After reading the comments so far, I think I'm going to agree with this. Presentation and context.
For example, if you have ever deleted a pic of a person from your computer, you have committed murder. That's the argument from one side, while the other side depends on the context.
That's a rather interesting interpretation (or denial) of what's been said...
How is the action of clicking a mouse button to delete pixels any different than using your mouse button to "murder" pixels?
On a side note, now I just gave angry catladies on Twitter the idea that deleting pics is murder and a law needs to be passed to ban deleting pics.
After reading the comments so far, I think I'm going to agree with this. Presentation and context.
For example, if you have ever deleted a pic of a person from your computer, you have committed murder. That's the argument from one side, while the other side depends on the context.
That's a rather interesting interpretation (or denial) of what's been said...
How is the action of clicking a mouse button to delete pixels any different than using your mouse button to "murder" pixels?
On a side note, now I just gave angry catladies on Twitter the idea that deleting pics is murder and a law needs to be passed to ban deleting pics.
Read the edit.
Perhaps the last statement will be most relevant. Your analogy doesn't work because a photo is not a depiction of violence/murder. It's not a matter of deleting pixels, it's as you already had agreed to, a matter of depiction and context.
In the context of deleting a photo of a kid, are you watching an avatar brain that picture of a child with a weapon?
No, you're right clicking it and selecting a delete button, or dragging it onto a trash bin icon.
In a game, it's a graphical representation of something taking place. In this context, of killing someone. Notably a child.
So, you want to say that a visual depiction of hitting a young person with a weapon is the same as dragging one icon onto another icon? It provides the same mental connotations, and feedback?
No, "presentation and context" matters. Which is again why we can "kill" adults all day with a T to M rating, but "killing" a child is a M+ rating. Because again it's a graphic depiction of a child being put in an adult situation.
After reading the comments so far, I think I'm going to agree with this. Presentation and context.
For example, if you have ever deleted a pic of a person from your computer, you have committed murder. That's the argument from one side, while the other side depends on the context.
Which, what happens then when there is no justification to the action?
I think that is when our personal morals kick in. If a book or game glorifies or celebrates something I do not agree with, I will make the choice on what to do, not by others.
After reading the comments so far, I think I'm going to agree with this. Presentation and context.
For example, if you have ever deleted a pic of a person from your computer, you have committed murder. That's the argument from one side, while the other side depends on the context.
That's a rather interesting interpretation (or denial) of what's been said...
How is the action of clicking a mouse button to delete pixels any different than using your mouse button to "murder" pixels?
On a side note, now I just gave angry catladies on Twitter the idea that deleting pics is murder and a law needs to be passed to ban deleting pics.
I think that's a very literal way of looking at it.
In a game, if you are seeing images of killing or violence then that puts a specific context to it.
If you are just deleting an image you are making room on your hard drive or just deciding that image is no longer relevant.
If you are deleting an image and recitiing some satanic chant all the while hoping the "real" person will die then that's another thing entirely.
Like Skyrim? Need more content? Try my Skyrim mod "Godfred's Tomb."
After reading the comments so far, I think I'm going to agree with this. Presentation and context.
For example, if you have ever deleted a pic of a person from your computer, you have committed murder. That's the argument from one side, while the other side depends on the context.
Which, what happens then when there is no justification to the action?
I think that is when our personal morals kick in. If a book or game glorifies or celebrates something I do not agree with, I will make the choice on what to do, not by others.
And as a studio, you need to be aware of what the majority response would most likely be, and how that'd affect your product.
Because again it's a graphic depiction of a child being put in an adult situation.
Have you ever read a book or watch a movie where a child dies because of the action or inaction of the hero or villain?
If yes, how did you react? Did the author make you believe that the situation was dire? Did it make you want to go kill children? Did you throw the book down in disgust and protest in front of the author's home?
Because again it's a graphic depiction of a child being put in an adult situation.
Have you ever read a book or watch a movie where a child dies because of the action or inaction of the hero or villain?
If yes, how did you react? Did the author make you believe that the situation was dire? Did it make you want to go kill children? Did you throw the book down in disgust and protest in front of the author's home?
I have done some research on the topic over the last few days and I haven't found anything concrete from a dev themselves but I have find some juicy tidbits here and their are found interesting.
