Ferisar said:
I can't agree with this. I also can't agree with how people are reacting to the child in ME3, which was a giant fucking obvious plot sign that said "Hey, Earth is fucked, here's how we're going to make Shepard REMEMBER that Earth is fucked. Because, all throughout his star campaign children don't just get mercilessly blown up in front of him without even a second thought."
A child is not a small adult. A child is a child. To pretend otherwise is mental. A PERSON, sure, but a very impressionable, very dependent on conditioning and environment, and generally innocent. A shitty adult is someone who's so desensitized to the world they have the gall to call children just some little shits who wet the bed every now and then. Humans are the product of their environment, if you want children to be strong and not helpless, you're not going to find too many outside of borderline fantasy. When the "child stereotype" is being used, it's not because a child is like a grown woman or a grown man, they aren't out there to prove anything to you. They ARE helpless, or scared or otherwise. They have trouble because they haven't made the mistakes to learn anything from yet.
And as far as not being invested in a plight of a parent in search of their kid: no. It's the same thing as every other "____ in distress", except this one makes sense. Just because you don't have emotional attachment to a character does not mean you can't sympathize with such a loss when the parents are losing their mind over THEIR SON OR DAUGHTER. You can't sympathize WITH THE KID, sure, but that's the thing you should be complaining about. A parent who isn't upset about their kid being stolen is utterly freaking ridiculous. It's how NORMAL people work, because normal people get upset about their offspring suddenly up and vanishing.
If you need more exposition on a child, sure, ask for it. If you want more diversity in some child characters, yeah, fine. But don't pretend for even a second that they aren't what they are the majority of the time: fairly simple, fairly helpless, and have very little personal motivation that wouldn't already relate to a known conflict within the family. Values and personality types all come from somewhere, and that all can be covered, again, in exposition.
EDIT:
And I'm not saying there's no value in this, but this ridiculously aggressive view of the matter is just... bothersome. A plea for good characters I can understand, but kids innately aren't that good of characters. The only thing you can gain from them most of the time is how they learn to approach new issues which the medium they're put in is presented. Some can be portrayed as little shits or melodramatic because those types of people exist. To not acknowledge that is... well, lying to yourself?
I am not sure I follow you. You are telling that is wrong for people to react negatively toward an obvious plot device, as you call it yourself? It is manipulative, that's why a child was picked for that role, and that's why people don't like it, because it's cheap.
A child is not a small adult, but mature children aren't so rare, either. Also, children learn quickly, and can adapt better than adults to a lot of situations, even if they lack the physical strength required to survive alone. Children throughout history had to partecipate to wars (even today, children are forced to be soldiers in several countries), there are slums in this world that have children survive as thieves, pickpocketers and beggars. Of course, if we talk of children from 0 to 7-8 years, it's unlikely for them to be able to do everything on their own, but you are selling them short if you believe that they are as helpless as you make them to be (also, you don't necessarily need to learn from mistakes, but this is another story).
I can't talk about Heavy Rain, so I am just going to say what I think Jim meant with that: in a game, players take an active role, unlike in movies, so to motivate them to act, you must give them something to care about. If the child doesn't get to play a big enough role in the game, the players won't be able to relate on the matter on a personal level. The fact that you can push your personal experience to substitute for the inadequacies of the plot doesn't make it a good plot, and in fact it cuts a lot of people from establishing a connection with the narrative. I don't think the point here was being unable to relate to the parents, but the fact that the sole driver of the narrative was someone (the child) we didn't know or cared about.
I just don't know what kind of children you have been around, or if I was blessed, but even the most whiny brats show clear signs of intelligence and initiative, even if in a roundabout, manipulative way (the child that cries because he wants a toy and you said him no, do so because they expect to get what they want when they cry, as this is what they are used to. If their parents are level-headed, he will learn the lesson soon enough, and won't cry for something like that forever. Children grow as long as their parents allow them to). You can also reason with kids, they aren't all so self-centered that they won't understand that context matters.
Also, this is fiction. Even if such a portrayal was the correct one (and I don't think it is), there is the matter that such "characters" won't make for an interesting narrative. They become just "obstacles" put in the way of the true characters, as they have to deal with them as well as with the task at hand, and frankly, add little to nothing to the whole. Not all kids should be "small adults" as you said, but the other end of the spectrum isn't good at all, either.