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Emil Pagliarulo Writes for Edge
At Bethesda, Emil Pagliarulo has worked on Morrowind and Oblivion and is now lead designer on Fallout 3. Before working at Bethesda, he was a designer on the Thief series, and worked at Looking Glass and Ion Storm Austin.
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I often struggle with whether or not we as game developers should have a heightened sense of social responsibility when creating entertainment.
Fallout 3 is an M-rated game—made for adults. Its violence is over-the-top and has been a central focus of not only our game, but the entire franchise. This is a series that in previous installments allowed players to kill children, right? When Bethesda first started developing Fallout 3, we had early conversations about whether you’re going to be able to blow the kids’ heads off . (Let’s be clear, with the ESRB’s rating system, that’s not something that would fly anyway.)
But then we began to think, really what benefit would there be in killing the kids in the game? It just seems gratuitous, unnecessary and cruel. The reverse of that is some of the great stories that have been told that involve kids. Look at George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire books. Kids play an important part in that series, and violence to those kids is an important part of those stories.
You really have to balance out and consider if doing violence to a child in a game is so important to your story that it outweighs any kind of social responsibility you might have.
And here comes the struggle again: At the end of the day, I feel like I’m an adult and I’m conscious of my buying decisions. I’m not making a game for an eight-year-old; I’m making a game for a 38-year-old like me, so I’m okay with the content. It’s really tough for me because I am an adult who likes to play M-rated games, and so are many of the people reading this article, as well as many of those who’ve been following the development of Fallout 3 since day one.
Maybe it’s arrogant to think this way, but damn it, it’s my god-given right to blow guys’ heads off if I want to in my videogames!
Nevertheless, I still think there is a certain social responsibility to not make things too violent. Fallout 3 is very violent, but the violence is cartoony. Sometimes you’ll shoot a guy in the head and it won’t explode; it takes the whole head off. Is it realistic? No, it’s funny, and it becomes cool because of that.
Of course, I think that kind of “humor” is open to interpretation. We’ve gotten so used to (maybe even enamored with) the game’s violence. Actually it sometimes surprised us when we’d show the game to a spouse or someone outside of the studio, and they’d respond, “God! What the hell is that?!” They’re really taken aback by it. We had been working so closely to the game, we would forget about the possibility of that kind of response. But then again, the reaction to it among others has clearly been, “We want this game.” They like it and enjoy it, so a lot of people are sharing the same mindset that we have.
We’re grown-ups, we can make and play something like this. We think it’s funny, we think it’s fun and people have been agreeing with that. We don’t want to cross lines like killing kids (we actually never got as far as even putting kill-able kids in any builds of the game). For us, that was a line we certainly didn’t want to cross, and we think that was the right decision. It wouldn’t have been socially responsible, at least in the case of Fallout 3.
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I often struggle with whether or not we as game developers should have a heightened sense of social responsibility when creating entertainment.
Fallout 3 is an M-rated game—made for adults. Its violence is over-the-top and has been a central focus of not only our game, but the entire franchise. This is a series that in previous installments allowed players to kill children, right? When Bethesda first started developing Fallout 3, we had early conversations about whether you’re going to be able to blow the kids’ heads off . (Let’s be clear, with the ESRB’s rating system, that’s not something that would fly anyway.)
But then we began to think, really what benefit would there be in killing the kids in the game? It just seems gratuitous, unnecessary and cruel. The reverse of that is some of the great stories that have been told that involve kids. Look at George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire books. Kids play an important part in that series, and violence to those kids is an important part of those stories.
You really have to balance out and consider if doing violence to a child in a game is so important to your story that it outweighs any kind of social responsibility you might have.
And here comes the struggle again: At the end of the day, I feel like I’m an adult and I’m conscious of my buying decisions. I’m not making a game for an eight-year-old; I’m making a game for a 38-year-old like me, so I’m okay with the content. It’s really tough for me because I am an adult who likes to play M-rated games, and so are many of the people reading this article, as well as many of those who’ve been following the development of Fallout 3 since day one.
