Killing children in video games

Fallout's writing was never that great. It's not surprising the developer would censor its own creative work just to appease reactionaries who whined about it. (And likely never played the game for themselves, for that matter)

You can still kill children in a number of other retro series, though. King's Field comes to mind. I don't think there were any consequences to killing NPCs until the third game, and the consequences are still pretty minimal.

Also, Ultima. I know some games allow you to kill NPCs at the risk of triggering endless waves of guards coming after you.

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>98
>child killing enabled
So maybe 98 is the cutoff
For me, the more interesting question is why there are regular threads about killing children in video games here
Is it there one person here who has this fetish, or is it more common?

Transition to 3D maybe? It looks more "real" so the depiction of dead kids was more appalling.

>>3897824
No it's just I was playing Fallout 2 yesterday and then 3 or so hours ago I was playing Fallout new vegas and I wanted to kill everybody in the area outside the strip, but I couldn't kill the kid who advertises for mick and ralph's or whatever's store. so it just got me thinking when it became something that you couldn't do in games

Columbine happened and a bunch of other school shootings

You can shoot up a whole classroom of little girls in Invisible War. No one ever brings that up.

You can kill a couple kids in Deception 2 but one is a ruse.

>>3897905
For me, school shootings ruined the light gun arcade scene
Some of my favorite places got rid of Lethal Enforcer 1/2, Area 51, Silent Scope etc.
I don't need to kill all the NPCs in a game, including the children, but I miss my arcade shooters

>>3897924
it's a lot more fun to keep hitting them with the tonfa baton and listening to them moan while you're locked in the closet with one of them

>>3897737

Fall aside I can't think of terribly many games where you do kill kids. GTA was always weirdly devoid of youth and even Silent Hill only had vaguely child like monsters

I imagine that the dots in pac-Man are children so pac-Man is eating them

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Come on, killing kids has always been a bad thing to do. Look, even the Postal guy, who doesnt give a fuck about anything couldnt kill them.

>>3897737
It was never considered acceptable and even back then those were the few exceptions when it came to that.

>>3897737
A fetus isn't a child.

why do western rpg fans always want to kill children?

>>3898224
Because the only people who play WRPG tripe are edgy white teenage boys who wanna be le evil mastermind. It's fucking sickening.

>>3898269
WRPGs are mostly popular with goons, so, it's probably goons.

>>3897754
It definitely had issues but characters like The Master in Fallout 1 are god-tier.

>>3897905
School shootings are rare. They just get disproportionate and unfair amounts of attention when they do happen.

>>3898224
It's more that we want consistency.

>>3898201
pic semi related

>>3898224
>why do western rpg fans always want to kill children?

It's just the principle of having that degree of freedom in the first place.

And of course it's humorous for the would-be hero to snap once in a while.

I've played plenty of modern day games that allow you to kill kids, you just don't see many kids in video games.
They're usually used as plot devices or are mentioned but not seen, but the few games that do have child NPCs usually allow you to kill them.

>>3897737
You can kill kids in the original Deus Ex, which was 2000. It was just an incidental result of there being kids in certain levels, and it never occurred to the devs to make them magically invulnerable to protect the feelings of Concerned Parents. It was probably one of the last games where it was possible without mods, I'm pretty sure other titles around then were already playing it safe.

>>3898224
I don't care too much, it's just really bizarre when there's apparently no children anywhere in a civilization, and directly fucks with any sense of immersion when the aftermath of a devastating dragon attack or a botched attempt to do something with explosives in a town leaves the kids miraculously unscathed.

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>endgame literally is you going into a womb and killing a fetus
Wow, what complex themes and artistic vision!

>>3899241
>literally parroting tumblr story interpretations

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>>3899267
>literally incapable of understanding anything beyond explicit realism
Yeah, tumblr really stretched it with this one

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Older games had smaller budgets, smaller teams, and there were more lax producers who let their developers do what they want and if it made enough money they'd get to make another one.

But as games started to see more Hollywood levels of investment/profit with game publishers forming big corporations with share holders to answer to and marketing professionals given power over design decisions, it became harder to find a place to work that would consider child killing in vidya to be acceptable and not an unnecessary financial risk. After all, the news loves to sensationalize edgy details in vidya like it's what the vidya is all about, and shareholders who probably don't even play games see that news and get pissed off thinking their company is making school shooting games.

Maybe child killing will have a comeback with indie games or if there's another vidya market crash and AAA devs get their full freedom back (albeit with a smaller budget, but most of today's AAA budgets are probably marketing costs anyway).

>>3899267
This was way before tumblr.

>>3899316

Pic not related.

