Do you think the harming of innocents in games depends on the genre?

[pulse2]

Okay, Battlefield developers have stated that in 3 you won't be able to harm civilians, which is fine by me, its not as if we are missing anything, bit pointless and rather morbid to be frank, especially considering the shit storm that Modern Warfare 2 faced for putting in that infamous scene, for those of you who haven't seen, here ya go:


And for good reason too, the entire scene is quite sickening.

But the thing is, there is the option to kill innocent NPCs by the dozens in GTA4 and Fallout 3 for examples, hearing them scream, bleed to death, limp away, all the same things, which leaves me wondering, what is it that differentiates killing innocents in FPS games to killing innocents in these games? Here's the question, why is it okay to behead innocents in Skyrim, but obscene and sick to bullet riddle innocent civilians in Battlefield 3 for example? When you think about it, they are no further away from home then each other.

EDIT: I'm not for or against it, although I can't deny there was something a little disturbing about the MW scene, still, pixels are pixels and if its okay in one game, why not in another? As someone said, why would it be okay to massacre innocents if it was a RTS game but not okay if it was an FPS game?

 

[OrenjiJusu]

It may have something to do with the fact that Skyrim, fallout and oblivion have never claimed the "REALISM!" title for their games, and people acknowledge that they are complete works of fantasy. With GTA all of the hype over murder has come and past, Do you remember when they wanted to ban some GTA titles because of the chainsaw weapon? or the fact that you can pick up prostitutes to increase your health?
CoD and Battlefield have tried to make realistic war in a modern environment, showing exactly what could happen if someone decided they wanted to do this. Its somewhat harder to accept that something that looks, sounds and feels like your home is not your home. Desite the armed men shooting it up.

 

[DustyDrB]

The only game I do this with is Oblivion. And only when I get really bored with it.

OK...and in GTA4 I made a helicopter crash to the ground with Carmen inside while I jumped to the safety of the roof of a skyscraper on my side of the chopper.

So it's not something I would whine about if it was missing from any particular game.

 

[torzath]

And for good reason too, the entire scene is quite sickening, especially when you start considering what it may have lead to (Norway massacre).

This statement seems to have been put there just to derail it into "Video games don't cause violence." argument.

 

[wooty]

None of it bothers me really, killing soldiers, killing terrorists, killing zombies/monsters/dragons/gangsters, killing myself, its all just pixels at the end of the day.

But in answer to your question, its a lot easier to pick up a gun and rail on morons in an airport than it is to find a fantasy land and beat someone to death with a battleaxe. Its all just part of the times and it seems to me that BF3 is just covering its own arse to avoid media backlash, MW2 couldnt of done that as the "No Russian" scene was vital to the unveiling of the "story".

 

[pulse2]

And for good reason too, the entire scene is quite sickening, especially when you start considering what it may have lead to (Norway massacre).

This statement seems to have been put there just to derail it into "Video games don't cause violence." argument.

I only mentioned it because the murderer himself claimed to have practiced on Modern Warfare 2. There's no proof for or against that, but it all seems a little convenient.

It may have something to do with the fact that Skyrim, fallout and oblivion have never claimed the "REALISM!" title for their games, and people acknowledge that they are complete works of fantasy. With GTA all of the hype over murder has come and past, Do you remember when they wanted to ban some GTA titles because of the chainsaw weapon? or the fact that you can pick up prostitutes to increase your health?
CoD and Battlefield have tried to make realistic war in a modern environment, showing exactly what could happen if someone decided they wanted to do this. Its somewhat harder to accept that something that looks, sounds and feels like your home is not your home. Desite the armed men shooting it up.

I agree with your point, but does that automatically grant games based on fantasy the right to kill innocents just because it's based on fantasy? Despite the fact it still has humans and may or may not have weapons similar to our own today. Fallout 3 for example. Would it make the massacre in Modern Warfare 2 any less distressing to players if they were firing arrows instead of bullets, or were in a castle massacring hundreds of innocents instead of an airport?

 

[Ordinaryundone]

It really depends on the game. Free-roaming sandbox type games, like GTA or Prototype would miss out if you couldn't dick around with civilians, as they constitute a lot of the random fun that you can get out of the game. Heck, I've spent time in GTAIV just driving around hitting people with my car so I could watch the cool body physics.

