Tiger Hunt is a fairly simple video game. You are a poacher in India and the goal is to make money off of tigers. This can only be done by directly hunting tigers if you see them. This will not be often though, because they are rare. Your character moves slowly through the jungle unless you decide to cut down some of the vegetation. Then you can move more quickly through the forest and increase the distance you cover, increasing your chances of finding tigers. When you do come across a tiger, you have the option to hunt it with your rifle. If you succeed in killing it, you then have the choice to sell the tiger for its fur and make $10,000. You will have to initially buy bullets for $130 (300 bullets) and buy more when you run out. Every so often you will also have to resharpen your tools for cutting down the vegetation, which only costs $20. Because of food, water, and shelter needs, your money will decrease by $100 each day.
In addition, once in a while you will be confronted with an official and you will have the opportunity to bribe this official to let you go. This costs $15,000, but prevents you from automatically losing the game by going to jail. The controls are simple. The arrow keys move your character and there are icons for deforestation, hunting, selling, buying, and bribing. Once you click on the icon, hitting the space bar will cause you to perform the action and for those that have more than one option, you will be given a menu where you can click which action you would like to perform. The bottom left corner of the screen also tells you how much money you have, as well as a tiger count, which will decrease every time you kill a tiger or deforest its habitat. You will start out with $1,000. There are 3,000 tigers out there. Get hunting!
The goal of “Tiger Hunt” is to make money by hunting tigers and selling them, mainly for their fur to be used in the production of fur coats. The game allows you to perform various actions, but selling tigers that the player has shot and killed is the only way to make money. The game has the potential to go on for a long time, however, because of the limited number of tigers left in the world, the player will eventually run out of money. Because of this, there is no way to actually win the game. The player may feel like he or she is winning for some time because of the increase in money after selling a tiger, but soon the money will run out on various needs, like food, drink and shelter, ammunition, and bribing officials to not put you in jail, causing an automatic “game over.” The number of tigers in the world also decreases, not only when one is directly killed through hunting, but also when the character chooses to deforest (10 tigers die for every plot of land deforested). All of these actions that the poacher can do contribute to the further endangerment and potential future extinction of tigers. There are estimated to be only 3,500 tigers left in the world and, while conservations efforts are working toward increasing their numbers, poaching and habitat destruction still have a drastic impact on tiger populations in Asia. In this game, the player has the opportunity to cause tigers to go extinct. Whether or not this happens is up to the player.
This game was designed in the hopes that the player would understand the damage that humans are causing tigers better when placed in the position of the poacher. While the game has the potential to cause the player to empathize with the poachers, as Ian Bogost discusses in his work, Persuasive Games, the damage the player would be doing would hopefully seem so extreme that it would be difficult to side with the poachers. There is that slight possibility, however. The fewer tigers there are, the harder it is to find them, so it is also possible that the game may become boring to the player as he or she tries to find more tigers with no success. If this were true, the player may be able to take away the message that hunting tigers isn’t worth the effort it takes or the damage it is causing. If the player is able to see that if the poaching of tigers and the destruction of their habitat continues, then this beautiful animal will become extinct and be gone forever and understand that this is not the direction we want to go in, then the game has succeeded.
Comments
Sorry that the quality is not
Sorry that the quality is not the greatest. The "screen" should also be rotated so that the icons for the actions you can perform are on the bottom and the title is on the top. I tried rotating it on my computer, but apparently it didn't work. Also, I'm really bad at drawing tree tops, as you can see.