Maybe it’s arrogant to think this way, but damn it, it’s my god-given right to blow guys’ heads off if I want to in my videogames!
Nevertheless, I still think there is a certain social responsibility to not make things too violent. Fallout 3 is very violent, but the violence is cartoony. Sometimes you’ll shoot a guy in the head and it won’t explode; it takes the whole head off. Is it realistic? No, it’s funny, and it becomes cool because of that.
Of course, I think that kind of “humor” is open to interpretation. We’ve gotten so used to (maybe even enamored with) the game’s violence. Actually it sometimes surprised us when we’d show the game to a spouse or someone outside of the studio, and they’d respond, “God! What the hell is that?!” They’re really taken aback by it. We had been working so closely to the game, we would forget about the possibility of that kind of response. But then again, the reaction to it among others has clearly been, “We want this game.” They like it and enjoy it, so a lot of people are sharing the same mindset that we have.
We’re grown-ups, we can make and play something like this. We think it’s funny, we think it’s fun and people have been agreeing with that. We don’t want to cross lines like killing kids (we actually never got as far as even putting kill-able kids in any builds of the game). For us, that was a line we certainly didn’t want to cross, and we think that was the right decision. It wouldn’t have been socially responsible, at least in the case of Fallout 3.
The only reason not being able to kill children didn't bother me was because I generally didn't do it in the games, but I do agree it should just be there as a choice regardless of whatever moral qualms come to mind.
I'll echo what others said: don't include children at all if you have such a problem with it. Rockstar did such and, whatever complaints you may hear about the games, none include "they didn't have children for me to kill!" (if there was, I'd find myself less-than-hesitant to get the person sectioned). I will admit, though, that I do find it somewhat contradictory that a game doesn't allow you to kill children directly (i.e. by shooting, stabbing, etc.) but gives you opportunity to blow up a town with a few in it and even give you the option to trick one into slavery. It comes off as having your cake and eating it too.
What bothers me more is the fact that violence against people in games are considered okay, but the moment you put a child in - you'll hear nothing but fits of righteous anger. Are people aware that children die all the time in horrible circumstances (look at Africa and female genital mutilation, for one) and that apparently killing an adult is apparently justified under some instances and not reflected on as "tragic" unless those people are considered innocent victims. I'm not trying to guilt anyone for liking violent games - I LOVE them - but I do find that this view has led to this odd belief that children are less susceptible to death than adults and are inherently innocent because of such, despite the fact they aren't any less likely to die than an adult would for the same reasons and that children can be as mean and cruel (perhaps moreso) than adults.
To me, entertainment should reflect some reality and if one wants to add children in a game that emphasizes survival out in an unforgiving and dangerous land, children should be as much a victim to the elements as any adult would. Otherwise, chuck them out completely and avoid being noticed for making a horrible design decision.
OK this is a little late but; surely the issue is that taking morality out of the game (when it is based on a karma system and the ENDINGS are based on said system) limits the game itself? How can we be expected to do what is right or, conversely, do wrong things in a controlled and false environment (which is why we play games: escapism) when the only medium it is possible in is morally neutered? I do not play Gears of War, run down to my shed and pull out the hedge strimmer and proceed to saw the local chavs in half, why would it even be considered that I would take a nail gun to a child's head? However I can understand that being slapped with an AO rating would have impacted sales of the games (and when them must have spent tens, if not hundreds of millions, that is very bad). It is perfectly acceptable to remove non-PC elements from a financial point of view; morally however killing a child is no different from killing a teenager or pensioner surely? I am sure that both are possible in Fallout 3. Censorship for financial gain is perfectly laudible, they have children to feed and lives to live as well. Lets try to remember that as well.
Socially responsible doesn't enter into this. The fact is, children are killed in every major armed conflict. Fallout is kind of about that, right? Existence in a chaotic world of brutal traders, raiders, religious nuts, post military industrial complex psychos, giant berserk mutants and other such violent warring factions leads you to conclude it's not important to present that children can die in the crossfire? Crappy old westerns had more balls than this. Also, every other issue people have presented here. Shame on this P.C. garbage. I can nuke a whole town for money but can not even accidentally kill a kid. Is that social responsibility?
