I think it would be fun to have a whole animation of you picking up the kid by the shirt before walking off, then fade to blackSidingWithTheEnemy said:
That would be pretty cool! Mod that in
Extra Punctuation: What Is the Matter with You People?
- Thread starter Yahtzee Croshaw
- Start date
That would be pretty cool! Mod that in
He's opening up a window for people to mod the game so that they could have sex not with children, but with the woodland critters or the various plane of oblivion creatures...
That is at least what I understood from his rant.
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Back on topic - Immersion breaks when you have something that breaks the flow of the game.
It goes the same to long loading times and glitches... Though I don't really mind the children because I'm not that murderous bastard. I prefer killing dragons.
That is at least what I understood from his rant.
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Back on topic - Immersion breaks when you have something that breaks the flow of the game.
It goes the same to long loading times and glitches... Though I don't really mind the children because I'm not that murderous bastard. I prefer killing dragons.
(Mind you I'm with Yahtzee on this one) from a gaming notion i suppose its some sort of Oedipus complex or maybe like Romeo and Juliet the tragic story would not be as impacting to the senses if the tragedy didn't occur. I don't know. Personally i don't want to kill children in a game much like i really wouldn't like to break a pencil if i were to name it. I'm soft and that's my nature. If you want some child slaughtering achievement the gaming world would probably give you the go ahead. To be fair for political correctness (being the devils advocate here) its "your right" as people would say. Funny how that line greys with complexities of society. but enough of that; you go ahead with your crusade Yahtzee the people should be forced to feel and think. not completely abandon their world for the sake of "gaming." For wouldn't that be as sinful as gluttony itself?
Clarification of Yahtzee's argument/position:
The nuclear explosion and protagonist dying in MW1 was impressive because it had never been done before. Therefore it at least had the illusion that some nice, tender human thought went into it. But when games that followed started doing it, then doing it some more, then digging for ideas that were even more atrocious I.E. murdering children. It all became reduced to a crutch used by developers who wanted to make their game compelling without actually making a mental effort. Anyone can imagine "nuclear explosion" or "children get dead".
This extends to mods that loosen your leash in such a way. It's not contemptible because it's atrocious, it's contemptible because it's just simpleminded, no, it's mindless. Not in the programming but the aesthetic. Or to be more precise the lack of it.
The Half-Life series is a prime staple of Yahtzee's standards. And as most intelligent people who've played it know. Such a game isn't as much a structure of code molded by human thought. As it is a colossal heap of human thought molded into a game.
What I'm getting at is Yahtzee has good awareness for aesthetics (imbedded human thought) in a game. Ergo he is quickly aware of a lack of it.
And he complained about not being able to marry his dog in Fable II because he 'adjusted his expectations' to a life Sim that placed heavy emphasis on marriage. And his dog was the only character he even remotely gave a crap about. Probably due to the dog being unable to talk. Making its' personality an infinitely more appealing blank slate.
The nuclear explosion and protagonist dying in MW1 was impressive because it had never been done before. Therefore it at least had the illusion that some nice, tender human thought went into it. But when games that followed started doing it, then doing it some more, then digging for ideas that were even more atrocious I.E. murdering children. It all became reduced to a crutch used by developers who wanted to make their game compelling without actually making a mental effort. Anyone can imagine "nuclear explosion" or "children get dead".
This extends to mods that loosen your leash in such a way. It's not contemptible because it's atrocious, it's contemptible because it's just simpleminded, no, it's mindless. Not in the programming but the aesthetic. Or to be more precise the lack of it.
The Half-Life series is a prime staple of Yahtzee's standards. And as most intelligent people who've played it know. Such a game isn't as much a structure of code molded by human thought. As it is a colossal heap of human thought molded into a game.
What I'm getting at is Yahtzee has good awareness for aesthetics (imbedded human thought) in a game. Ergo he is quickly aware of a lack of it.
