Chewing Pixels: 'I Kill Children'
November 1, 2008 8:00 AM |
['Chewing Pixels' is a regular GameSetWatch column written by British games journalist and producer, Simon Parkin. This time, a look at Fallout 3 and morals.]
Washington D.C. is a bleak and difficult place to eke out an existence. From the moment you exit the relative safety of Vault 101 and take your first lungful of radioactive breeze, it’s clear that Fallout 3’s development team has created a post-apocalyptic capital wasteland of grim authenticity.
Indeed, if a player harbours any sort of perverse attraction to the idea of living in an anarchic, rubble strewn, radiation-soaked America, Fallout 3 soon dampens it. These streets, or what’s left of them, are relentlessly hostile. Every can of coke requires a chemotherapy chaser, every rival scavenger you meet while traipsing over the endless debris would put a bullet in your eye sooner than look into it.
This is an America whose dream died a long time ago; whose selfish, writhing instincts were revealed in full when the blanket of social responsibility and respectability burned up in nuclear fire. But while Fallout 3’s America is a bleak place indeed, it is still very much the land of the free.
You see, with anarchy comes a giddy sort of liberty. Despite the hostility of its geography and inhabitants, Fallout 3’s world is pregnant with opportunity. As with all contemporary open world videogames, you are free to be the kind of person you want to be. Should you so choose you can steal from the poor or help them; you can speak with unshakeable politeness or unflinching rudeness; you can make friends and share resources or make enemies and take them. Post-Christian as well as post-apocalyptic, the sum of your moral choices in Fallout’s world is then represented by a karma stat.
But, as with any open-world videogame, the opportunities, while wide and not always binary, are subject to their own limits and boundaries. These are the restrictions imposed by both technology and premise. Technologically, you cannot build a plane from scrap metal in Fallout 3 and fly away to a new, radiation-free existence as a sheep farmer in Australia, for example.
And the boundaries of the scenario mean that you could never be a pacifist in this world. Instead, the choices you have are whether to sneak past the shotgun-wielding leper or to take his head off with a fat boy missile. The basic need to survive in a city whose inhabitants’ existence depends on depriving others of resources is common to every player, whoever they want to be. To play Fallout 3 is to embrace violence: it’s a dog eat dog existence where cruelty and murder are an inescapable reality of the setting.
There is also a third kind of restriction on player freedom in the game, one that forbids a particular action both technically possible and narratively plausible.
In Fallout 3, you cannot kill children.
Writing for Edge Online this week, the game’s lead designer, Emil Pagliarulo, explained the decision to restrict murder to men, women and animals in the game, forbidding the use of violence against children, something that was present in the previous Fallout titles.
“We began to think, really what benefit would there be in killing the kids?” he says. “It just seems gratuitous, unnecessary and cruel.”
Pagliarulo states that killing children using Fallout 3’s impressive engine is not something that would have passed ESRB checks anyway. That some violent games have grisly features cut or dulled in order to secure a specific rating is news to no-one, so why the need to elaborate on and justify the decision in the public sphere? Because, says Pagliarulo, the decision to self-moderate was a moral and ethical one.
Problematically, in singling out and self-censoring one particular type of ‘crime’ in his game Pagliarulo by implication justifies all the others as being non-gratuitous and necessary. Last night I blew the head from a homeless scavenger girl, one who’s barely into twenties. The slow motion camera tracked her head’s explosion before lingering on the crimson fountain spurting from her neck stump. Is this kind of interaction and feedback ‘socially responsible’? And so then what’s the difference to killing a minor?
Is the life of a make-believe child really worth more than that of a make-believe adult?
Pagliarulo states at the start of the piece that the decision was born out of a “heightened sense of social responsibility”. If the decision to restrict the player’s freedom in this respect was to in some way serve players with moral instruction then it sends players a dangerous and mixed message.
Bethesda has implemented half of a legitimate real-world law into a virtual world defined by its very lawlessness and anarchic freedom. In this sense it’s a decision that hurts the integrity of Fallout 3’s setting. Take away the freedom to commit atrocities within an open word game and you undermine the impact and power of the good, philanthropic choices a player makes.
