Extra Punctuation: What Is the Matter with You People?

[bushwhacker2k]

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.

---

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.

 

[dubious_wolf]

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.

 

[theultimateend]

at worst it's just sick.

I'm not grasping this part.

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.

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.

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.

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.

 

[Zakarath]

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...

 

[FieryTrainwreck]

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.

 

[xqxm]

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.

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?

 

[The Cake Is Annoying]

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.

 

[RamirezDoEverything]

From the general concensus, for purposes of dragons and being annoying little shits, children in the game deserve to be killed.

 

[ThunderCavalier]

I kinda agree with Yahtzee here.

If you're going to have something as shocking as the MW1 nuke scene, or have the ability to do something shocking like killing a child, it better have some significance to the story and not be merely for shock value, and it has to be done in moderation.

For example, the MW1 nuke scene was so gripping and immersed everyone because you genuinely did not see it coming. It was one of the first games that tapped at the FPS perspective and told you, "Hey, since we're aiming for a more realistic approach, we're also going to throw in the fact that you can, and most likely will, die. Enjoy!"

But they took away the wrong message from that, and now it's simply there because it was good in MW1, and they're shamelessly trying to recreate the hype and controversy the first one created, ironically killing the entire point the first one had.

And seriously, do we really need to kill children in video games? I can understand having the 'choice' to do so, but at the same time, was it really a 'choice' that needed to be made? I can understand freedom and whatnot, but when you start falling into the uncanny valley and wanting to see children slowly suffocate to death in chemicals or screw children, then this isn't necessarily a demand for freedom as it is more a cry for help and mental rehabilitation.

 

[CodeOrange]

The thing is, that you just don't put it into the game. Obsidian Entertainment was smart enough to veto those... creatures in New Vegas. Let's just hope that they are given the green light on their own remake of Skyrim - the one that's not shit.

End of argument.

Speaking of moderation, wouldn't it be nice if dragons were put in moderation in the game? Yknow, if you didn't fucking kill one at level 2 ten minutes into the game? Hell, we would have gotten a much nicer opening sequence if dragons weren't so immodestly plugged into it like a subscribe banner on the videos of youtube parters.

But I suppose you all aren't actually playing Skyrim, but rather continuing the epic adventure of mindless wandering from where you left off in F3 or Oblivion, because that was a really good game.

 

[xqxm]

Here's a conundrum for you, straight from Fallout: New Vegas.

Let's consider two characters, Mr. House, the ruler of the strip, and Pete, the child responsible for retelling the story of the Boomers in their museum

Mr. House defended Las Vegas from something like 70 atomic warheads, preventing untold damage and loss of life. He also has grand plans for humanity, keeping himself alive indefinately by way of an advanced life support system, with the goal of rebuilding society, and eventually colonizing other planets.

He can by killed, defenseless and frail as he is after about 200 years in stasis. You can even disconnect him from his computer network and leave him to rot, a prisoner in his own body until he is finally killed by microbial infections months later.

Pete, on the other hand has no such bright thoughts about humanity. He makes it clear that he regards anyone and everyone outside Nellis AFB as savages to be shot on sight. He further describes that the ultimate goal for him and his people is to restore planes so as to carpet bomb people they consider to be savages, i.e. everyone else.

It's clear that these genocidal thoughts have been ingrained from the very moment he was born, and it's highly unlikely he'll grow up as anything less than a xenophobic mass murderer.

Him, you cannot kill.

 

[bushwhacker2k]

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...

I just realised this isn't the first time I've quoted you recently to counter one of your points. Huh.

Anyway, you're wrong - Child At Heart perk. You sacrifice one perk slot(hardly a huge deal), and you turn that town into the best place on the wasteland.

...???? What are you talking about??????

 

[Do4600]

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.

Are not all lives of equal worth?

No, no they are not, they are not of equal worth, this is evidenced by the fact that Bethesda won't let you end some of those lives.

 

[xqxm]

No, no they are not, they are not of equal worth, this is evidenced by the fact that Bethesda won't let you end some of those lives.

That's indeed how it would seem, and if you ask me, that's a far more sinister and disturbing prospect than just straight up letting you murder some kids. I understand that the games industry has the eyes of the sensationalist media upon them and really don't need to "child murdering simulator"-stamp upon them, but i personally fail to see the difference between murdering two equally defenseless and weak human beings.

 

[Weentastic]

I can't say that killing children is important to me in games. What is important is consistency and how a game builds the world that we occupy. Skyrim is supposed to be a game about choice and freedom. It frustrates me that they went out of their way to remove choices for me. Its not any more frustrating or stupid that I can't kill a child for an arbitrary reason than I can't kill many characters because "their important". Yahtzee seems to be really determined to declare himself more righteous than us, especially when he's such a proponent of games not jerking the player around during cutscenes and whatnot to make a point. But it's ok, i still like his videos.

 

[remnant_phoenix]

How about not putting children in games at all, if you can't handle them dying in a virtual world.

Would be better option than making them immortal.

In Assassin's Creed, where you can kill any person in the world, hostile or not (though you are penalized for killing innocent civilians), there are no children in the game's world.

So yeah, I agree.

 

[abhi]

Killing children in a game (as a modder, game designer or the morbid person wants to enact that in games) is something you do when you are at the fag end of your creativity.

 

[bushwhacker2k]

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...

I just realised this isn't the first time I've quoted you recently to counter one of your points. Huh.

Anyway, you're wrong - Child At Heart perk. You sacrifice one perk slot(hardly a huge deal), and you turn that town into the best place on the wasteland.

...???? What are you talking about??????

Was the quoting and the bolding not enough?

Since you didn't elaborate on what you were saying, I think that's kind of a given.

Yes, you can do something about the obnoxious kids in fallout, use the Child at Heart perk, they become your best mates instantly and that town becomes awesome.

I specifically recall getting this and using it and yet still not liking the brats.

 

[RedMage]

The best part about this article isn't what it says but what it doesn't say.

Innovation takes effort. It speaks to the market when a "shocking moment" can make a corporation go big and then refuse to make any more games. It's a consumer market, not an ethical or even an artistic market. I'll always advocate the art of games but not everyone sees it that way.

Skyrim is a touchy subject. There's something to be said (or left unsaid) about mods to kill children but you have to look at the flip side. Why are children the only creatures in the game that are immune to daggers to the face? Games(specifically fantasy and scifi settings) are often ethical explorations. Who made the decision to limit a role played characters individuality by removing friendly fire from children? While I wouldn't be killing children any time soon I think the decision should be left to the public.

 

[Mopbucket]

Okay Yahtzee, go ahead and call me a sicko that fantasizes about killing children, because that simply means you're a sicko that fantasizes about killing adults. You can't have it both ways. Either simulated violence is okay or it isn't.

My argument is simply that simulated violence does not relate to real world violence in ANY way, shape, or form. Apparently you think it does, yet you still commit other horrific crimes in a game world. I doubt you can justify that, so I don't think you can legitimately criticize these modders.

Oh, and the little shock bit about ploughing children for realism is obviously a feeble strawman. We don't play Skyrim for realism. If you hadn't noticed, there's freaking dragons in it, for crying out loud.