Moral or Limiting

I recently came across an interesting blog post on gamasutra. In games that are meant to provide you with infinite choices, games that you believe you should be able to do just about anything, should you be able to kill children. Bethesda studios says no because they did not implement this feature into Fallout 3. While the author of the blog I read disagreed I do not believe he is right. Now, I have already discussed my view on M rated games. You should not have to worry about whether or not games provide people with reason to go out and murder people because they don’t. People are already messed up and play games to satisfy their bloodthirsty ways, while normal people just play them for fun. So why should you not be able to kill minors in a game that is already as brutal as it gets. I watched my friend walk up to a young man in his twenties who was already beaten and bloody, a man who was locked out of a city because he was undesirable, and decided to shoot him point blank in the face in slow motion. His head exploded and we watched his brains splatter all over. With Fallout’s beautiful graphics this grotesque picture left us saying ‘Oh my god.’ Now tell me what is the difference between killing a seven year old or the poor homeless man, the difference is actually everything in the world. It would be horrible to see that child sitting there hugging their teddy bear staring sadly at you as you murder them in cold blood. That would be something that only the sickos out there could enjoy. So naturally Bethesda did not allow you to kill children. So who would honestly argue that they should allow people to kill children if they want, someone who is either a sicko or someone who wants a game to practice what they advertise, limitless choices and the ability to basically do whatever you want. The author of the gamasutra blog said that Bethesda should not have self censored and instead have implemented features into the game that would have larger consequences for your evil actions. In Fable when you are evil your characters appearance becomes ugly and people will eventually run away and scream when they see you. Not only does this make you think about how you will not be able to attract a spouse in the game but it also makes it difficult because store owners mark up their prices when they do not like you. Should Bethesda have decided to try to do something similar to that? Should they have said ‘if you kill children then their ghosts will follow you and make it harder to fight’ or something like that? I personally believe that would have been a really cool feature but that would probably have been very difficult for the programmers of the game and possibly could have slowed the frame rate of the game so that I would just get angry when there is lag. In the game they decided to try and hide the fact that you cannot kill children by emphasizing the many other features more and by putting limited amounts of children in the game in the first place. If you only see about twenty children in the game you are going to be less tempted to try and slaughter them. However, there is one choice in the game that actually does allow you to kill the children. There is a point in the game where you can decide to nuke a whole city (that of course contains children). That allows you to indirectly kill some children.

Now let’s talk about why history says we should not be able to kill children in video games. When Grand Theft Auto 3 was being produced 2001 they originally had the ability to kill children in the games. Then the events on September 11 happened and the programmers believed that the world would not be ready for that kind of brutality. So they removed all children from the game. They have not tried to implement the ability to kill minors again yet. Now I believe had Grand Theft Auto programmers left that feature in the game, that video games would be much different. Many games would allow you to have the choice to kill children, that we would not even be having this discussion because long ago we would have been desensitized to violence of that nature.

Tell me what you guys think. Should games allow violence as gruesome and brutal as murdering kids while watching in high definition or should they continue to sensor themselves. I already told you that I believe that they should be self censored(but definitely not government censored).