This is not to say that a game designer should not seek to communicate moral values via their game. Videogames are all too often all about the ends and not the means. But self-censorship in this way removes all possibility of communicating moral worth through cause and effect, neutering the power and potential of the medium in doing so.
Self-censorship was the least effective course of action open to Bethesda if they are looking to morally instruct their players. Why not take the route less-traveled and try to implement some meaningful consequence, something beyond an essentially meaningless ‘karma’ stat?
Of course it is the route less-traveled for a reason: it’s a whole lot more work. The framework of systems and rules that govern Fallout 3 serve the setting: a place of lawless anarchy. As such it’s difficult to introduce a potent enough disincentive to murdering children. And, in more general terms it’s hard to make any game talk to a player in true terms of ‘good’ and ‘bad’, when the medium’s primary vocabulary is one of ‘success’ and ‘failure’.
In real life, if you kill a child you will be imprisoned and, depending on where you live, killed for the crime. Not only that but, insanity aside, there will also be heavy physical, mental and emotional repercussions to your action, things that will stay with you throughout the rest of your life. How can these kinds of severe, complex outputs be communicated in a videogame? Do you, as in Steel Battalion, kill the player and wipe their save game to teach a lesson? Or do you, as in Fable 2, let the player’s evil shape their character’s physical appearance, making them more unpleasant and ugly for it?
Videogames will always struggle to provide deeper, more nuanced consequences. Try to provide multiple narrative routes through your experience and costs will sky-rocket into the implausible. Restrict the player’s abilities in order to impede their progress and you have a weak compromise that offers little in the way of persuasive or realistic moral instruction.
These are difficult questions with few satisfying answers. But no matter what, in removing the opportunity to kill children in their anarchic game, Bethesda has admitted videogames’ ineffectiveness in providing meaningful disincentives and negative repercussions for in-game atrocities. That the team chose to carve the issue out of their game rather than attempt to engage it head on, speaks volumes.
Categories: Column: Chewing Pixels
15 Comments
I thing the main reason for not allowing the killing of children is not that Bethesda doesn't like players to do bad things. Rather, the real reason is to protect the gaming industry at large and the company's general reputation. A huge number of non-gamers are always ready to pounce on games as senseless depravity, destroying "our youth". These people latch onto any poor excuse, no matter how unrelated it is to the game's narrative context - see the hysteria over the sex scenes in Mass Effect as an example. It was decried as "porn" on national TV. These critics would be thrilled to attack a "child murder simulator". Bethesda simply chose not to give the enemies of gaming an easy attack vector.
Anonymous Coward | November 1, 2008 9:46 AM
Since I don't have the game, my question is - HOW do they prevent you from killing children?
Do the children just not highlight as targets, preventing you from directing an attack at them?
Do bullets pass through them harmlessly if you fire in their direction?
Or does the character actually refuse to fire?
It might be an interesting idea from a game design standpoint if, when you try to aim the gun at a child and fire, the character says "No," - not in a chiding, nagging, you-horrible-person way, but in a tone that indicates the character considered it but couldn't bring him/herself to do it.
Making it part of the fiction, of course, allows villains to use children as human shields, which is both nasty and accurate.
Whiner | November 1, 2008 10:35 AM
It's a shame since this does take away from the harsh reality of the game. In the first hour of play people are killed indiscriminately for baser instinctual reasons, and dogs are beheaded with no consequence.
The creators could have easily worked the repercussions of becoming a child killer into the game. By having the NPCs recognize the player as such one would be prevented from dealing with merchants, denied participation in a quests, or being locked out of towns.
In this case real world public relations and censorship hurt the fictional world of Fallout.
TS | November 1, 2008 2:28 PM
"The creators could have easily worked the repercussions of becoming a child killer into the game."
It's unlikely that the general, non-gaming public would be able to separate the consequences from the act. The press, for example, continuously parrots the idea that you can indiscriminately kill people in GTA, yet never mentions the game has "wanted" levels to (somewhat) punish that behavior.
And self-censorship isn't censorship.
