Do You Want to Kill Children?

The little girl zombie from Dead Island.

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.


Little Sister



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.



Do you agree? Should games allow players to kill more innocents, and even children? Let us know.