And he complained about not being able to marry his dog in Fable II because he 'adjusted his expectations' to a life Sim that placed heavy emphasis on marriage. And his dog was the only character he even remotely gave a crap about. Probably due to the dog being unable to talk. Making its' personality an infinitely more appealing blank slate.
I think the people who mod in things like child killing in to games do so less because they're a bit funny in the head and demand the capacity for child murder and more that its simply a restriction on the players freedom within the game world they wish to do away with.
I certainly have no interest going around slaughtering kids in games but it would be kind of weird if I threw a giant ball of fire on the ground and everyone and everything in it was incinerated except for the apparently immortal child npcs.
I certainly have no interest going around slaughtering kids in games but it would be kind of weird if I threw a giant ball of fire on the ground and everyone and everything in it was incinerated except for the apparently immortal child npcs.
I think most people are miffed about the "immortal" status of some of the NPCs. You'll find that most of the "child killers" are Morrowind veterans, a game in which even the integral plot NPCs could be killed off. I don't think there were children in Morrowind..
So, you'll find that they will mod probably both 'immortal' children -and- the plot NPCs, because it's just odd otherwise.
Others are just creepy folks, I suppose. Do we need to get into the fact that some people have bizarre "private mods"? No, no we do not.
I find the MW3-factor to be far more creepy, personally. It's just gratuitous violence trying to spark an illicit emotional response from it's viewer. It's like a bad joke. The epitome of poor taste. Skyrim's child-thing isn't like this at all.
The real losers in this whole scenario are the bears man. The poor bears have nowhere to go. All of a sudden they wake up in their caves, they come out.. fucking dragons, they try to go back to their caves, fucking draugr. Constantly getting harassed in the wilderness by everything that moves. What did the bears do to deserve this?
So, you'll find that they will mod probably both 'immortal' children -and- the plot NPCs, because it's just odd otherwise.
Others are just creepy folks, I suppose. Do we need to get into the fact that some people have bizarre "private mods"? No, no we do not.
I find the MW3-factor to be far more creepy, personally. It's just gratuitous violence trying to spark an illicit emotional response from it's viewer. It's like a bad joke. The epitome of poor taste. Skyrim's child-thing isn't like this at all.
The real losers in this whole scenario are the bears man. The poor bears have nowhere to go. All of a sudden they wake up in their caves, they come out.. fucking dragons, they try to go back to their caves, fucking draugr. Constantly getting harassed in the wilderness by everything that moves. What did the bears do to deserve this?
I think they should just treat it like they did in Fallout 2 [http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Child_Killer] , of course that's usually my response to everything. In Fallout 2 if you killed a child even by accident you got the "Childkiller" reputation perk, or rather anti-perk. Basically it gives you heavy penalties to anything regarding social skills because nobody is willing to associate with you. You also have a chance to encounter parties of heavily geared bounty hunters which attempt to kill you. Instead of making children invincible as in Fallout 3 and Skyrim, or in the European release of Fallout 2, invisible, just make the killing of children essentially game breaking in it's difficulty curve. This way they can be killed by the dragons and NPC splash magic and not break immersion, and anybody who actually wants to kill children in the game for kicks is forced to play with severally curtailed freedoms hiding like the rat they are in shadows and is chased ceaselessly and tirelessly to the ends of the earth and eventually cornered by bounty hunters and slain. This way you maintain immersion by making the solution to the problem a logical series of steps in game instead of the leap of logic that is:"Every child has god-mode on".
Of course this will never be implemented by any game designer because just letting players kill children regardless of the in-game consequences would probably draw so much media that a U.S. Presidential Candidate could probably win an election solely on the promise of banning the game.
Might fix a mod or two though.
Of course this will never be implemented by any game designer because just letting players kill children regardless of the in-game consequences would probably draw so much media that a U.S. Presidential Candidate could probably win an election solely on the promise of banning the game.
Might fix a mod or two though.
