Nathan Hennessy - 2021

Endangered Elephants!

As of March 2021, African elephants have been listed as critically endangered. Poaching for ivory and loss of habitat are blamed for the recent sharp population declines.

My artistic approach for awareness was to write a simple video game called "Endangered Elephants!" The basic concept of the game is to hide elephants behind bushes on the African plains while avoiding poacher’s rifle crosshairs. Every elephant hidden is a point. If a poacher’s crosshairs touch the elephant it is game over and the following message flashes across the screen: YOU ARE EXTINCT!

This game is not gruesome. My focus with this game was to engineer a first-person experience that provides the simple concept of elephant survival instead of a game where we a player would be hunting them. The concept is easy to understand. Elephants are endangered and the entire purpose of the game is to try to avoid poachers. I hope my little game inspires others to adopt similar concepts of biodiversity loss awareness through video games. Exposure to these issues through video games is something I have never personally witnessed, and I think it would add another important platform for raising awareness of biodiversity loss and environmental issues.