Vern5 said:
I'm reading a lot of comments about "The children aren't well written because they're annoying", which is fucking insane.
I teach Elementary school kids. Most of those kids were annoying little bastards. Don't get me wrong, every now and then you would run into children who were ideally intelligent and respectful but, for the most part, they were all Little Lamplighters.
The kids from Fallout 3 were written perfectly. These kids are used to killing slavers and Super Mutants so of course they are not going to think much of anyone who comes their way. Bad attitudes coupled with hard lives and childish instincts makes for really condescending brats.
The really sad thing about this whole thread is that there are so many people admitting that virtual children can get their blood up. What sort of self-respecting human let's a child get to them?
You could say the same of killing any character for non-utilitarian reasons in videogames. They're just lines of code, why should you feel violent towards them?
The answer of course is because it's a videogame. If I wanted to interact with people I didn't feel morally ok with bricking in the face with rock-it propelled nuka-cola bottles, I'd go outside or play a game not full of one-dimensional gits. And it goes both ways. If there's no reason to get worked up over annoying characters in videogames, what's the point in getting worked up over people killing them?
I'll admit that for some of the kids, like the rich spoiled ones in Whiterun, it does make sense for them to be kind of brattish. By the same token though, my character is (at least in some of my playthroughs) a ruthless assassin who kills unquestioningly for coin, favor, or even just the sport of it, but there's literally no action she can take whatsoever that will hurt or scare the kids in the game. She can't even tell them to fuck off or shake a dagger at them. The only response that this utterly despicable, sociopathic mass-murderer can offer to being insulted by a kid is to maybe play tag with them. And the kids know this. I swear they have OOC knowledge of the player's helplessness. As she stands there, soaked in the blood of 50 guards and maybe a dragon or two, gore clinging to her spiked armor forged from the bones of Alduin himself, the little shits pipe up about how she should lick their (recently murdered with a broadsword) father's boots.
I've met some pretty snotty kids in my day, but come the fuck on. Even the generic, infinitely respawning guards will acknowledge your particularly bad-ass or terrible feats if you're, say, an infamous assassin, god-like arch mage, or broadsword-wielding werewolf. Not the little snotfaucets though. No siree. How's that boot coming?
And even if you think it's morally reprehensible for any player, regardless of how they're roleplaying (or not roleplaying), to want to kill, scare or injure a character-of-small-height-value, there's still the fact that they're LITERALLY FUCKING INVINCIBLE. TO EVERYTHING. THEY JUST SIT THERE GETTING A NICE LITTLE TAN WHILE A DRAGON BREATHES FIRE ON THEM, TELLING IT THAT THEY LIKE THEIR FUCKING STEAKS FRESH.
And then there's lamplight, where the Enclave apparently just gave the (irradiated, probably mutated) kids bloody chocolates or something so they could pass and skipped on through without so much as upturning a pebble. Because we all know how much the Enclave <3 muties, amirite? They're such nice, lovable fascist genocidal murderers. They would never hurt a kid except for that time they totally murdered an entire vault and that time they tried to unleash biological warfare on the wastes and all the other times where they basically just murder the fuck out of literally anyone they come across.
Honestly, for most of the kids in these games, if they were killable, I probably wouldn't want to. I might even be protective of them. But when a game bends over backwards, shunning game-play, immersion, and even lore to keep a character intact, their face demands my sword.