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Children in TDM


Morat

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How do the TDM developers feel about adding children to the game? I don't mean the grunt work of modeling and animating and voice work but more the emotional / gameplay aspects. It doesn't seem like there's been any discussion on the topic.

 

Most commercial video games with lots of player-initiated violence leave the kiddies out, for obvious reasons. Lawmakers and parents would be outraged if you could blow up a school bus full of kids in Grand Theft Auto, for instance, but since TDM is not a commercial product and not that sort of game anyway, you guys have a greater degree of freedom in what you could add.

 

Being a new father, children in general have such an emotional impact on me now that they never had before, and I wondered if this sort of emotional resonance could be transmitted to the player via a fan mission with kids in it. I was thinking, for instance, of something similar to the Corvo-Emily relationship in Dishonored (which also affected me), like an FM where you had to rescue the daughter of a nobleman or something like that. And let me just state here for the record that I would *not* want to play a fan mission that encouraged/required the slaughter of children in any way.

 

So, what do you guys and gals think?

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I think it was discussed in the past.

 

Generally, we are not a AAA title game studio that tries to avoid negative impact. This means that we could, in theory, do all kinds of nasty stuff without the fear of money valves closing because of public uproar.

 

That said, many TDM contributors have children too. This makes all kinds of works where children can be killed a sort of taboo. Sure there has been a FM or two with missing children and toys and cradles in blood puddles, but those are more like a sad story element. I hope we will never see FM with direct violence against children.

 

A rescue mission would, of course, be okay, but there are no child assets.

 

Overall, it seems that in the dark and gritty world of TDM, children go early to sleep, out of the harms way. And that is good.

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Clipper

-The mapper's best friend.

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Anyone is free to create assets for their FM that they want.

 

I personally don't think they should be part of the core mod because there are far too many abuse possibilities and then all the negative press, connotations, controversy, that follows.

 

Along with the fact of what Sotha said, unless its a daytime mission,

children go early to sleep, out of the harms way. And that is good.
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Pretty sure at least one if not both of the original Thief games featured the occasional child.

 

Personally I couldn't give a rat's ass about the "think of the children" hand-wringing and am disgusted by the idea that works of fiction should be censored to protect people's delicate little sensitivies, but obviously adding more fully-animated AI models to the game is a lot of work and an FM author who wanted to introduce children would need to take this on for themselves.

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As I remember there was a child in the original missions who was a translator for the Keepers oracle, she only appeared in a cutscene though, and there's the infamous child in the cutscene at the end of T3 that everyone loved so much.

 

There was one fan mission with child like AI, they swore like troopers and were quite deadly which kind of implies they weren't children though.

 

Personally I'm for for not having child AI in the game.

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I don't have any children myself so my feeling is neutral towards them. However a child in game would probably be used so minimally that it wouldn't make sense to add it to the core mod. Things that are apart of the core mod are usually things used frequently.

 

A child seems more one time FM specific so it doesn't make practical sense.

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Personally I couldn't give a rat's ass about the "think of the children" hand-wringing and am disgusted by the idea that works of fiction should be censored to protect people's delicate little sensitivies

 

To be a bit less edgy about it, reveling in gory "lol look how much I fucked up this guy's face with an arrow" and then being against the idea of it happening to children is hypocritical at best. Violence is violence, and it means the same whether you're killing them early on or later in life.

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Heh.. AB and OW probably do not have children. I used to think the same way. But once you have your own children the genetics seem to re-rout your brain in a way that children become emotionally strongly loaded subject. You can try to rationalize, but your relation to the kids will always be emotional.

 

The worst thing a parent can imagine is something horrible to happen to their child. Even a fictious character would then touch that delicate button in an average person. That is why stuff like this is a taboo in the society in general.

 

Violence is bad, but violence against children is worse than violence against an adult.

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Clipper

-The mapper's best friend.

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I don't see it as hypocritical at all.