Before I go any further I want to preface this with the fact that I think if the dev's think kids should be killable I say go for it. One of my favorite games ever is Fallout 1 & 2. Both of them are masterpieces as far as I am concerned. Both allow to murder children if it is your fancy. However, the reason why dev's stopped giving it as an option seems like it was because the change of the times.
The last game I could find that allowed you to kill a child NPC was Deux Ex: Invisible War where you can litterly shoot up a school. It seems though after the shooting of Columbine and after shootings at colleges were on the rise no game has done it since. It was just one of those things that went away. This is were it gets murky for there are 3 big reasons why most people agree why games no longer make it option.
1) The bad press. With most shootings video games are to blame most of the time. Most agree that if a game allowed you to kill kids it would give the government more ammo against video games and not only that but in some countries it would get your game banned immediately.
2) Backlash. I found a few people on reddit and other forums who asked the question posed by many here. Why not? The dislikes and hate they got was quick and sudden with only a few backing them up. Basically as one person put it. Killing an adult or an elderly person or one thing. Hurting am minor is a complete other. It could be that game devs are aware of this and decide that it is better to not even try it. I mean its not like anyone on here is not going to buy Cyberpunk 2077, Skyrim, or any other RPG because it doesn't let you kill a child.
I did find a game from 2013 that allows you to kill zombie children and that faced a backlash on steam at the time. Can't imagine what the backlash would be like now a days if it was just letting you kill children who were normal.
There also is debate if you can kill children in Pillars of Eternity.
Slight spoiler for Pillars of Eternity -
There is a quest where a community leader asks you to commit infanticide for him because a child has been born with a soul that has viable claim to the community's leadership. He doesn't want her to inherit his position because she comes from a different clan and believes that it will weaken the community as a result.
You also routinely fight "wichts" in PoE which are children that have gone mad because they've been given animal souls. It's pretty dark, really, but I suppose there aren't many people making a fuss about it because the game is isometric and you can't see all the gory details.
3) The devs themselves. A few people say its the devs that changed. This was comes from more of a political way of thinking. However, some think that devs of video games are leaning more left now a days and they are to chicken to animate a child dying or even making it an option because it would hurt the snowflakes.
I couldn't find the article but one of the first articles I read was from a dev who said that the reason why they never put the option in their RPG's is because everyone on the dev team had a kid or two and they didn't want to animate a child's death animation. That they were going to do it but in the process of doing so it felt wrong and made them feel weird. So they scrapped it. Wish I could find the article. If I find it in the furture I will edit it in.
Art has some good information to consider.
Though some context too. In the original Fallout you could kill children, and you also received a negative reputation for doing so and got bounty hunters sent after you, being flagged in the game as a "childkiller". In that game, they made a point of your actions having consequences for your deeds.
Invisible war, used it narratively in that the kids were being quarantined at the school and claimed to be "infected", with you then having to do the classical Deus Ex thing and pick a branching decision on what you were going to do as far as handling it. "Rescue" the children and whack the staff? Leave it be? Whack the kids because of their incurable plight? PoE uses similar example by creating a specific plot where the player has to make a decision focused on the subject and narrative weight.
Even the older games that did allow it, generally contextualized it or gave consequence/weight to it through repercussions. Other ones used an excuse to make them targets, such as zombifying them.
And that's a difference in later games like Skyrim, where they simply didn't allow it, because there was no narrative context nor mechanical consequence. It became a hollow action.
And yes, real world events have had a pretty direct impact on what's perceived as acceptable, and ratings and internal judgement on what's acceptable has shifted, because it's something that needs to be accounted for in allowing the game to remain financially successful and not get mired in some politic cesspool.
Games are a dominantly visual medium at this point. Even when they are not, their text and descriptive elements can be and are used to great detail. This translates directly into the same kind of issues any other entertainment medium faces regarding how you portray children, or anyone, and the kind of situations you put them into. How that affects individual and broader public reception, and how that affects the perception of your game, your studio, and you and your staff.
Also again there are some more hard legal boundaries nowadays. Again the whole "depiction of children in adult situations" thing. Not all nations carry the same laws around that, and what might be ok as a "digital rendering and therefore art" thing may be seen as "recreation of violence or inappropriate acts against a minor" and see real legal action against your studio.