>>3897737
Postal was the last game I owned where you could do this.

>>3898224
I don't, but I want to be able to do it even if it means suffering horrible consequences.

It's just limitations on player agency.

>>3897824
JA2 came out in 1999
Deus Ex came out in 2000 ans let you kill kids

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>>3897737
Not quite retro but I made my Black and White creature so his preferred food was children taken from the nursery. My whole set up in that game was to have everyone either be breeders or worshipers. No need for farmers or wood cutters, by sacrificing a couple of babies it would give me more than enough god power to create all that for them.

A human's only job was to fuck like rabbits then genuflect for the rest of the time to feed my power and my creature's belly so conquest could continue.
Fair warning though, it gives them wicked indigestion.

>>3898201
>bait

>>3897824

It's a shitty form of self-censorship and it does nothing other than prevent a big media stink about it, which doesn't matter in the first place since media will blow up anything for more views. It sticks out because they're usually in games where you can already play a completely depraved individual.

why do goons always want to kill kids in games?

>>3898224
i dunno man. the first time i ever did it was when i came across a mod that let you do it in skyrim. before, i hadn't thought about it. well, ever since then, it's like crack. i love killing children.

>>3903138
>>3903138
It's accurate though.

>>3897824

It takes you out of the game completely when kids are magically immune. Let me kill who I want in my games, for fucks sake, I won't turn into a child murderer if I kill a kid in a game.

>>3899276
>>3899332
tumblr, starmen.net, it's the same difference. Same group of autists.

>>3903403
>It sticks out because they're usually in games where you can already play a completely depraved individual.
Not in Rance.

what happened?

The shadow of Columbine that hung over gaming for a long time and still kinda does

same reason they medicated the shit out of boys when we were growing up

>>3903571
>same reason they medicated the shit out of boys when we were growing up

They were doing that even before school shootings. I remember I was in elementary school and all the talk of ADD and giving kids ritalin and that was the early 90s.

>>3903586

Wait until you see the 00 kids brains. They're all emotionless unimaginative freaks with borderline personality disorder.

>>3903567
Not him but are you really saying you don't think that's a womb reference? In a game called Mother?

>>3903594
I have a 14 year old. This is spot on.

>>3903613
>I have a 14 year old
Wife, girlfriend or fiancee?

Probably because the American government has twice (The Senate hearings about Mortal Kombat/Night Trap and the GTA Hot Coffee incident) tried to regulate video games, so devs have to watch their toes.

What people REALLY need to keep in mind is that video games were considered children's toys up until Call of Duty took of as a cultural phenomenon. That's why you only saw all this child killing stuff on PC; up until the late 90s, only hardcore techies had computers meant just for gaming. Once everyone got them, PC devs had to be more careful about what turbo edgy stuff they could put in their games.

Also, cut this "artistic freedom" shit out. We all know that child killing in video games isn't some vision that people have; its just something edgy added in for black humor. It would be different if that was a major plot point that was actually speaking to something, but no one's being shackled under the bar of censorship to keep their artisan story about gutting a toddle out of Fallout.

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>>3903674
>What people REALLY need to keep in mind is that video games were considered children's toys up until Call of Duty took of as a cultural phenomenon. That's why you only saw all this child killing stuff on PC

You're partially correct. When you say "video games" what you actually mean is home consoles. Arcades were often frequented by adults and PC gaming as you even point out always skewed older as well.

The thing with CoD and Halo is that was when a genre that before that had primarily existed on PC's moved to home consoles which changed the landscape.

>>3903567
>incapable of comprehending implicit narrative
>accuses other people of autism

>>3903674
>tried to regulate video games
And were shot down like a nazi plane over Britain after being repeatedly hit across the face with this thing we call the "First Amendment" which has been ruled to cover all works of fiction.

>>3903674
>Also, cut this "artistic freedom" shit out. We all know that child killing in video games isn't some vision that people have; its just something edgy added in for black humor.

Here's a theory: The people who develop these games simply aren't prudish like you are. I would say this is especially true of Japanese developers. If they allow the player to target and kill NPCs, it might not even occur to them that this action carries over to child NPCs as well, or that it would even be perceived as controversial by anyone but the most prudish of individuals. So no, I don't think developers generally go out of their way to make it happen, they just aren't reactionary thinkers like you.

>>3903795
>what is the FCC/Standards and Practices
Actually, there's nothing stopping the government from regulating the content of a media product. The MPAA, Comics Code, and ESRB were the direct result of "if you don't shape this up, we'll shape it up for you."

Does a single PERSON have the right to free speech? Sure. Does a fucking video game? No. Products aren't people.

