It's not bad that you can't kill them. UNLESS you are stuck in a town full of children and you can't find the one kid to trigger your way past them... You'd think a mini-nuke on a child would result in death :(

Right, I'm sure it had to do with "gratuitous, unnecessary and cruel", because the thought of getting banned by close minded countries would never have gotten in the way of their profits.

well...Ugh. Touch touchy tocuhy. On one hand, I'm a douchey free speech nut, and on the other I'm a dismemberer of children >.<

Obviously they had to appease the censors, but it's a shame they didn't handle it like they did in the previous games. You can kill kids, sure, but it puts a huge black mark on your record. Not just a Karma dip, but you get a "Perk" which marks you as a Child Killer. And, obviously, most people you meet with hate you more than they otherwise would.

That said, they could have gone the route of not having the kids gib when shot. But somehow I doubt that measure would have saved them from having their game banned in numerous countries.

but you can still have sex with them, right?

For some odd reason it won't let me flirt with children in Fable 2.

Nailing a guys head to the wall is good for business though

Tino took the words outta my mouth. In the previous fallouts, each one of those little buggers would steal something everytime they passed by, all the while looking like goofy child-like airplanes.

They deserved death if by off chance they stole my last sniper bullet.

As long as in this sequel kids are just pouty little pieces of grimdark bloom, I don't care if they are unkillable.

I look forward to a black isle, everything goes mod for the game. At which point, I will become the plague in this capitol wasteland.

It's all a matter of context. If it doesn't fit the game world, and the mythology, then why include it? If it's included merely for controversy or black humor, then it IS gratuitous, and pointless. I like the Postal comparison made by Daxelman.

Personally, I'd be disappointed if it was included purely for the sake of it, or purely to appease the "free speech" nuts. If it was warranted within the mythology then it should be included, for sure.

LOL @ "free speech" by the way. What a fallacy.

"Free Speech" allows this website to exist. It allows us to have this HIGHLY intellectual conversation about killing children as a proper story telling medium.

"Free Speech" gives you the ability to be indecent. But not necessarily the right.

I cannot see any scenario in which killing children could be anything other than a destructive freedom in Fallout 3. In GTA or anything where you have real world morally grey dilemas (kill this kid or I'll kill yours) but in a game like Fallout, especially the new and improved mainstream Fallout, I doubt the plot is going to move in those directions. So why include it? It's a very unpleasant thing to do, children being innocent and all, and the only reason I could see to kill them would be 'for the lulz'. If you're going to complain about unplesant things you can't do in videogames, why not complain about the lack of ability to rape someone? (And to the it-was-in-the-last-game arguement, there's a difference between killing a small semi-abstract spite from a zoomed-out distance and killing a detailed three dimensional model from a much closer perspective)

Honestly, who in it's right mind would enjoy killing kids in video games. I don't see this as an awful censorship of video games and stopping them from making an intellectual point in the death of children. Even in violent movies, you don't see children being killed in graphic ways. Games don't have the background and age the literary media have. Games (and even movies) can't afford to go there like books can or they will get shredded. The particularity of the media, the image in that case, in very important when it comes to how it is perceived by the public.

As long as the kids in question don't wear tracksuits tucked into their socks, drink cheap cider by the litre, and give me lip when i walk past them in a park, then all is fine.

Otherwise pass me the biggest gun possible and stand back.

Someone will mod it in

I liked his argument:
"Fallout allowed you to kill kids, AMIRITE?"

I don't really care. I didn't plan on killing them anyway.

I suppose shooting the Groin area in VATS was left out for the same reason.

I find can only approach this in relation to sexism, because it's [not] funny that killing a prostitute is a *feature* of GTA -- GameTrailers ended one of their trailers to GTA IV with a shot to the head.

Generally, the real-world idea of excessive cruelty in a wartime scenario is the killing/abuse of women* and children. The reason why children aren't even given their [url="http://www.childsoldiersglobalreport.org/"]realistic proportion[/url] as participants of violent conflicts is because ideally we want to eliminate that aspect of reality, period, and removing it from a virtual form is just a natural step.

Obviously, the inclusion if women in the aforementioned notion is essentially chivalric, and chivalry is arguably rooted in sexism, but the double-standard remains. Women are abused and murdered often because they are women, and children because they are children. But it is because of this extra potential for cruelty (and for their traditional position as innocent bystanders) that extra level of respect is reserved for them in these situations.

What I'm arguing here is probably unclear, probably because my feelings are ambiguous even to myself. Even as a feminist, I don't think that sexism will ever be completely eradicated; I think it's too fundamental of a psychological and philosophical tension. The issue, then, is the degree to which we can reduce sexism's influence on the social existence of women in a civilized culture, that is, so it doesn't affect their lives and well-being. The problem is that, in reality, it does. The conundrum for an 'artist', though, is to what extent they will balance their portrayal of reality with their responsibility to their society (or, if you please, to themselves) to eliminate its woes. It may be that women are abused much more terribly in war, but is it necessary for artistic recreation to be fully portrayed? And if exposure is in fact a subtle form of psychological reinforcement (aka, 'This is how reality is, so I should accept it.') does a reduction actually have an alternatively positive effect on its society by lessening that reinforcement.

What it comes down to is, I'd be appalled if rape was an option in a video game, as I am just as outraged with its inclusion (and particularly the manner of its inclusion) in film and literature -- regardless of the fact that these are mere depictions of already real perceptions and occurrences. It's a phenomena that should be wiped off the face of the universe, including any glorification of it in art, and any positive mention of it in speech. You may have the right to portray it, or the freedom of how to say it, in terms of inalienable civil liberty. But it doesn't stop the existential liberty that makes possible the ability of another to tear off your limbs.

And I would have to suppose that others feel the same way about the murder/abuse of children.

(Another note, briefly: I didn't bring into my comment any mention of childhood as a modern invention -- which it very much is. But even if we reduce its defense as a defense of a mere social convention, I don't think this would threaten very much the direction I took. I guess I'd reply that the reason childhood was invented and is acknowledged as essential today is because of an expectation that it become reality, and that it is. Childhood is no less legitimate because it may have existed vaguely 200 years ago.)

Richard: Yes, that's him.

Albert Fish wasn't just a murderer of children, btw...