What consumers do to/with a game post-release is not really a concern so much as what is in the commercial release.
Because again it's a graphic depiction of a child being put in an adult situation.
Have you ever read a book or watch a movie where a child dies because of the action or inaction of the hero or villain?
If yes, how did you react? Did the author make you believe that the situation was dire? Did it make you want to go kill children? Did you throw the book down in disgust and protest in front of the author's home?
Did you not just have to establish that there is both context and weight to the action? Did the child dying have meaning? Was it acknowledged as something that happened, and have an impact on both characters and events?
Ironically Monty just reinforced my point by offering up that Anakin image. Not only did they avoid any gratuitous depictions, they also contextualized why Anakin had done it, and how it affected not only him, but Padme and Obi-Wan in knowing what he'd done. It fueled the plot and the later consequences while also avoiding actually showing much of any child killing. Just him popping his lightsaber.
You would have been better off bringing up Bioshock, but even then it is yet again both context and consequence, as the more little sisters you kill it affects your game and results in a "bad ending". It's treated as a direct moral consequence slider, and shows you how killing them is a bad thing.
And he offered the flip-side with his adoring fan compilation. Player-modded element that shows how superfluous and context/consequence-free killing completely trivializes the fact that they are a child, or even a being, within the game world since nothing acknowledges the events.
"Presentation and Context"
Not to mention, you completely ignored what the point of "graphic depiction of a child being put in an adult situation" was dealing with. IE, the legal situation around the representation of minors in media. I noticed you decided to drop all reference made to ratings, and reframe it as a personal taste quandary instead.
To which end, what does personal taste matter if the subject matter is whether or not a country is going to ban your game?
Did you not just have to establish that there is both context and weight to the action? Did the child dying have meaning? Was it acknowledged as something that happened, and have an impact on events?
"Presentation and Context"
Not to mention, you completely ignored what the point of "graphic depiction of a child being put in an adult situation" was dealing with. IE, the legal situation around the representation of minors in media. I noticed you decided to drop all reference made to ratings, and reframe it as a personal taste quandary instead.
To which end, what does personal taste matter if the subject matter is whether or not a country is going to ban your game?
But, I also said in the glorification or celebration of things I disagree with is a no go for me. I don't need you or the government to tell me or others as a whole, what is acceptable or what isn't.
I'm unaware that I mentioned "ratings". Unless, you have me confused with someone else, can you explain?
That is what's great about a Free Market Society, nobody is forcing me to buy something I don't want or agree with. Wouldn't you agree?
Did you not just have to establish that there is both context and weight to the action? Did the child dying have meaning? Was it acknowledged as something that happened, and have an impact on events?
"Presentation and Context"
Not to mention, you completely ignored what the point of "graphic depiction of a child being put in an adult situation" was dealing with. IE, the legal situation around the representation of minors in media. I noticed you decided to drop all reference made to ratings, and reframe it as a personal taste quandary instead.
To which end, what does personal taste matter if the subject matter is whether or not a country is going to ban your game?
But, I also said in the glorification or celebration of things I disagree with is a no go for me. I don't need you or the government to tell me or others as a whole, what is acceptable or what isn't.
I'm unaware that I mentioned "ratings". Unless, you have me confused with someone else, can you explain?
That is what's great about a Free Market Society, nobody is forcing me to buy something I don't want or agree with. Wouldn't you agree?
It's the removal of the mention of ratings that is/was the issue there. As you responded to part of a comment that was about it, but removed the context that addressed it as such in order to address it in a different manner.
And it doesn't matter what you feel your government does or does not need to do. If we want to sell a game in a country that has such regulations/limitations, we have to play by their standards, and branching out a bunch of versions for different markets can become needlessly costly.
Moreover, if we have to remove such content due to a global release, then we cannot be relying on that content to be a pivotal narrative element, otherwise we are shooting the game in the foot the moment we have to censor it for some region.
We cannot be developing things just based on opinions and individual standards of what a person finds acceptable, because that's not going to play well on a legal level, nor will it necessarily play well to an actual market scale.
Your last sentence is, ironically, the very reason games will have such content censored or limited, because if people find it objectionable they won't buy it.
