It's not your usual video game. Instead of fragging aliens or carjacking Ferraris, a soon-to-be-released game encourages players to break into hamburger joints and animal-testing laboratories, all in hope of building a cruelty-free, public-transit-taking, tofu-munching utopia.
    And if video-game distributors buy into Steer Madness next week, when the game's Canadian developer pitches it at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles, cattle ranchers could soon have more than mad-cow disease to fear.
    Centred on Bryce, an escaped steer on a rampage (albeit a distinctly non-violent, non-polluting, non-dairy and socially conscious one), Steer Madness takes players through 15 "world-changing" missions, maybe even making them vegetarians along the way.
    "It's quite possible that it will sway a few people," Johnathan Skinner, the game's 27-year-old developer, says from Vancouver.
    Mr. Skinner readily confesses that he has a political agenda. He is a commited vegan and a regular volunteer for animal-rights groups such as PETA, he says. But he has never had the nerve for hard-core civil disobedience. "So I created the game to do it for me."
    He hopes to release it in time for next Christmas.
    On one mission, Bryce the steer must covertly switch a restaurant's supply order for beef burgers to "100 per cent vegetable and soy protein" patties. On another, he has to infiltrate a lab to free it's animals.
    In a screen shot shown on the game's Internet site, a busty woman in a shirt that reads "vegan" is shown talking to a baby harp seal as they mourn a dead rabbit. "Those bastards, the cosmetics lab," the woman tells the seal, "they killed him."
    Strident, perhaps, but Mr. Skinner's creation could fill a gaping niche in the video-game market: For many vegetarians, video games and their frequent violence are only a little less taboo than, say, a milk-fed veal chop, grilled bloody rare.
    "True vegans" don't suffer the violent, angry impulses that meat eaters do, so they definitely don't play video games, says Gerry Coffey, North America representative for the International Vegetarian Union.
    Steer Madness will change that, promises Mr. Skinner, who built his programming career on more mainstream gaming hits such as Homeworld II. "Our video game is completely non-violent; nobody gets hurt," he says, "Even the steer, when he falls off his bike, he just gets back up again."