You can't do everything in any game. Adding a whole "child killer" aspect of the game would, in fact, be rewarding players by acknowledging and creating a response to the act. You could make similar suggestions that they should include rape options, or you could become a racist or pedophile. But in order to add those systems, the developer has to go down some pretty sick paths and implement systems that may cross a line for the developer.
steve | November 1, 2008 2:56 PM
Nice article!
No thorough analysis of the moral status of game actions can be undertaken without a larger understanding of the general issues of representation in games. If we aren't careful we run the risk of simply re-running all the old gameplay vs. narrative arguments in a new disguise.
Fallout 3 is a game of resource management, exploration, strategic decision-making, and tactical skill. It's also a game of procedural storytelling and interactive narrative. No matter how immersive a game is, players are pretty good at understanding that these are two related but non-identical overlapping systems.
Avoiding killing a certain type of game unit because of what it's called or what it looks like is essentially a purely narrative choice. We do it in order to push the story in a certain direction.
The moral weight of narrative decisions has to be understood within a narrative context. If the player is a kind of performer within a procedural narrative, then perhaps we should judge their actions the way we judge those of actors who play murderers or authors who kill off their characters. The point here is that we typically *don't* judge the moral weight of these types of actions.
Consider these four scenarios:
- Playing Chess with a Simpson's Chess set, you capture your opponent's pawn, which looks like baby Maggie.
- As part of a personality profile quiz you read a scenario involving a child in danger, you picture yourself in the situation, imagine what you would actually do, and pick honestly from a set of possible actions.
- You are directing a film in which a there is a scene where a child is kidnapped and their life is threatened.
- You are playing a game with your own child in which you chase them around the house shouting "Rawwrrr! I'm going to eat you up!"
It is obvious that the moral content of these actions is not only very different, but different in important fundamental, essential ways.
But it seems to me that the people who are designing moral dilemmas into their videogames aren't thinking about these differences and how they relate to each other. Instead a general attitude of "simulationism" assumes that all of these things are ground up into a virtual reality mush in which player actions in a game are just "sort of like" real-world actions in some vague way, and if narrative choices have gameplay effects that this will automatically create interesting dilemmas.
One final thought...
"Videogames are all too often all about the ends and not the means."
Isn't it the exact opposite? Real life is governed by ends. In games, the ends are entirely arbitrary, so that we observe, experience, and enjoy the means for their own sake.
Frank Lantz | November 1, 2008 4:19 PM
I agree, Pagliarulo's article about not allowing child-killing is sort of odd. Frankly there's absolutely no way the game could have been released with the ability to harm children, it's not a choice the developers got to make. I find it troubling that our moral restrictions on games are so arbitrary but I can live with it. That, and the headshot slo-mo is pretty sweet looking.
Fable 2 also has fairly strict child protection in it. Particularly for sex. You can seduce men in the game, you can seduce women, you can have three-ways and polygamy and murder your wife. But it's impossible to flirt with or seduce a child. That section of the emote tree is just not present. Of course it's obvious why pedophilia isn't allowed in the game, but it's interesting that so many other sexual options are allowed without much public protest.
(To answer your question, Whiner, it's just not possible to damage children in Fallout 3. Bullets go through them, they're immune to mini-nuke splash damage, etc. Shooting one doesn't even cause any alarm in nearby guards, it's like it never happened.)
Nelson | November 1, 2008 6:05 PM
The main reason Bethsoft didn't include child killing in this game is because they already took heavy heat for that little topless fiasco in Oblivion that everyone's happily forgotten about. They're once bitten and twice shy to try anything that could possibly bite them in the ass again.
Besides, there's plenty of dead kids in the game if you look around certain dungeons.
A small guy in the corner | November 1, 2008 11:40 PM
Oh come on, there's plenty if moral choices in the game - nuke megaton, killing all its inhabitants or not for one.
Picking on something so insular as not being able to kill children in a game, is a smite low.
DM Osbon | November 2, 2008 3:56 AM
"Bethesda simply chose not to give the enemies of gaming an easy attack vector."
