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Game About Killing Poachers Vies For Top Prize In Microsoft Student Tech Contest
theodp writes: GeekWire reports on a group of students from Nepal who will be competing for the $50K top prize in Microsoft's Imagine Cup student tech contest with a first-person shooter in which players track down and kill poachers. "Until and unless the player kills all the poachers," reads the description for Defend Your Territory, "he/she cannot progress to next level. To make the game more interesting, there will be lots of weapons and vehicles unlock." So, is this the inspiration Google needs to take their anti-poaching drone program to the next level?
I have. It's fun. He was there on his knees in his tattered clothes,
Have you seen pics of poachers? By definition they aren't poor; their equipment is worth more than most people around them make in a year. They're dressed, typically, better than average for people wandering around the places where one kills endangered animals.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It took all of 5 seconds to load the page and read that:
The game is set in a futuristic world where decades of poaching has knocked Earth’s ecosystem off-kilter and left the planet a barren dessert. The last hope for restoration involves sending a cyborg back in time to hunt the poachers.
Your stopping poachers to save humanity.
And if you can use backstory to allow people kill thousands of demons, zombies, sentient robots, nazis and communists; why the hell are poachers any different? What makes the games you played so magically okay? Did you blow up Megaton in Fallout 3? Because then by your own logic you're now just encouraged nuclear terrorism.
Get off your damn high horses and realize it's not 1995, you're not Jack Thompson, and video games don't encourage people to kill people.
What do you think happens to a family who lives in a 3rd world country that owns no land, possibly displaced due to warfare, where there are thousands of people competing for jobs that barely pay enough for 1 person to survive off, let alone a family, no access to medical services, no access to clean water, no education and no hope of escaping the cycle of poverty?
Are you really that stupid? If these people are so dirt-poor, how exactly do they afford high-powered rifles capable of taking down elephants and rhinos, plus expensive all-terrain vehicles to chase them with?
Here's a hint: poachers aren't poor starving Africans, they're illegal big-game hunters with a lot of money, and they're in it to make even more money because it's so profitable. They're not even locals. They deserve to be shot.