Here's what I think about the player character's ability to murder children in a video game. If you are unwilling to read this, society frowns on you.
I took an hour to beat the childhood level of Fable: The Lost Chapters.
For a great deal of that hour, I was beating the child who wanted to play with Rosie.
I'm not sick, twisted, or a serial killer. I'm a regular gamer who, at the time, was stressed and wanted to remedy it.
In Fallout 3, in detonating the dormant atomic bomb in the center of Megaton, one hardly spares a thought to the two children living there at the time, who are presumed to have perished in the blast.
We see nary a corpse, nary a pinch of bonemeal, nary a drop of blood, nary a sign that there was anybody living there before the bomb detonated. Nobody gives a care about it.
Video games are naught but simulations. Any overprotective parent would see a child being murdered in a game and immediately assume the entire game is a child murder simulator with no other aim and no story, only that you go into a populated area and slaughter waves of children. A game with child murder would be shunned and banned in this overly sensitive society, which is exactly why the only town in Fable TLC is the town in which you are not allowed to carry weapons, and why Fallout 3's children are invulnerable to damage.
People play video games to suspend themselves from the crushing limitations of reality and immerse themselves in an alternate, larger-than-life role, and they therefore expect their video game to be as realistic as possible.
Take a look at Pablo Picasso's famous work "Guernica". Look to the far left of the mural, what do you see?
A mother in emotional agony, holding a dead child in her arms.
Art is brutal.
Video games are art, and therefore should be brutal. Society cannot accept the latter until they can embrace the truth of the former.
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