Did they? Well, good luck establishing your favorite media as a respected one. Accepting this is accepting that video games will never be something other than a stupid, childish hobby.
ilker | November 2, 2008 10:15 AM
Fallout 1 & 2 both featured child killing.
As I recall, killing a child not only dramatically lowered your karma, but gave you the title of "child-killer," triggering new random encounters with power-armored bounty hunters wielding some of the strongest weapons in the game. Even for a powerful character with comparable equipment, these encounters were almost always a death sentence. Moreover, once branded a "child-killer," no amount of good work could remove the title. You were marked for life.
In light of this, I'm afraid I can't give Bethesda any credit for its "moral" stance on this issue. Good games are, at heart, meditations on action and consequence. Black Isle understood this in Fallout 1 & 2, and chose to attach severe, believable consequences to child-killing. Like in real life, child-killing has no benefits, and extensive negative consequences. If Bethesda was a more creative development team, they would have found a way to imbed their moral objection to child-killing in the game, rather than hurting the believability of the Fallout 3 world by clumsily avoiding the whole issue.
aesquire | November 2, 2008 12:58 PM
"Like in real life, child-killing has no benefits, and extensive negative consequences."
And yet this has nothing to do with why, in real life, we don't kill children. Do you avoid killing children because the payoff isn't worth the penalty? No, you do it because you're not a psychopath.
I don't see how attaching severe gameplay punishments to morally repugnant actions is necessarily an obvious best solution. Sure, it's one way to do it, but let's not pretend it's a natural or accurate way to model morality. Making certain game actions "unthinkable" seems closer, to me, to a model of how morality actually functions in our actual lives.
Frank Lantz | November 2, 2008 1:29 PM
"I don't see how attaching severe gameplay punishments to morally repugnant actions is necessarily an obvious best solution. Sure, it's one way to do it, but let's not pretend it's a natural or accurate way to model morality. Making certain game actions "unthinkable" seems closer, to me, to a model of how morality actually functions in our actual lives."
I think the author of this piece did a good job explaining how the in-game consequences of moral choices and the game's believability are linked, so I'll refer you to what he said:
"Bethesda has implemented half of a legitimate real-world law into a virtual world defined by its very lawlessness and anarchic freedom. In this sense it’s a decision that hurts the integrity of Fallout 3’s setting. Take away the freedom to commit atrocities within an open word game and you undermine the impact and power of the good, philanthropic choices a player makes.
This is not to say that a game designer should not seek to communicate moral values via their game. Videogames are all too often all about the ends and not the means. But self-censorship in this way removes all possibility of communicating moral worth through cause and effect, neutering the power and potential of the medium in doing so."
aesquire | November 2, 2008 3:15 PM
I think running around your house shouting "Rrawr, I'm going to eat you up" is a perfectly legitimate parenting strategy.
I mean, that's what my dad did and I turned out okay.
In regards to the debate: The question to me is, what do I get/not get out of child killing? I don't know very many people who are so wrapped up in their character as an extension of their own decisions that they feel bad doing something they wouldn't do. Maybe these people exist, but certainly a large percentage of players are simply looking at the pros and cons of killing a kid. If there's only negative gameplay reprecussions, it becomes a form of self-imposed handicap.
On the other hand, if it's exploitable in some way, or makes people with powerful items (which I can pick up) chase after me, then I'll do it without a second thought.
Am I alone in the opinion that "moral decisions for the sake of moral decisions" in games like Fallout 3 and Bioshock are ultimately weak forms choose-your-own-adventure?
jlantz | November 2, 2008 11:16 PM
Oh for goodness' sake. This is an issue that means nothing except for game snobs. There are better things to do with your time than writing essays about why you are or are not outraged about the lack of child-killing in Fallout 3.
Jesse | November 3, 2008 7:43 AM
Hey idiots! The ESRB would not allow a game to come out for a major console where you killed children. Sorry guys don't know what dream planet you are from. It may make it to PC but never to 360 or PS3. This is because of censorship not from the developer but from the entire outside world. Every country has a ratings system and last time I checked child killing would have got you an "AO" rating universally.
Josh | November 15, 2008 6:25 PM