I think I'll make "Lord of the Flies - The Game" and watch everyone's heads explode when they realize they can play children killing other children.
That's a very contextually driven use of violence that was to demonstrate the atrocity of their decisions and how they gave in to "feral" tendencies. It'll certainly be niche due to compliance to ratings, but that's also much ado about paying respect to the source, if it's just wanton killing, then the worse part is more not respecting the story it's supposedly based on.
I think I'll make "Lord of the Flies - The Game" and watch everyone's heads explode when they realize they can play children killing other children.
That's a very contextually driven use of violence that was to demonstrate the atrocity of their decisions and how they gave in to "feral" tendencies. It'll certainly be niche due to compliance to ratings, but that's also much ado about paying respect to the source, if it's just wanton killing, then the worse part is more not respecting the story it's supposedly based on.
Okay, so it would also be fine if I made "John Wayne Gacy: Clowning Around" as long as I stuck to the facts of what and how he did stuff to kids? And of course, the player is Gacy.
Depends again on narrative. Are you idolizing the protagonist or demonizing their actions? Just because you play a person does not mean you are playing the good guy. Your motives for creating such a thing, how you deliver it and it's context, and why you'd present it to people all matters there.
IE, yet again narrative logic matters. Just doing something for shits and giggles isn't sufficient cause, especially with content that would see your rating set to adult.
And instead, this just demonstrates a dive into pendantics by you to try and justify something that really shouldn't be or need to be.
I can't be the only one that thinks it would be great to allow players to kill Plot cnetric NPCs and make it so that players screw themselves over, and dead end their game. Would be a great lesson for not being a murder hobo.
Also.. make it so that killing Children gets you put on some Bounty Hunter Lists, where some insanely powerful cyborg bounty hunter now it trying to constantly kill you, so you can never rest, or relax in game.
Egotism is the anesthetic that dullens the pain of stupidity, this is why when I try to beat my head against the stupidity of other people, I only hurt myself.
With the exception of Adoring Fan in Oblivion iv never had any desire to engage in such behavior.
Behavior of playing a fantasy video game?
Just because I want to kill a pixel child NPC in a game does not in any way shape or form translate to real life behavior.
If in game behaviors translated 100% to real life - we would all be serial killers and mass murderers
Reality proves otherwise
Doesn't translate but I still find it disturbing you want to kill a pixel child. In this case the same way people complain about characters that look like kids dressed in oversexed clothes disturb them I have often argued that those are not real children and have never felt that it promotes pedo behaviour I am oddly affected by the thought of killing children in games. I suppose you can accuse me of double standards.
I do not believe killing children in games creates the desire to kill children in real life however I am happy they are not allowing it.
Tell you the truth even baby animals bother me and I avoid killing them especially if they are very cute.
To me - children, people, animals - only exist in real life.
Children in game is a misnomer - that's pixels on the screen - same goes with animals or anything in game - they are not real they cannot be killed.
Killing in game - again - it's not real
To me the distinction between games and reality is so clear that I never for a split second confuse anything on the screen as being real.
So I have ZERO issues killing NPCs - because there is no killing at all - ever.
The difference between child, adult, animal npc is just pixels on the screen - they are all equally fictional and non-existent
It's saddening that people actually don't understand this and actually argue against it. I'm curious to know if any actual parents (actually meaning provide and care for your kids) are against this. If I were to make a game you'd regret even trying to shoot kids. Gun blows up in your face, permanently maimed, game saved and old saves deleted.
I'm rambling, but I hope I had a point in there somewhere.
Art generally has meaning. Be it abstract or otherwise. That continues to be the problem of the examples and why I keep having to repeat the same point over and over.
"If it has narrative purpose."
Gratuitous violence or other actions represented, without depth of purpose beyond "entertainment", is not art. It's not by itself telling us anything or expressing a deeper meaning.
Context, purpose, weight needs to be established.
Not killing representations of children comes up because of this, as well as the prior mentioned technical issues you skipped past.
With the exception of Adoring Fan in Oblivion iv never had any desire to engage in such behavior.
Behavior of playing a fantasy video game?
Just because I want to kill a pixel child NPC in a game does not in any way shape or form translate to real life behavior.