I was actually surprised when I found out you could kill civilians in Deus Ex: HR. It wasn't surprising for DX, I suppose, as the first 2 let you do the same, but because of how pointless it was. The only civilians you ever see are milling around in quest hubs, and as far as I know there is no reason to ever kill a friendly-marked target, outside of alternate quest endings or just dicking around. You don't even get chastised for it, outside of possibly getting the cops on your case. It just felt very strange, is all, but I know that if it hadn't been in the game, people would have flipped their shit. Even if it has no bearing on the game itself at all.

People are funny like that.

 

[hannes2]

First of all, I do not think the scene "may have led" to the massacre in Norway or any other act of violence, for that matter. I don´t find it particularly sickening or anything, either.
I agree that it´s rather pointless, though. Even if you disregard the whole "shooting civilians" thing, your sole objective is to follow some guy (you don´t have to shoot anyone) and nobody´s fighting back or trying to stop you in any way, so the only challenge is not to fall asleep. Story-wise, it´s better than a cutscene but I don´t remember that scene contributing anything to the story.

As for your question: The main difference is, Skyrim and Fallout are sandbox games (and RPGs at that). A sandbox game requires (neutral) NPCs to make the world interesting and most sandbox games try to give the player a certain freedom. Being able to kill those NPCs ads a bit of freedom. Not a lot, but since it´s virtually no additional work during development, so why not.
In linear shooters, like Modern Warfare, you don´t need NPCs. If there´s a war going on, a deserted town is just as believable, maybe even more so, since you´d assume it´s been evacuated or the residents have fled. If you want civilians, you need to create a scenario where they have a reason to be around and if that scenario doesn´t add anything to the game, why bother?

That doesn´t mean it´s okay to kill civilians in one kind of game while it is obscene in the other. I guess there might be a difference between killing a few of them occasionally and machine-gunning your way through an airport, but I don´t really see the moral difference considering they´re still piles of pixels.

 

[NotSoLoneWanderer]

When you kill civilians in an RPG there could easily be a reason for it. I killed "civilians" in fallout 3 but I always had a reason and some of them deserved it. In FPS games the whole point is just crafting a story around guns and set pieces so there's no usually no reason to kill civilians unless its part of the story but really the airport scene is nothing. You should see the things I've done to the fine people of San Andreas and the only media outrage for that game was something that wasn't even meant to be seen.

 

[Da Orky Man]

There's one genre everyone forgets about in this topic. Strategy games.
In Age of Empires, the best way to weaken you enemy isn't by fighting his army. It's by attacking his civilians and villagers. I don't charge right at his well-protected fortress, I go around the back and massacre his resourcing operations.

 

[Jordi]

And for good reason too, the entire scene is quite sickening, especially when you start considering what it may have lead to (Norway massacre).

If I were you, I'd edit this sentence out of your first post, because I have a feeling it might derail the topic. Also, I don't think Breivik's actions have been specifically linked to that scene or the killing of innocents/allies, but rather to the overall gameplay (because he considered it good practice).

Anyway, I'm a little torn on what I prefer in games with respect to this. Ethically, I think it is stupid to disallow players to do certain obvious things. IMO the player should be the one that makes the decision whether he wants to be a murderous psychopath or not.
I also like my game universes to make sense, and being immune to my bullets unless you don't share my beliefs is a little stupid.

On the other hand, from a more practical perspective, I guess some games have really frantic combat and it is good that you hit/shoot through your allies by default (although I actually do like it more if friendly fire is on). Furthermore, I can imagine that knowing who will live and die is a major convenience for the game developers. If you can kill random innocents and allies, they might feel like some sort of ramification is in order (which they'd have to program), or it could screw up the story.

As such, I don't really think that this is a matter of genre (although less mature games will usually avoid this kind of thing), but more of how much the developers value player freedom.

 

[pulse2]

Being able to kill off civilians it not exactly a big deal. It makes sense to include it in some games and not in others. Fallout or GTA just wouldnt be the same if you couldnt cut down random civilians. On the other hand in a game like Battlefield of CoD there is barely any civilians in the game so it doesnt matter.