This line will always exist: The line between artists that do art regardless of being offensive, and those who do art with some P.C., social awareness, ergo: playing it safe. You, as a publisher/designer, continuously help that line get traced... and your decision on child violence and DRUGS seems to be on the P.C. self censorship side - something your advocates wish were less so. The way you present your argument is subjective and judgmental saying that child violence "seems gratuitous, unnecessary, and cruel". Yet, you don’t take the time to illustrate how: How is it gratuitous? Is your assumed adult audience thirsting for child violence so much that you fear they might select your game as THE outlet? How is it unnecessary? Are ALL the children in post-apocalyptic D.C. good and pure? How is it cruel? Are they entirely alone and defenseless? How are you avoiding the line?
Do you think those people that blame GTA for their violent behavior are victims of GTA? Consider what your game is saying: Washington DC is, will be, in nuclear ruin... holy crap, I hope NO ONE plays your game and loves EVERY minute ;)
Moreover, but the violence is cartoony... really? VATS is cartoony? The deaths of every character in your game are more real than in GTA, without question! I beat up the overseer, but chose not to kill him. Now, I don’t know if the game "lets" me, but the appreciation of my choice would suffer if i became aware that I couldn’t.
These responses presents to you an inconsistency your players are reacting to, not because they want to perpetrate the crime YOU deem foul, or just spot Bethesda’s PR justification, etc., but because they feel it makes your world a bit shallower, your development less consistent. I wonder, what made people continue to play fallout 1 even after having killed a kid? I don’t know, but that is your responsibility as a developer... how to help players deal with all their choices, no matter how bad they were, and not reset to an earlier save file.
PLEASE be consistent when dispensing YOUR version of morality, your version of that line to cross, to YOUR players.
So, if killing children is "cruel", does that mean that killing adults isn't? Guess what, in the real world I can kill children (and old ladies, and cute little kittens). The fact that I choose not to says something about me. Choice (not the lack of it) is what builds and shows a person's character.
I could understand not including children at all (it would save time during development, since it would reduce the number of models, clothes, animations, etc.). But this decision is motivated purely by commercial reasons, and any justifications presented now are pure BS. Bethesda and its designers chose to sacrifice a game's realism and consistency to avoid any short-term negative publicity from a "self-righteous" moral minority.
It's probably a sign of how self-censoring and hypocritical (and bland, and cowardly) american society has become in the last decade or two.
This is why Origin RPGs (especially from the Ultima VI - VIII days) will always be remembered as milestones and why Bethesda is seen more and more as (yet another) maker of first-person shooters with inconsistent RPG "bling" sprinkled on top.
The thing those people fail to understand is that they're not killing children, they are giving a choice to. If anything, we should scorn the people willing to kill imaginary children, rather than the developers who give you the opportunity NOT to do so.
If the reviewers choose to ban the gam based on child-killing, then a question needs to be asked - what kind of sick people they are, to try and kill children, and blame everyone else but themselves for (imaginary) demise?
We are trying to simulate life, are we not? Why do we have to artificially limit this simulation? You can't be good if you don't have the possibility, the choice to be bad. If some artificial power prevents you from doing the bad thing, it doesn't mean you're good.
Bethesda, go die in a fire.
The thing you fail to understand is that the vast majority of people who kill kids in these games, do it for the novelty. Do it for the fantasy of being bad without the consequences, and having pretend guilt afterwards. So don't be so full of yourself; hating people who pull the trigger at a critter in the fantasy they are taking part in.
I honestly think that games, like with any art, has to stay true to itself. Bethesda's world should have taken the plunge and been as disgusting as it was supposed to be. Otherwise your sense of freedom is compromised as you play, and it's all just bollocks.
