits and warm their hands at the fire, then drive their pickup truck deeper into the wilderness, grab their rifles and start tramping through the woods. Every sound and image is razor-true to life. Cut to a scene of mule deer grazing peacefully in a meadow. One supremely antlered buck looks up, straight at you, and the cross hairs on your rifle sight center first on his head, then swivel toward the heart. A rifle shot breaks the silence, and ends the introduction. The point, it appears, has been made: This game is about killing deer.

Trophy Buck is one of a slew of death-to-deer games now hitting the market. All are aiming to capitalize on the huge success of last year's Deer Hunter -- a cheap, Wal-Mart-marketed, low-production-value hunting simulation that was one of the top-selling computer games of 1998. In contrast, Trophy Buck is super slick -- Sierra Sports, a division of Cendant Software (which, incidentally, also owns Blizzard Entertainment, the makers of Starcraft), put some real programmers on the job. The landscapes are realistic and the sound quality is pristine (the tramp of boots crumpling snow, the click of the safety going off). The game's liner notes even claim that it uses artificial intelligence to model the different behaviorial characteristics of the two main species of deer that roam the "lower 48," mule deer and white-tailed deer. Normally I tend to sneer at any computer game's claim to use artificial intelligence -- but I suppose deer are dumb enough that it's possible.

Next Page: The author rethinks his trigger-happy scorn toward simulated deer hunting

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