This is the first time I've really agreed fully with every single thing in one of these articles. It really does create a strange world where somebody can say that games are art and are enjoyed by mature adults just as simple entertainment and then that same person can create a mod to allow the mass murder of infants in game. I think a lot of the hardcore crowd really need to take a step back and look at what they're spending their time on; at best it's pointless and asinine and at worst it's just sick.
I'll be honest, I care a lot less about a minor break from reality than I do about seeing children happily playing one moment and being incinerated by a dragon the next. I'm sure a lot of other people feel that way too.Do4600 said:
>Would you mod the game to allow players to also fuck children?
Japan, come here. Tell Mr. Yahtzee what you did. No, don't lie. I went looking for new meshes and skins and I saw it.
Also MW3 is like someone dropped the first two games through a blender and then pushed the resulting paste back together. It was complete regurgitated shit and a complete fail in my book.
Japan, come here. Tell Mr. Yahtzee what you did. No, don't lie. I went looking for new meshes and skins and I saw it.
Also MW3 is like someone dropped the first two games through a blender and then pushed the resulting paste back together. It was complete regurgitated shit and a complete fail in my book.
I didn't like the children in Fallout 3, because they freely got to piss you off and yet you could never do anything about it... but on the other hand it's perfectly okay to go on a killing spree of innocent civilians when they're above a certain age. This is my primary argument against having children in a game that are magically immune to violence when people above a certain age lose this magical protection from the gods.
In Oblivion there were no children, which I think handled it better with the "out of sight, out of mind" train of thought. It wasn't realistic, obviously, but at the same time we didn't have these stupid moral debates.
I don't actually know how it's handled in Skyrim (excepting that there ARE children) but making them essential (meaning they can be knocked unconscious but can't die) would make the most sense, because having immortal untouchable children is way more flow-breaking to me than simply never seeing them... and we don't have to deal with murdering children because everyone gets up-in-arms about it.
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I'm actually reminded of a certain driving game (it was a while ago, may have been Crazy Taxi) where if you tried to run over people they all saw you coming and could get out of the way with a 100% success rate. It might be illogical, but comparatively it's ACCEPTABLE. I'm certainly not pushing for murdering children and making religious non-gamers avert their eyes and cover their mouths in appallment, but as I already stated it's too distracting when they're around but a divine intervention steps in to prevent anything that might be potentially shocking.
In Oblivion there were no children, which I think handled it better with the "out of sight, out of mind" train of thought. It wasn't realistic, obviously, but at the same time we didn't have these stupid moral debates.
I don't actually know how it's handled in Skyrim (excepting that there ARE children) but making them essential (meaning they can be knocked unconscious but can't die) would make the most sense, because having immortal untouchable children is way more flow-breaking to me than simply never seeing them... and we don't have to deal with murdering children because everyone gets up-in-arms about it.
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I'm actually reminded of a certain driving game (it was a while ago, may have been Crazy Taxi) where if you tried to run over people they all saw you coming and could get out of the way with a 100% success rate. It might be illogical, but comparatively it's ACCEPTABLE. I'm certainly not pushing for murdering children and making religious non-gamers avert their eyes and cover their mouths in appallment, but as I already stated it's too distracting when they're around but a divine intervention steps in to prevent anything that might be potentially shocking.
I keep seeing "I want to kill the children because they are so damn irritating."
This alarms me.
If your reason for killing children is because they annoy you, I wouldn't want you to ever be in a social situation. I work retail, there are annoying children running around the store, with parents that frankly don't give a f***. My first reactions IS NOT, "gee I wish I could murder these annoying little b******s."
....
I can see why the average person think video games are horrible.
This alarms me.
If your reason for killing children is because they annoy you, I wouldn't want you to ever be in a social situation. I work retail, there are annoying children running around the store, with parents that frankly don't give a f***. My first reactions IS NOT, "gee I wish I could murder these annoying little b******s."