So, games can be used as the playground of some nasty people, just as the internet can be used to learn how to make bombs. But if they are ever to be their own medium, and be really accomplished, you need to be able to shoot the kids as you play. You have to tell your story man. Then again, I'm not sure, maybe you have a point. Because all art has the status side to it, the side where you know people will be interacting with it, and there is some social responsibility, especially if you seduce them into it with advertisements everywhere. It shouldn't be an issue in a Fallout game anyway. You should have included it. There might be some anger about it, but that is all just part of the journey. It's like, ahem, rock and roll, in that people who don't feel an empathy with the tortured, tearing, screaming white noise of death metal won't be a part of the movement. Won't be consumers or fans. That's the way it should be. If you want to make a piece with the ability to not offend any of the opinionated pricks in this world, don't make a videogame. Not one like Fallout, with so much dedication to freedom and substance and expression involved. Make a transcient game up like chess. Although even that speaks about war and empires and the human condition by manipulating us with the nature of it's rules. So if you don't want to stay true to your roots, please piss off. Or change. Release a patch.
And maybe while you're at it throw some of that euphoria engine into the movement so it's less broken. You have all that budget and you stick to the Oblivion animation? Where if you strafe you are immediately disconnected? And you can run on the spot into a wall, no problems? You've got to have a little faith in the new and the possibilities of the technology. Because what is that animation about? An homage to the crappiness in so many games that gamers have kindly ignored. And now you really have the ability to fix it and you don't? I think it's your social responsibility to fix that to be honest with you. And to release a game for the now. Try these things. Maybe put in a little bit of a physics engine too, where you could really tear it up. I think you'll be pleasantly suprised
P.S. guys:
Killing a kid is felt to be worse than killing an adult because a kid hasn't had as much of a chance at life yet. They haven't even got their own identity and grown up yet. That's why it is that bit extra cruel.
Gamasutra has a well thought out, thought provoking response:
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=20908
I agree with Simon Parkin over Emil on this. Children are in the world. They should be killable. If you didn't want us killing children? Don't put them in the game at all!
So it's OK to give kids a potty mouth but we can't kill them like we can anything and everything else in the game? Isn't that a contradiction?
You aren't selling Fallout 3: Teaching Morals and Values Edition here; you're selling a game series that in the past allowed these types of questionable actions to take place and the repercussions were HARSH. I realize that it was also 10 yrs ago and Fallout didn't need the ESRB's golden touch to be released, but trying to paint "violence on children" as "gratuitous," in a game that revels in over the top, "comedic" violence is a contradiction.
I would have preferred "ESRB said no" over this "imposing morals in a game where NO MORALS ARE NEEDED" response.
Maybe you can add DLC that will be a side quest of just child killing? Why can't I use them to find all the land mines in the mine field? THAT is something I'd pay for, especially since the children I've met thus far in the game are deserving that job.
EDIT- Postal. That was a game I loved for it's gratuity. You could mercilessly kill anyone and everyone... except children. I ALWAYS hated that fact. You could put them in a custom level you've built, WITH guns. If you did this, you were signing your death warrant as children are unkillable and invincible. Not being able to kill children in Postal, when you could stand over someone begging you not to kill them and blow them away, made the premise of the game less stable and less realized IMO. Same goes for Fallout 3.
Wouldn't it be in a somewhat disturbed way satisfying killing children in a video game similar to how it is satisfying killing prostitutes and grannies in GTA? I think the most fun I had was killing old women in GTA if only because of how wrong it really was. I think the same can be said of children, it’s the most wrong thing to do and the thing most controversial, so it by nature would be the most fun. It’s like anything you do in a video game that you're not allowed to do in real life. Need for speed is all about running from the cops, burnout is all about driving on the wrong side of the road, you even get awarded for causing huge pileups that would for sure end in the deaths of many if you were to do that in real life, as someone mentioned before killing the little girls in Bioshock (although they were sorta mutated killers). Most games allow you to do things you would never consider in real life, so why is killing kids any different? Oh, I'm ok cause I enjoy killing hookers after I'm done with them in GTA, but I killed a kid in a video game? I'm terrible. Movies are the same way (except the new Rambo actually had child violence in it which is super rare, but fit in with the context of the movie). Am I wrong to think because it is ok to kill pretty much anything that exists in the world in a video game so it should be ok if children fit into that? I guess I may feel a bit more guilty if it were an innocent child, but in games like Kotor and Mass effect, its fun being bad (in a video game).