If in game behaviors translated 100% to real life - we would all be serial killers and mass murderers
Reality proves otherwise
Doesn't translate but I still find it disturbing you want to kill a pixel child. In this case the same way people complain about characters that look like kids dressed in oversexed clothes disturb them I have often argued that those are not real children and have never felt that it promotes pedo behaviour I am oddly affected by the thought of killing children in games. I suppose you can accuse me of double standards.
I do not believe killing children in games creates the desire to kill children in real life however I am happy they are not allowing it.
Tell you the truth even baby animals bother me and I avoid killing them especially if they are very cute.
To me - children, people, animals - only exist in real life.
Children in game is a misnomer - that's pixels on the screen - same goes with animals or anything in game - they are not real they cannot be killed.
Killing in game - again - it's not real
To me the distinction between games and reality is so clear that I never for a split second confuse anything on the screen as being real.
So I have ZERO issues killing NPCs - because there is no killing at all - ever.
The difference between child, adult, animal npc is just pixels on the screen - they are all equally fictional and non-existent
It's saddening that people actually don't understand this and actually argue against it. I'm curious to know if any actual parents (actually meaning provide and care for your kids) are against this. If I were to make a game you'd regret even trying to shoot kids. Gun blows up in your face, permanently maimed, game saved and old saves deleted.
Think a good example to demonstrate a point of deeper relevance here would be to bring up Spec Ops The Line.
Remember the reason that game gained relevance? Because it was one of the few in a while that threw the way people not just consume casual/virtual violence, but how we buy into the mindset of "that's just what we should do". It flung the zombie mentality in the player's face and asked them through narrative the weight of taking lives.
Certainly, mindless killing in games has its place as mindless entertainment does. Action films are much the sam . As its it's not so much what actions are being committed as it's the spectacle flashing in front of you like a enraptured toddler.
As soon as a game wants to deliver context, narrative, something to invest yourself into on a thoughtful level, it cannot simply treat everything as mindless spectacle.
Comments
On a side note, now I just gave angry catladies on Twitter the idea that deleting pics is murder and a law needs to be passed to ban deleting pics.
Perhaps the last statement will be most relevant. Your analogy doesn't work because a photo is not a depiction of violence/murder. It's not a matter of deleting pixels, it's as you already had agreed to, a matter of depiction and context.
In the context of deleting a photo of a kid, are you watching an avatar brain that picture of a child with a weapon?
No, you're right clicking it and selecting a delete button, or dragging it onto a trash bin icon.
In a game, it's a graphical representation of something taking place. In this context, of killing someone. Notably a child.
So, you want to say that a visual depiction of hitting a young person with a weapon is the same as dragging one icon onto another icon? It provides the same mental connotations, and feedback?
No, "presentation and context" matters. Which is again why we can "kill" adults all day with a T to M rating, but "killing" a child is a M+ rating. Because again it's a graphic depiction of a child being put in an adult situation.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
Aloha Mr Hand !
If yes, how did you react? Did the author make you believe that the situation was dire? Did it make you want to go kill children? Did you throw the book down in disgust and protest in front of the author's home?
Aloha Mr Hand !
Though some context too. In the original Fallout you could kill children, and you also received a negative reputation for doing so and got bounty hunters sent after you, being flagged in the game as a "childkiller". In that game, they made a point of your actions having consequences for your deeds.
Invisible war, used it narratively in that the kids were being quarantined at the school and claimed to be "infected", with you then having to do the classical Deus Ex thing and pick a branching decision on what you were going to do as far as handling it. "Rescue" the children and whack the staff? Leave it be? Whack the kids because of their incurable plight? PoE uses similar example by creating a specific plot where the player has to make a decision focused on the subject and narrative weight.
Even the older games that did allow it, generally contextualized it or gave consequence/weight to it through repercussions. Other ones used an excuse to make them targets, such as zombifying them.
And that's a difference in later games like Skyrim, where they simply didn't allow it, because there was no narrative context nor mechanical consequence. It became a hollow action.
And yes, real world events have had a pretty direct impact on what's perceived as acceptable, and ratings and internal judgement on what's acceptable has shifted, because it's something that needs to be accounted for in allowing the game to remain financially successful and not get mired in some politic cesspool.