....
I can see why the average person think video games are horrible.
I'm not grasping this part.Pearwood said:
How is anything done in imagination land a problem?
Someone painting a picture of toddlers being BBQ'd is no more of a problem than a guy farting with his top down on the highway.
About the only thing that weirds me out is that folks have designed rules for who you can and can not kill. Sounds god-complexy, "I will decide who's life has value."
But the original point is the main piece to take away, this is all imagination world, no animals were harmed etc, etc. People shouldn't be any more weirded out by that mod than the making Jarl's and other essential npcs non-essential.
Death is death, murder is murder. These things are very very bad, we should never ever try to rationalize it in the real world. Beyond that taking that same irrationality into non-living simulations is just plane silly, if not insane.
These kids don't exist and thus don't have the same value as a living breathing person. So you should probably reevaluate your statement or get some help since you are equating interactions with simulations on the same level as people.dubious_wolf said:
The average person doesn't think video games are horrible either, I don't believe any data supports that. What you are looking for is people who can't separate fantasy from reality, those are the folks who think games are horrible. Or at the very least a noisy branch of them.
Yeah, I second everyone saying that the child death mod's point, to myself at least, is not so I can go around killing kids. I have absolutely no intention of ever killing a kid in that game. BUT WHY THE FUCK SHOULD A DRAGON NOT KILL THEM? There is absolutely no reason that a dragon would lay waste to a town and not kill the kids. They aren't bound by pithy things like human morality. They've returned to the world with a vengeance, and they aren't going to give a damn about killing humans of any age.
What will you burn? EVERYTHING.
What will you spare? uh, the kids, I guess...
What will you burn? EVERYTHING.
What will you spare? uh, the kids, I guess...
This is one instance where Yahtzee comes off like nothing more than a career contrarian. If I expect anyone to understand how the tragic loss of innocent life can impact a narrative, it would be Mr. Croshaw. Apparently he's too busy swimming counter to the counter-current.
Why do I want mortal children in my games? So that it can be my fault when I fail to save them. I don't want to kill them or see them killed. I don't want cheap tragedy or drama. I want the responsibility of protecting them from whatever threats the game throws at me. If they can't be harmed, I'm robbed of my potential for true heroism.
I guess my point is this: if you want to see people doing good in games, you have to give them the freedom to commit evil. Otherwise I'm just a passive observer on another needlessly linear train ride through a developer's preconceived notion of roleplay.
Why do I want mortal children in my games? So that it can be my fault when I fail to save them. I don't want to kill them or see them killed. I don't want cheap tragedy or drama. I want the responsibility of protecting them from whatever threats the game throws at me. If they can't be harmed, I'm robbed of my potential for true heroism.
I guess my point is this: if you want to see people doing good in games, you have to give them the freedom to commit evil. Otherwise I'm just a passive observer on another needlessly linear train ride through a developer's preconceived notion of roleplay.
What your argument doesn't consider is why everyone and everything would band together and hunt you down and murder you "like the rat you are" for killing kids, but not for killing poor and defenseless elderly people, which is already very possible in Skyrim. Why is one worse than the other? Are not all lives of equal worth?Do4600 said:
A:
The matter with me is that you're a published author of a book, a medium that enjoys a lack of censorship and allows the reader the opportunity to read anything potentially without censorship, and you haven't given anything more than a moralist's knee-jerk reaction than "killing children is wrong."
Fine. You're right. Killing children is wrong. But in novels, children get killed all the time. Films and television too. Hell, the Simpsons have done it on Hallowe'en specials.
You wimped out. You didn't complain about how the mod ignored the opportunity to learn from other media (e.g. horror works best when its unseen) and reduce the murder to an off camera cut scene where most of the horror comes from the sound, not the sights.
You didn't argue that by having mods like this on next to cat fetishes skins and anime eyes and whatever else modders care to imagine its only going to make the maturation of the game as a medium slower, and keep it mired controversy and tabloid moral panic for years to come.
