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This story about making a modern wilderness begins with a trip to the Future Shop. It was an expedition that saw me push my way past the Big Bamboo (a nightclub) and the Banana Leaf (a restaurant) in hot pursuit of 'THE BIGGEST GAME OF ALL': Deer Hunter: Interactive Hunting Experience. I'd seen advertisements for it in a number of outdoor magazines and I was anxious to bag one for myself. But I soon discovered that Deer Hunter is just one of a number of hunting games put out by different software companies, outfitters, conservation groups, and outdoors magazines designed to allow you to 'bag your limit of outdoor challenges' without ever having to leave home. While buying Deer Hunter guaranteed me an 'open season all year round,' Field and Stream magazine's Trophy Buck promised nothing less than 'the most realistic hunting experience you can have - short of picking ticks out of your hair.' Not only would my 'elusive quarry... exhibit every instinct of its real-world counterpart,' but my 'chosen firearm and ammunition' would perform just as 'the actual manufacturers' handbooks say they will' - making the experience one that would impart a 'most realistic thrill.'
Though the rhetoric provokes laughter, these 'interactive experiences' merit more serious consideration, if only because they are incredibly popular. Deer Hunter, for instance, was the best-selling piece of computer software (not game, but software) in 1998-9.(1) The idea of virtual hunting seems about as far away from what 'real' hunting is supposed to be as one can get. Real hunting is supposed to be physical; its appeal lies in the almost unmediated encounter with nature it promises. The chase is supposed to confront the hunter's body and mind with unaccustomed physical challenges; pushing him (and it usually is a 'him,' particularly in the period I deal with) against his own limits.
Sitting in front of a computer screen taking tinny-sounding potshots with a 'mouse' at digitized animals hardly measures up - even if they are, as Rocky Mountain Trophy Hunter promises, 'full motion.' In fact, it would be difficult to think of a more eloquent emblem for modern life under late capitalism than these games. These examples of nature-in-a-box seem to exemplify what the environmental writer Bill McKibben...