Games are a dominantly visual medium at this point. Even when they are not, their text and descriptive elements can be and are used to great detail. This translates directly into the same kind of issues any other entertainment medium faces regarding how you portray children, or anyone, and the kind of situations you put them into. How that affects individual and broader public reception, and how that affects the perception of your game, your studio, and you and your staff.
Also again there are some more hard legal boundaries nowadays. Again the whole "depiction of children in adult situations" thing. Not all nations carry the same laws around that, and what might be ok as a "digital rendering and therefore art" thing may be seen as "recreation of violence or inappropriate acts against a minor" and see real legal action against your studio.
What consumers do to/with a game post-release is not really a concern so much as what is in the commercial release.
Ironically Monty just reinforced my point by offering up that Anakin image. Not only did they avoid any gratuitous depictions, they also contextualized why Anakin had done it, and how it affected not only him, but Padme and Obi-Wan in knowing what he'd done. It fueled the plot and the later consequences while also avoiding actually showing much of any child killing. Just him popping his lightsaber.
You would have been better off bringing up Bioshock, but even then it is yet again both context and consequence, as the more little sisters you kill it affects your game and results in a "bad ending". It's treated as a direct moral consequence slider, and shows you how killing them is a bad thing.
And he offered the flip-side with his adoring fan compilation. Player-modded element that shows how superfluous and context/consequence-free killing completely trivializes the fact that they are a child, or even a being, within the game world since nothing acknowledges the events.
"Presentation and Context"
Not to mention, you completely ignored what the point of "graphic depiction of a child being put in an adult situation" was dealing with. IE, the legal situation around the representation of minors in media. I noticed you decided to drop all reference made to ratings, and reframe it as a personal taste quandary instead.
To which end, what does personal taste matter if the subject matter is whether or not a country is going to ban your game?
I'm unaware that I mentioned "ratings". Unless, you have me confused with someone else, can you explain?
That is what's great about a Free Market Society, nobody is forcing me to buy something I don't want or agree with. Wouldn't you agree?
And it doesn't matter what you feel your government does or does not need to do. If we want to sell a game in a country that has such regulations/limitations, we have to play by their standards, and branching out a bunch of versions for different markets can become needlessly costly.
Moreover, if we have to remove such content due to a global release, then we cannot be relying on that content to be a pivotal narrative element, otherwise we are shooting the game in the foot the moment we have to censor it for some region.
We cannot be developing things just based on opinions and individual standards of what a person finds acceptable, because that's not going to play well on a legal level, nor will it necessarily play well to an actual market scale.
Your last sentence is, ironically, the very reason games will have such content censored or limited, because if people find it objectionable they won't buy it.
IE, yet again narrative logic matters. Just doing something for shits and giggles isn't sufficient cause, especially with content that would see your rating set to adult.
And instead, this just demonstrates a dive into pendantics by you to try and justify something that really shouldn't be or need to be.
Also.. make it so that killing Children gets you put on some Bounty Hunter Lists, where some insanely powerful cyborg bounty hunter now it trying to constantly kill you, so you can never rest, or relax in game.
I'm curious to know if any actual parents (actually meaning provide and care for your kids) are against this.
If I were to make a game you'd regret even trying to shoot kids. Gun blows up in your face, permanently maimed, game saved and old saves deleted.
"If it has narrative purpose."
Gratuitous violence or other actions represented, without depth of purpose beyond "entertainment", is not art. It's not by itself telling us anything or expressing a deeper meaning.
Context, purpose, weight needs to be established.
Not killing representations of children comes up because of this, as well as the prior mentioned technical issues you skipped past.
Remember the reason that game gained relevance? Because it was one of the few in a while that threw the way people not just consume casual/virtual violence, but how we buy into the mindset of "that's just what we should do". It flung the zombie mentality in the player's face and asked them through narrative the weight of taking lives.
Certainly, mindless killing in games has its place as mindless entertainment does. Action films are much the sam . As its it's not so much what actions are being committed as it's the spectacle flashing in front of you like a enraptured toddler.
As soon as a game wants to deliver context, narrative, something to invest yourself into on a thoughtful level, it cannot simply treat everything as mindless spectacle.