Frankly, I don't see any problems here. I mean, take Bioshock. The player there had the option to forcibly remove the vital organs of up to eighteen orphaned girls, causing them to die horribly, for profitable purposes (by ripping out their vital organs, you can now shoot bees out of your hand.)
As far as the whole "kids lives are sacred in this game" thing - well, we've known for several months now that YOU CAN NUKE AN ENTIRE TOWN, presumably killing every man, woman, and child around. How is that more valid than shooting a kid in the face? Because they die 'offscreen'?
How about this - just give the kids guns! What post-apocalyptic family wouldn't train anyone and everyone capable of pulling a trigger how to defend themselves? And if that little kid starts taking pot-shots at you, would you still think that all their lives are sacred and all that?
I think that stuff like this sets a dangerous precendent in the opposite direction - we start thinking that kids are invincible and that even though they may get a couple scraped knees and bruises, it's not like they'll die. Now think that, next trip you take to Darfur.
After sinking a great many hours into this latest Fallout, I have to say that this overt violence presented all too often in the media leading up to release, has taken focus away from the true nature of the experience.
The funniest parts of Fallout 3 are rarely tied to violence. It's in the outcome of character interaction, and it's in the hilarity of their ironic views spawned by a post-apocalyptic landscape. And to me, at least, that's what will resonate when this veil of popping heads has been lifted.
First, I must confess to being guilty as anyone else as I play(ed) Wasteland, Fallout, and/or Morrowind (not to mention Bioshock). As I ride my epic mount around Azeroth, slaying horde and other evil toons, I often tell myself that the violence is no different than playing army when I was a kid (in the fifties). But times have changed since I first played Odysee. The invisible line programmers will not or cannot go over seems to be moving. Several years ago, a publisher attempted to publish a game of Custard vs the Indians. It was never released. I'm certain that a video game of "Lolita" (while having very low market value) would be hard pressed to find a publisher.
The author's remarks could be made for Roadrunner cartoons. They are silly, unbelievable and fun, but somehow did not go over the line of the fifties. Is Fallout like Roadrunner? In a very real sense yes, but in another no. Perhaps the line that is being pushed is not violence so much as the setting of the game that seems to becoming more and more of a reality.
3 quick thoughts on what I think you would need to do if you were to include violence on children in this game:
- For attacks on children, the game would have to eschew the cartoony violence displayed with villainous enemies. So no heads popping off, no torrents of blood, etc. You might want to even include additional audio and visual effects such as a sound/music cue that implies you've just done something that will have serious ramifications.
- Children would have to be only found in locations in which their demise could be witnessed by the locals (like in a town) such that killing a child will unless a flood of hatred and aggression on the player. Per what I suggested above, the exaggerated violent effects could also be turned off for denizens who are retaliating for the child's death.
- To reduce the likelihood of players accidentally killing children, I would have the engine actively force the player to miss when shooting at children for at least the first several shots. Another option would be to make the player always miss when aiming manually, and only allow them to land a hit if using the VATS systems since that requires a conscious decision on the player's behalf (though you might want to disallow targeting limbs or the head, and simply present the entire body as a single targetable option).
Allowing the killing of children in a realistic 3D environment requires a lot of careful thought and consideration. Unless the theme of your game is heavily dependent on weighing the morality of the player's choices, it may not be worth effort required to include the capability in a manner that respects the magnitude of such actions. Fallout 3 seems to be a game that offers a lot of player decision-making, but I don't quite get the sense that its end goal is a dissection of moral responsibility (which is fine, but you need to determine that).
The first time I played fallout, I thought it was thieving midgets
so I killed one to get my stuff back, then suddenly everyone hated me
it's only later I realized
"that wasn't a midget..."
perhaps the solution is killable little people?