Editorial: Should People Be Able to Kill Children Characters in Video Games/

http://games.ign.com/articles/119/1192293p1.html

It is wrong to kill people.
It is wrong to kill children.
It is ok to kill pretend people.
It is wrong to kill pretend children.

I agree with the above set of statements and I believe it's a majority view. I greatly enjoy murdering enemies in shooting games. In Call of Duty multiplayer mode, there are few things I relish more than shooting my brother between the eyes, or cutting my teenage son's throat as he sneaks up the stairs of a mock suburban home.

But kill a child in a videogame? Nope. Never.

This is why I agree with EA 's decision not to allow the killing of children in Battlefield 3. It's why I agree with Bethesda 's decision not to allow the killing of children in Skyrim.

There are those who believe the gamer ought to be allowed as much freedom as possible to explore his or her power for good or for evil. Games designers tell us that we are being dropped into a realistic world, but then restrict our abilities to behave in highly personal ways within those worlds. This moves the interactive experience away from 'free experience' and towards fairground shooting game.

If the game designers are promising a combat simulation, why are they then restricting the role of the participant, thereby channeling activities down restricted tramlines?

Furthermore, this is a pretend world in which the morality of real life is suspended for the sake of entertainment. If I enjoy the novelty of watching a man die painfully in simulation, might I not also enjoy watching a baby die in her mother's arms?

The Dead Island trailer is a distressing back-to-front film which shows a dead child, and the circumstances of her demise at the hands of zombies. In my view. it's a horrible marketing ploy, but even if you disagree, there is no doubt about one fact – the player is not responsible for her death, and we are invited to feel sorry for her and her parents.

Some point to Irrational's excellent Bioshock series in which little girls are "harvested". In this game we never see the girls killed, never see their corpses. It is implied that they are destroyed. Players are rewarded, ultimately, by letting them live. The 'girls' are zombie-fied; not-quite-right. This is not the same as shooting dead a child in an airport, or a crowded market-place scenario.

Games designers shoot back with two pragmatic arguments.

Firstly, while child-killing, rape and other monstrous acts are evident in war, they are not the norm for combat soldiers, at least in the war scenarios simulated by games companies which tend to involve highly dangerous fire-fights against armed combatants, not, say, burning villages to the ground to root out suspected insurgents or torturing civilians to gain information. These games are not really simulations of war, otherwise they would also involve a great deal of sitting around in hot Humvees, bitching about chow and officers.

Secondly, no commercial organization wants to be associated with images of children being killed. We have been watching grisly death on screen for over a century, and for millennia on stage. But the death of a child is a much rarer occasion in fiction, and very, very rare at the hands of the fiction's main protagonist, which in a game, is you.

YouTube montages of children being killed would be commercial and PR suicide for any company, and ripe picking as for those who believe that simulated violence of any kind if an evil which ought to be extinguished.

The real truth is that the killing of children is a widely held taboo which makes for extremely poor popular entertainment. It's worth noting that games like Grand Theft Auto, and even the infamous airport level in Modern Warfare 2 are conspicuously absent of children.

Think of the very many fairy tales and legends you heard as a child in which kids are placed in mortal danger. In general, the witch, the wolf, get their comeuppance. Only in the Pied Piper of Hamelin are the children taken away, lost forever. If there is a creepier tale, I haven't heard it.

I recall coming home from a night out drinking, 20 years ago, turning the TV and seeing a man in a movie strangling a girl, aged about ten. It upset me greatly then, and upsets me now to think of it. Yet I have seen hundreds of men and women strangled on-screen in a video game, and couldn't give a damn.

Gaming companies are creating scenarios in which we get to play out popular archetypal fantasies. For sensible game-design reasons, they build in restrictions – in Call of Duty I cannot run off to an airport and take a flight home, or stop at a café and order a latte – but they also make moral choices for us, both to protect us from things we don't want to experience, and to protect themselves against stupidity and prejudice.
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Do you agree?

Should games allow players to kill more innocents, and even children?

Relishing in the death of a human even if it is a character isn't good for the soul.

I agree. Why is it we enjoy killing people so much in games? Because deep down, we would enjoy doing it if there were no laws too.

We don't eat poop in games and then hate it in real life, do we?

Yes we should be able to kill children in video games. Children are the most annoying people in the world.

ℳℛ J.F.K. wrote:: Relishing in the death of a human even if it is a character isn't good for the soul.

Can you take your holy good fella act someplace where people care?

The shit's becoming sickening.
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Anywho...

Video games affect each person differently. Not everyone who plays a violent game wants to go out and commit crimes.

It's no different than violent movies or tv shows. To avoid people from becoming violent, are movie producers supposed to stop creating movies with lots of violence in them? It's entertainment.

The whole "demon kid" thing was done in the first Silent Hill game, by the way. But I've never understood people using video games as an excuse for murder in real life. Playing Doom could not have possibly made somebody do the Columbine shooting, for example. That was just an excuse.

Agreed.

HELL YEAH WE SHOULD BE ABLE TO KILL THE LITTLE BASTARDS!

WarGreymon77 wrote:: The whole "demon kid" thing was done in the first Silent Hill game, by the way. But I've never understood people using video games as an excuse for murder in real life. Playing Doom could not have possibly made somebody do the Columbine shooting, for example. That was just an excuse.

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