It also depends on who you are playing in the game. In god of war you play as a psychotic asshole who has absolutely no regard at all for human life. If you couldnt kill civilians in it it would feel kind of strange. A game like battlefield however it would be kind of weird if they let you gun down civilians. These are pro military games and so they try to only show the good good side of the military.

And for good reason too, the entire scene is quite sickening, especially when you start considering what it may have lead to (Norway massacre).

This statement seems to have been put there just to derail it into "Video games don't cause violence." argument.

I only mentioned it because the murderer himself claimed to have practiced on Modern Warfare 2. There's no proof for or against that, but it all seems a little convenient.

Im gonna have to side with torzath on this one. There is a big difference between what you said here and what you said in your first post.

Not really, that's why I put "may have lead to", I wasn't confirming anything. I just find it convenient that the game he claimed to have practiced on just happens to have a massacre scene of its own to cause outrage, but I'll remove it if its really bothering people.

On to the other point: But you have to bear in mind that MW2 was trying to convey the evil of those murderers, how heartless they were from a first person point of view, in the same way that any other game conveys evil. As someone said, GoW would be classed as fantasy so it's okay, but is it really? What if they had made GoW more about killing innocents and less about killing the gods, just because he's evil, would it still be okay? Would it have been okay if you had to chase injured civilians down and cut out their innards or stab them multiple times as they scream out in agony, just because it was a fantasy game? I doubt it. I think the same rule would still apply, though I'm partial to the idea that MW2 is closer to reality and to "our time" then GoW is, and therefore is probably more disturbing.

 

[hannes2]

Well it was the reason for the war which three quarters of the missions were about. That level was basically the take off point for the entire game.

I must have missed that. Alright, in that case it´s only pointless gameplay-wise.

 

[shadow_Fox81]

There's one genre everyone forgets about in this topic. Strategy games.
In Age of Empires, the best way to weaken you enemy isn't by fighting his army. It's by attacking his civilians and villagers. I don't charge right at his well-protected fortress, I go around the back and massacre his resourcing operations.

i get really emotionally invested in rts.

 

[Rawne1980]

I kill lots of people shaped pixels in a game. I don't care if they are soldiers or civilian shaped pixels.

Why?

Because it's a fucking game and it doesn't matter what I do.

 

[DeathWyrmNexus]

Yes, because blaming the game for Norway is logical. The object is always the cause and people don't make decisions...

THAT said and over with, I feel that scene is more important because it is disturbing. War... is fucking disturbing. If we want video games to be understood as art instead of a childish diversion, we have to accept that they can provoke thought and challenge our ideas as well as our perceptions of villains.

If this part of the game allows a person to better understand the mindset of a terrorist and why they do what they do while still disturbing the shit out of you, then it does a better job than any bit of "We are right and they are wrong" propaganda out there. More importantly, it is more intellectually useful than all the handwringing cries for censorship.

There is never a progressive answer for censorship. If it makes sense for the story to have civilians, then it should have civilians as that is good story telling, if you exclude them because you want to control what people do because you disagree, then that isn't storytelling, that is censorship and sterilization of what the story really is about.

If War is hell but nothing innocent dies, then War isn't hell. It is simply a death match with AI bots. It might as well be Quake Arena, for lulz and fragging without the pretense of "realism."

 

[Apocalypse0Child]

I personally think that if you're going out to kill anything, then one death is as good as another, sometimes for personal rage/frustration venting it's better to pick on civilians, and you can just generally have a lot more fun torturing their simple AI programming for your own amusement. (That probably reflects very badly on me as a person, and makes me sound like a psychopath, but I'm not... really...)

 

[krazykidd]

I kill lots of people shaped pixels in a game. I don't care if they are soldiers or civilian shaped pixels.

Why?

Because it's a fucking game and it doesn't matter what I do.

This. I like killing civilians for 2 reason. A) it's fun , every game should allow you to smack ,kick,punch civilians( even children omgwtfbbq ftw) especially when you plAying/role playing a evil character and b) civilian murdering adds to the experience , especially when civilians are racist /dicks towards you for no apparent reason. But in real life i wouldn't hurt a fly .