Immortal Kids: Video Game Revelation #1

Generally speaking, you can’t kill kids in video games. Like all of you reading this now, I am a monster and I’ve tried. They either don’t respond to being hit over the head with a club or shot in the face or complain like I leggo’d their eggo. Children, if they’re stomping around at all in our virtual worlds, are greater immortals than the highlander.

You bow to no one.

Game developers simply decided that it would be so. Which is absolutely fine. But also very weird when you think about it. It makes me think of a bunch of people sitting around a table, actively talking about what age lifts an avatar out of immortality in their games.

“Eighteen?” Bill Gamedeveloper asks his colleagues and a bunch of heads nod because it’s widely considered to be the age you can vote, go to war, and have sex on camera. In other words, it’s the approximate age where society says, “Okay, you’re old enough to decide for yourself” even if that’s rarely true.

No one would argue that the death or murder of a real eighteen-year-old is anything but tragic. And I doubt anyone would disagree if I proposed that a younger child passing away is also just terrible. But if it were asked which age group’s death was more tragic, you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who wouldn’t pick the child, for reasons that seem obvious:

A child hasn’t had a chance to have as many experiences as a teenager.

A child is less able to defend him or herself than a teen.

A child is too innocent and trusting to understand when they’re facing danger.

These, as far as I can see it, are the reasons behind our quantification of tragedy. And they’re all pretty nonsensical. First, think about how different the experiences of a child and a teen might be. Summarized, both age groups probably have a life consisting of moments derived from the same places: School, home, and maybe a part-time job. Neither group has gotten married or had kids or begun a career. So if experience, or a lackthereof, is why we find the death of a young person tragic, both teens and children should probably score about equally on the fictitious tragedy scale we seem to have invented.

The second idea, regarding self-defense, is also pretty stupid. If we accept the notion that one’s ability to defend themselves somehow relates to how tragic we regard their death, then a kid with a black belt dying isn’t as tragic as, I don’t know, some kid with a blue belt? Or without self-defense training entirely? If we quantify tragedy based on the colour of a karate belt, well, we’re more fucked up than I first thought.

But I don’t think either of the first two premises or explanations for why we find something tragic is actually the case.

Nope, the cause behind immortal virtual children, the real reason we find a child’s death more horrifying than an almost grown up teenager is in that third premise, the idea of a kid’s innocence and ignorance. Children don’t know any better. They would never have a chance against whatever monster took their life.

Ask yourself, though, is this any less true of most adults?

Consider a time when your avatar chased down and killed an NPC. Or when you were racing along in GTA and happened to flatten a few people on the sidewalk, all of them adults. How could any NPC have “known better” than to walk on the sidewalk or be somewhere your monstrous warrior/wizard guy might show up to cut them down?

This is clearly your fault.

The truth is they couldn’t possibly anticipate that you’d come along and do what you did. Nobody could. Just like the victims of crimes in real life. Yet we blame them a little, if they’re an adult. Scientists have been aware of victim blaming, no matter how powerless the victim is, for years now.

Deep down, we believe that the universe is just and that whatever someone gets they must have somehow deserved to some degree. Children, however, fit into this view of life differently. We believe that each child is owed something from life. If they don’t get it, then justice has not been served and it’s tragic.

So tragic, it seems, that, generally, we cannot even bear the thought of killing them in our video games (unless you’re a modder and/or the makers of Deus Ex).

At least not until they’re eighteen, when getting murdered by players is apparently their own stupid fault.

Remember me.