The following is an entry into Steve’s Call To Arms on his blog, Fullbright.

Survival.

You’re a simple, essentially talentless man, waking up in the middle of the wilderness. In complete desolation. There may be no people within tens or hundreds or thousands of miles, you have no idea. Your objective is to reach something resembling civilization, be it a full-blown city, campsite, cave-dwelling natives… something.

You begin your trek armed with only some pocket items. You have your wristwatch, cell phone, wallet containing a few items, and maybe a candy bar. Because the wilderness is completely foreign to you (maybe you were previously a Wall Street investor), you have some serious things to learn if you wish to survive even the first few days. Feeding yourself will entail scrounging for berries or fruit initially, and as you collect some basic elements, you may even be able to fashion some primitive weapons. You’ll have to acquire clothing and create some form of shelter in order to stay healthy, otherwise exposure will weaken and possibly kill you. Clothing yourself might include killing an animal, cleaning it, and tanning hides or tailoring the fur into warmer garb.

Setting up camp will allow you to become more familiar with those immediate surroundings. This may pay off in the short term, allowing you to avoid danger and injury, but only in the short term. You must move along if you expect to truly survive. You absolutely will succumb to some uncontrollable force of nature eventually. A bear might rip you up in your sleep. So you camp for a few days and move on.

As you journey along in search of someone, you’re experiences will pay off. Hunting more often makes hunting easier and in turn keeps you well fed. Learning about plant life will allow you to gather more varied fruits. With blade-wielding talent you’ll more efficiently clean your kills providing better yield of hide, fur, or meat. Collecting firewood, climbing mountains… it all becomes easier with practice. Life in the wilderness can be exhilarating, frightening, fun, deadly. Climbing a sheer cliff face may get you a hundreds of feet above, providing a better vantage point to view your surroundings, a stunningly picturesque landscape, and access to whatever’s on the other side of the mountain. You’ll encounter rivers to cross, predators to evade, and if you’re lucky: signs of human life.

As you begin to run across signs of other travelers or settlers — old campfires, animal carcasses, beaten paths through the forest — you must use tracking and pathfinding skills to seek out the nearby civilization. But there’s another catch: they won’t necessarily be friendly. You’ll have to figure that out.

If you find friendlies, and they accept you into the fold, The End.

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This game would be best if it played out over the course of dozens of hours, giving you time to learn the ropes of survival, as well as making new experiences in the wilderness all the more affecting. Of course since the world is completely open, you play at your pace. However, there is one absolute certainty: you will not last forever in the wild. You’ll do what’s necessary to survive, and sometimes that means it isn’t what you “want” to do. The player would experience hardship, cheat death, overcome adversity, and avoid disaster through becoming one with a foreign environment (without having to risk one’s real life in the bush).