The appeal of these games are that there are no consequences. You can ride your horse as fast as you want, and if you crash into something, you don't actually get hurt.

Also you can ride a horse without the requisite care, cost, time responsibility etc. You can be whoever you want, and when you get bored of that personality, you can just ditch it.

I personally don't really enjoy this game, but it's easy to see why people do.

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

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...

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.

Back when I was a lad, we used to get up before we'd gone to bed to go down the mines!

The other way to look at it is that these experiences promote a desire to go and see the real thing, in a similar way that zoos spark a lifelong interest in the kind of wildlife and habitats that you would never have normally interacted with otherwise.

Maybe not so much with the horse riding, but I'm pretty sure most people where I live would rather I did 200km/h through the city center in a virtual racecar than in a real sports car.

Games let you do things you really, really, really shouldn't do in real life.

Imagine the number of irresponsible people going camping or horseback riding in the wilderness increasing by 100x instead of playing a game.

My worry isn't that lots of people would die--because they would--but I worry that nature would be destroyed far faster. Seeing beautiful locations that were undiscovered suddenly become tourist hotspots, they're completely destroyed in the span of months.

The article ends with a similar point: "I was often left feeling hopeless and wanting to get outside to enjoy real nature while I still could."

Ah yes, only cute animals like turkey vultures

It does shed some light on the whole Fermi Paradox thing, though.