October 14, 1999
LIBRARY / RECENT RELEASES
Where the Wildebeest Roam, on CD-ROM
NATURE: VIRTUAL SERENGETI
(Grolier Interactive; $29.99;
Windows 95 and 98, and Macintosh;
for ages 9 and older.)
By LES LINE
erengeti: a magical name
that is synonymous with primeval Africa and evokes indelible images of one of the greatest
wildlife spectacles on Earth -- unless, of course, you never watch the
nature programs on television. The
word springs from the Masai language and means ""an extended
place."" The world-famous Serengeti
National Park in Tanzania covers
5,700 square miles of grassy plains
that are broken here and there by
granite islands called kopjes, savannahs that are lightly cloaked with
thorn trees, saline lakes where flamingos feed on minute organisms
and other habitats, all with their own
unique animal populations.
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But like Yellowstone in North
America, the park is incomplete. The
whole Serengeti ecosystem, as defined by the migration route of a
million ox-like antelopes called wildebeests (gnus to crossword puzzle
fans), is the size of the country of
Kuwait and extends into the Masai
Mara Game Reserve just across the
Kenyan border.
It seems odd, then, that Nature:
Virtual Serengeti, a CD-ROM spinoff
from the PBS television program,
never sets foot in Tanzania. All its
action takes place in Kenya, much of
it at sites far beyond the Serengeti,
like Lake Nakuru. And while some of
the five dozen video clips are truly
exciting -- I'm thinking in particular
of 35 seconds that show a cheetah
running down a Thomson's gazelle or
a scene of crocodiles tearing into a
hapless zebra -- they largely fail to
convey the vastness of the Serengeti,
the role of the animals in their respective habitats and especially the
struggles of the dry season. That is
when immense wildebeest herds,
trailed by predatory lions, cheetahs
and African wild dogs and scavenging hyenas, trek north to find green
pastures beyond the park boundary.
Some of the videos, in fact, add little
more than still photographs in glossy
picture books.
Perhaps I'm expecting too much
from a program billed as ""the first
photo safari for kids."" Certainly I'm
spoiled by having actually seen a
broad representation of African
wildlife in the lesser-known parks of
South Africa's KwaZulu/Natal province. But after spending several
hours with Virtual Serengeti -- and a
lot of it was fun, I admit -- I came
away feeling that the producers had
missed the chance to convey the Serengeti's big picture to young naturalists.
Moreover, it took considerable effort to join Nature's host, George
Page, and an elusive Serengeti field
scientist, Dr. Elgin Carp, at Camp
Mara, first stop on the electronic
safari. Virtual Serengeti would not
run on my high-end Pentium II computer, apparently because the Quick
Time movie viewer that it installed
on the hard drive was incompatible
with an existing version from another CD-ROM program. I spent an
hour on the phone with a willing help-line technician at Grolier Interactive, the publisher, but succeeded
only in disabling another much-used
program that needed Quick Time.
So I moved upstairs to my wife's
low-end computer, where Virtual
Serengeti and Quick Time were easily installed, and I was promptly told
to change the display settings. That
done, I reinserted the CD.
An elephant trumpeted into view,
Mr. Page read a letter to Dr. Carp
about the big research and filmmaking project in which I was about to
participate, my passport was
stamped, and I was flown to the first
of six study sites. In the process, Mr.
Page's voice-over breezed through
instructions for using the mouse to
explore the area, find hidden animals
and fill in a journal with my discoveries.
Whoa, George! Where's the manual? There isn't one. Where's the
Help button? None in sight. In addition to the video screen, there are
five objects on the desktop: a compass that brings up a 3-D map of the
present site, a journal, a video camera, a field guide and your passport.
If you stumble around and eventually open the field guide, you will find
help -- but there is no way to print
out the pages for reference.
Once you are comfortable with the
controls, however, the Virtual Safari
interface is nifty. On the map of
Camp Mara, for example, there is a
red ring where the airplane is
parked. Several more rings are
spaced along the track to your tent.
As you progress along the trail, each
ring or ""node"" turns red, offering a
360-degree, three-dimensional photograph of your surroundings -- and by
holding down the left mouse button,
you can search for animals while
turning in a complete circle. You are
able to zoom into the picture, look up
at the sky or look down toward your
feet. If there is an animal nearby,
you will hear its sounds -- the grunting of a warthog, the roar of a lion --
and the cursor will turn into a box. A
mouse click will open a video --
some of them are as short as five
seconds -- with a brief caption, like
""The caracal can jump up and
snatch a bird right out of the air.""
And when you reach the last ring,
your tent, you can push through the
flap and move around inside, where
there is a laptop computer on the
desk ready to connect to the Nature
Web site. Neat.
The goal is to shoot videos of all the
animals at each campsite and use
the images and information you have
collected to complete Dr. Carp's
studies about animal fashion (the
leopard's spots or zebra's stripes, for
example), body parts (an elephant's
trunk) and other topics. But you are
on your own. The scientist keeps
leaving E-mail messages saying that
he is unable to join you for one reason or another.
Ready to move on to a new place?
Hop in the Land Rover or the cockpit
of your plane, pull up a map of southern Kenya and choose your destination. The reward for finishing the
studies is a hot-air balloon ride over
the Masai Mara. I didn't get that far
on my first trip, but I'll be back.
As George Page says, ""Safari enjema,"" which is Masai for ""have a
good safari.""