You... just became another guy on the internet. If "Godwin's law" is the term for dragging Hitler or Nazis into an online argument on a moral topic, then there has to be an equivalent for its cousin, the other indefensible bastards, the child molestors.
Do I want a child killing game? Do I want a child raping game? NOOO.
But the point is, I want roleplaying games where killing is not the unique selling point and focus of a player's ambition and action. Removing kids from the equation as an unwritten default of an FPS social contract just means the status quo of if its a "first person perspective games, slap a crosshair on it at the center. If the punters can't shoot something they're not interested" continues.
With kids, it becomes "er... maybe seeing as there's kids around you should try take a leave out of REAL life when role playing? And I don't mean act like a high-school shooter that we're always getting lumped in with".
That said, I acknowledge there are other better ways of dealing with this too. When was the last time there was an expectation for "respect for the dead" in an FPS? Like informing the guard in the next village you saw a merchant get killed before you could do anything? Lead them to the scene so they can recover the body? Even see to it they get a good burial?
You have said yourself that you wanted a better morality system than the bastard points/boyscout points scale, but that won't work unless more of life's complexities are added to the game and their consequences are allowed run out. That will sooner or later include genuinely distasteful elements into a game to make a moral decision making have a real place in the players mind, rather than simply compairing which is their favourite ending or which result pays better loot.
If I'm being a whiny, ingrateful cloying fan, its because you've set the bar high and written consistently thoughful pieces. This seemed... phoned in.
The matter with me is that you're a published author of a book, a medium that enjoys a lack of censorship and allows the reader the opportunity to read anything potentially without censorship, and you haven't given anything more than a moralist's knee-jerk reaction than "killing children is wrong."
Fine. You're right. Killing children is wrong. But in novels, children get killed all the time. Films and television too. Hell, the Simpsons have done it on Hallowe'en specials.
You wimped out. You didn't complain about how the mod ignored the opportunity to learn from other media (e.g. horror works best when its unseen) and reduce the murder to an off camera cut scene where most of the horror comes from the sound, not the sights.
You didn't argue that by having mods like this on next to cat fetishes skins and anime eyes and whatever else modders care to imagine its only going to make the maturation of the game as a medium slower, and keep it mired controversy and tabloid moral panic for years to come.
You... just became another guy on the internet. If "Godwin's law" is the term for dragging Hitler or Nazis into an online argument on a moral topic, then there has to be an equivalent for its cousin, the other indefensible bastards, the child molestors.
Do I want a child killing game? Do I want a child raping game? NOOO.
But the point is, I want roleplaying games where killing is not the unique selling point and focus of a player's ambition and action. Removing kids from the equation as an unwritten default of an FPS social contract just means the status quo of if its a "first person perspective games, slap a crosshair on it at the center. If the punters can't shoot something they're not interested" continues.
With kids, it becomes "er... maybe seeing as there's kids around you should try take a leave out of REAL life when role playing? And I don't mean act like a high-school shooter that we're always getting lumped in with".
That said, I acknowledge there are other better ways of dealing with this too. When was the last time there was an expectation for "respect for the dead" in an FPS? Like informing the guard in the next village you saw a merchant get killed before you could do anything? Lead them to the scene so they can recover the body? Even see to it they get a good burial?
You have said yourself that you wanted a better morality system than the bastard points/boyscout points scale, but that won't work unless more of life's complexities are added to the game and their consequences are allowed run out. That will sooner or later include genuinely distasteful elements into a game to make a moral decision making have a real place in the players mind, rather than simply compairing which is their favourite ending or which result pays better loot.
If I'm being a whiny, ingrateful cloying fan, its because you've set the bar high and written consistently thoughful pieces. This seemed... phoned in.
From the general concensus, for purposes of dragons and being annoying little shits, children in the game deserve to be killed.