Rising from a computer terminal at the Minnesota Zoo after a few minutes as a wolf racing the hillsides of Yellowstone National Park, 11-year-old Chris Everhart seemed pleased.
"You can kill something," he said. "That's mostly what I like to do."
Moments later, the zoo released over the Internet what is being described as the first computer game to be paid for by the National Science Foundation.
And its creators admit they're taking a bit of a risk.
"This is a wild idea," said Grant Spickelmier, the zoo's assistant director of education. "Not many zoo directors would let us do something like this. It's a big experiment."
In attempting to immerse children in the world of the wild, programmers faced a host of questions as to just how "real" to be and remain within the bounds of government-financed taste.
What about mating? What about blood and gore? Would kids accustomed to mowing down a thousand bad guys be satisfied with sober, scientific truth?
"In action games, you kill everyone," said David Schaller, a principal with Eduweb, a private St. Paul firm that came up with the idea for the game and did the bulk of the work. "But wolves don't do that. They chase elk to death. It can take them hours. It's about energy management. We had to modify reality a bit to make it fun to play."