>>3903828
The point still stands that they aren't weeping about censors taking it out because child killing wasn't something that any of the them were adding explicitly into games as this thread seems to be implying.

>>3897737
Do the math you Columbine ignoratus

>>3903931
>The point still stands...
That was never your point. You earlier post made absolutely no mention of this. You're moving the goalposts.

>they aren't weeping about censors taking it out
Who? And how do you know this? Are you psychic?

I can only imagine that Fallout's developers weren't thrilled about their game being censored. Although I believe censoring child deaths was done only in the European version of the game, which might have been a quick hack by the game's European publisher as opposed to the original dev team itself. We could speculate about that all day, but neither of us really knows what was going through the minds of Interplay's staff when this occurred.

Also, there are at least a handful of retro games that allow the player to murder child NPCs, and to my knowledge, aren't censored in any region they've been released in. The entire King's Field series allows this, even the one for PS2. Do you actually believe FromSoftware was trying to be edgy with this move?

Is this another one of those "It's not edgy or in bad taste if its Freedom of Speech" threads?

>>3903956
>>3903674
Honestly, I don't think either of you have a point.

One of you is arguing about the mainstreaming of PC games, while the other is arguing about reactionary prudishness.

Maybe, no one gives a shit about children being killed in video games because its a complete no issue.

>>3903624
>the great carnak opens the envelope

"it says 'fuck, marry, kill"
ed mcmahon: Hi- O!

>>3899241
That's not symbolism, you dipshit, that's imagery. Learn to comprehension.

>>3897737
Bioshock gave you the "deep moral choice" of whether to kill kids in exchange for superpowers or not and that came out as late as 2007

>>3904232
Those were creepy zombie kids, though. Once you properly dehumanize someone, they become fair-game.

>>3904232
>>3904251
Also it was basically a cut scene you couldn't just pull out the revolver and blow their infant brains out

>>3897737
console babies complained

>>3904554
More like, uptight midwestern moms complained. Tipper Gore and Hillary Clinton where pushing for video game censorship before most of the users on this site were even born. And video game censorship wasn't considered a Left or Right thing at the time; it was considered a public menace vs. moral majority sort of thing.

>>3904643
>Tipper Gore and Hillary Clinton
>not a left or right thing

But your examples are exclusively left. And these examples don't even reflect the most vocal proponents of censorship. Exactly what are you trying to accomplish here, except to inject some revisionism / bias into this discussion.

>>3903608
Not that guy, but the theory has not only never been commented on by the creators, but it doesn't make any sense. Vagina's do not have multiple pathways, and the alien you were sent to kill arrived there LONG after you tangled with it before. It's just as stupid as the "Mario is hallucinating everything" theory, and requires the same jumps in logic to get there.

And if you can't figure out why the first game was called Mother you are a fucking idiot.

>>3905928
I don't think any of your points invalidate people's interpretations. I think it's pretty pointless to even claim there's a right/wrong way to interpret it, since the whole fight is made up of ambiguous images/actions/text/etc.

If anything, it seems like it's designed that way for people to fill in those blanks with their imagination. I think the "fetus theory" people point out some interesting things, but I wouldn't call theirs definitive either.

Personally, I think the entire Mother series is a hallucination in Mario's mind THINK ABOUT IT BRO IT MAKES SENSE

But can you still hit a (n another) kid like in Skool Daze?

>>3906245
They haven't made a game with young protagonist with other human characters in ages.

Unless you mean girls, in which case, yes; you can hit everyone in Senran Kagura

>>3898201
Gr8 b8 m8

>>3897754
Fallout 3 was developed by Bethesda, retard.

>>3898269
Please go away and jerk off to your cartoon women.

>>3908157
bernie lost because he's an incompetent retard and refused to attack clinton

>>3897737
The truth of the matter is that it only matters when it's a Western developed anticipated (hyped) console title.

>>3903406
boredum

>>3898224
boredum

This thread proves once again that WRPGs are a mistake and they should all die

How were pen and paper RPGs in that regard?
In the first two editions of DSA (The Dark Eye, Realms of Arkania) the starting module has an encounter with an Orc family and no mention of solving the conflict peacefully or sparing the woman or children.

>>3898224
Because there are children in the games. Which typically can attack the player. That way, you have an enemy you can't defeat. Either let the player waste a few children or don't have children at all.

>>3904189
I laughed way too hard at this. Thanks, Anon.

>>3908897
It's up to the GM/DM.
Your character can literally be the world's edgiest rapist if the GM/DM allows it. In one of my first D&D campaigns my character bonded with someone else's character because we split from the group to drown all the women and children in a goblin den and sold the survivors into slavery.