Living in the Age of Innocence

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (Skyrim), despite its liberal violence, does not allow depicted children to die, by fault of the player's character (or avatar), NPCs (non-player characters) or the environment. Because of this, a player going by the name of Kharmah published a mod, 'Killable Children', on the Steam Workshop that disposes of this restriction. Needless to say, this caused quite a controversy, with supporters of its release pointing out improved realism and freedom for the player, and others raising morals and ethics against it.

The ingame killing of children, with the special status their real-life counterparts enjoy, is a contentious issue for many computer game developers, who are well concerned about their business and social standing. In forming an opinion on it, two matters should be considered:

1. Whether the killing of real-life children is unethical
2. Whether the killing of ingame children raises material real-life consequences.

Especially heinous
Almost anyone of sound mind would agree that killing a fellow human being is immoral. In reaching that conclusion, it may be raised that life is sacred, that every human being has a natural right to it from birth, that every member of Homo sapiens has a duty to further the species, or that one's automatic dignity and self-worth is to be respected. Indeed, virtually all governments on Earth outlaw homicidal acts, be it murder, manslaughter or (in many cases) assisting in suicide. With unnatural adult death depicted so frequently in print, cinematographic film and computer games and that of children rather rare, one may wonder what makes the latter an exception.

Computer Games as Literature

Despite the bad press that video (computer) games get, they still are a multimedia text type. Utilising all five components of media (text, still images, audio, animation and video), they combine them along with interactivity in a way rarely seen with other forms of literature. This combination gives it great potential for immersive and effective storytelling.

Considering that, I will treat computer games as fictional literature and engage in a summary kind of literary analysis. To help with this, I will pretend to try to convince a public library to include some examples as part of their collections. Please note that, because of strict licensing requirements, this is often not actually practical, despite a strong supporting case!

Standard form
As part of maintaining its collection, this library solicits suggestions from the public for works that should be added to or removed from it. It does so through a form a member of the public fills out. Thus, my 'literary analysis' will take the form (mind the pun) of a filled form. As the form may have been designed with more traditional text types in mind, some questions will take some interpreting: