
Birding Like It’s 1899: Inside a Blockbuster American West Video Game - alexlrobertson
https://www.audubon.org/news/birding-its-1899-inside-blockbuster-american-west-video-game
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pnathan
This kind of tiny piece by piece interaction with the world is something I
desired in the late 90s, dreaming as a teen, but my rudimentary O(n) skills
showed me was beyond the computers of the time.

It's gorgeous & I love the potential that brims here.

What if something was this complex and well built, but the storyline was
removed - the player simply builds their own story, ala DF Adventurer mode.

~~~
headcanon
I'm sure we'll get there eventually, its just much more difficult to write
for. Even in Westworld, the interactions were semi-scripted, with packaged
"quests" along the way.

Some games come close though, the Witcher 3 includes choice-based gameplay
with real consequences that last thoughout the game. However the developers
still had to explicitly write each scenario as it unfolded.

~~~
airstrike
Since we're listing games with long-lasting consequences, I'll have to
recommend folks who have been living under a rock to play the entire Mass
Effect trilogy – to me, still the greatest game ever made (and I've played far
too many games)

~~~
moate
"Long Lasting Consequences" like changing the color of the sky during the
final cut-scene...

Don't get me wrong, I loved those games, but when I played 3 and that was the
big pay off...jesus.

~~~
airstrike
The DLCs fixed the endings somewhat, but in any case the journey itself was
amazing. Sometimes it's not just about the destination but how you got there

~~~
moate
Eh, when you say "hey, the things you do are going to have a dramatic affect
on the story" but they DON'T have a dramatic affect on the ending...maybe you
fucked up a little bit?

Again: loved the games, had a lot of fun, but I was also disappointing that
decisions I thought would matter wound up being relatively meaningless.

Not trying to say your experience playing the game wasn't valid, just that it
might not be the best example to point to since that was a rather noteworthy
example of what NOT to do for many people.

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ilamont
I think this is pretty neat, not just that so many species are featured but
some of the other natural behaviors (e.g. fox and turkey vultures feeding on
just-shot mallard carcass) are replicated.

Showed the article to my teen son, a big RDR2 fan, who was less impressed,
calling it "sad" that someone would play a birder in that world. YMMV.

~~~
pavel_lishin
I wonder what he would think of the World of Warcraft panda pacifist:
[https://www.pcgamer.com/world-of-warcrafts-pacifist-panda-
ha...](https://www.pcgamer.com/world-of-warcrafts-pacifist-panda-has-reached-
level-120-by-only-picking-flowers/)

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hownottowrite
The RDR2 environment is an amazing horseback camping simulator. Fishing,
hunting, beautiful vistas... bliss

~~~
techopoly
Side question, do you think there's a market for this sort of game? Outdoor
simulator I suppose?

~~~
jcl
Reminds me a bit of Jeff Vogel's blog post about the first Red Dead
Redemption:

"What was more surprising, though in retrospect it should not have been, was
how instantly attached my eight year old daughter became to the game the
moment she caught an unlucky glimpse of me playing it. Of course, it makes
perfect sense. This is a game where you own a horse, ride your horse, take
your horse out into the brush, find wild horses, capture and tame wild horses,
and make one of those horses your new horse."

[http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2010/12/red-dead-redemption-a...](http://jeff-
vogel.blogspot.com/2010/12/red-dead-redemption-and-my-failures-as.html)

~~~
Buttons840
Rockstar should consider breaking their games down into sub games. They could
build a G rated game about caring for wild horses and sell it for kids; they'd
only have to remove content. In the full RDR2 game my daughter might have fun
caring for horses, but she might also witness a random murder, pick up new
words I'd rather her not repeat, witness a rape, who knows. I haven't actually
played RDR2 but all of those thing seem like possibilities in a Rockstar game.

~~~
jcl
Exactly! The taxi, ambulance, and firetruck missions were some of my favorite
parts of the GTA games, and featured relatively nonviolent, legal activities.
They could easily be standalone games... One could argue the taxi missions
already are, if you count Crazy Taxi.

~~~
chrisweekly
I always thought Rockstar should've made an EMT / first-responder version of
GTA where the goal was to help rather than harm.

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mirimir
Funny. John James Audubon, working in the early 1820s, didn't have a camera.
So he shot lots of birds.[0]

0)
[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8e/Jo...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8e/John_James_Audubon_1826.jpg/315px-
John_James_Audubon_1826.jpg)

Edit: Oops. Make that 1820s, not 1920s.

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gcbw2
This sounds great for replayability... but does that even matter now that
digital copy auth servers will be long gone before you want to?

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narrator
Kind of a boring dystopia we have here. People enjoying the great outdoors
from their climate controlled bedrooms. Good thing they only kept the cute
animals in the game and not the mosquitos or black flies.

~~~
pavel_lishin
Back in my day, we had to enjoy the great outdoors uphill both ways!

~~~
UweSchmidt
We did. People used to spend more time outside, more time walking. Older
novels seem to mention animals and plants modern people wouldn't recognize.

And of course there just existed more nature. We are destroying our
environment and are losing many species. It's getting harder and harder to
just enjoy a carefree joke about it...

~~~
neuronic
I often think a lot about this, incidentally when taking long walks when not
playing video games in my free time, and continue to arrive at the same
conclusion: humans are merely evolution's self-brewed extinction event. A
couple of severely consequential, yet random mutations led to an overtly
destructive species.

Keep in mind that evolution is just the name for the mechanism that allows DNA
to continue self-preservation by means of replication and recombination,
allowing it to persevere in altering conditions.

So in a (sad?) way it is merely natural that many species die off as a
consequence of our actions, as it was when the Permian-Triassic extinction
hit. After all they are the result of our biology. That doesn't mean we
shouldn't try everything to prevent extinctions and counter-act climate
change. We do know that permanent loss of life is absolutely a possibility on
this planet.

While we might cause Earth to become more akin to Venus with our behaviour,
the apparent evolutionary disaster might also pay off for DNA by allowing it
to become interplanetary.

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sn41
Passenger pigeons were still around in the 1890s, weren't they? Is their
omission deliberate since their range seems to have been east of the Rockies?

~~~
thousandautumns
I believe the entirety of the game is set in a fictional equivalent of east of
the Rockies, so I doubt it.

~~~
Zimahl
There's really not much equivalence to anywhere, other than the different
biomes resemble ones you'd see in the US (outside of a side mission to Guarma,
a fictional island near Cuba). There's a swamp area similar to Louisiana with
a delta city called Saint Denis (pronounced San Da Knee). To the West (yes,
West) of that is the 'southern' town of Rhodes with plantations and antebellum
houses. Nearby is a former Civil War battlefield. Further west is the typical
wild west frontier, with the nothern areas being colder and mountainous down
to the more southern areas being grass and desert plains.

In game there is talk about real places (like New York, Cuba, Tahiti) but
there is little context to where those are in respect to where the player is.