 

Society in general tends to be more horrified by violence against children than it is by violence against adults. You don't find gratuitous slaughtering of children in fiction or movies. ('gratuitous' in this case means 'not needed to move the story forward'.)

 

My own opinion is that children in TDM shouldn't be placed in harm's way. If someone doesn't give a rodent's derrier about that opinion and wants to work toward allowing that to happen, that's fine, go for it. You're entitled to your opinion as much as I'm entitled to mine, but I won't be contributing anything toward helping you achieve your end.

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And, for the record, I have two kids and a grandkid. My wife teaches a class of 3/4/5 year-olds and my days are filled with stories of what these munchkins have been up to. No child should be denied the right to a long and happy childhood, even the little TDM kids, who are tucked safely away in their beds at night while the adults are out and about getting into all sorts of trouble.

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I'm more than aware that opening yourself up leads to irrational weakness of thought, but it's unavoidable and is ultimately meaningless. If we all acted on it and let irrational thought direct our actions we'd end up going nowhere but backwards. Succumbing to impulse emotional reactions like that is tantamount to sleepwalking. I saw a video not long enough ago on /r/watchpeople die,

where a brick fell off the back of a flatbed in an opposite lane, flew through the windshield and killed a man's wife while he drove and the dash cam recorded. I didn't see anything but the road, but the sheer power of the husband's outburst from realisation to exhaustion and losing his voice had me wanting to rush around imprisoning everybody I hold dear and slash the tyres on their cars. Had I acted on it I'd have been called a nutter and probably lost a few friends.

It seriously stuck with me, and I still have mild anxiety attacks on a weekly basis when I remember it, but I'm still going to end up driving with my SO in the passenger seat in the future despite that (with my daughter in the back). Allowing yourself to consciously act on irrational thought is silly, and will get you nowhere good. Here it doesn't really matter, and while I find it amusing that people have difficulty separating fantasy and reality because they both have humanoid characters, I'm not sure I care enough either way to outlaw or encourage squishy toddler pincushions in TDM.

Edited by Airship Ballet
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But once you have your own children the genetics seem to re-rout your brain in a way that children become emotionally strongly loaded subject. You can try to rationalize, but your relation to the kids will always be emotional.

 

Indeed, that's exactly how it works, and it's understandable. If you lost a close family member to cancer you will probably be upset by jokes about cancer. If your best friend killed themselves you will be upset by insensitive references to suicide.

 

The mistake people make is thinking that their own genetic/emotion-based sensitivities constitute some kind of global objective reality that everybody else needs to conform to.

 

Violence is bad, but violence against children is worse than violence against an adult.

 

According to popular subjective emotionalism, yes. If there is a rational basis for considering the value of a human life inversely proportional to the number of birthdays they have celebrated, I have yet to hear of it.

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OW,

I think it is perfectly rational for the parent creature to be concerned about the well being of their offspring.

 

This particular genetic/emotion based sensitivity is statistically frequent enough so it can be called as a norm in a civilized culture. I do not know who is pursuing objective reality, but if a group of people generally agree on something, then there is a norm. And people who disagree are declared deviants. And all of them have their places in a tolerant society, as long as laws remain unbroken.

Clipper

-The mapper's best friend.

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I'm a parent, and I've experienced the genetically pre-programmed instinct to want to protect all children that comes with it. But I don't see why that should impact what is acceptable in video games (especially a game that is based entirely around doing unacceptable things). Men are genetically preprogrammed to protect women they want to have sex with. But we don't say "Oh, you can't show the player's gf getting killed in video games". Instead games USE that instinct to further the story (frequently in very clumsy ways, but sometimes good ones). You don't have to look any further than Dishonored to see children being used in the same fashion. Part of the reason The Walking Dead game is such a great experience is because it also taps directly into that protective instinct.

 

I don't think we'll have children in the core of TDM because too many on the team are against the idea, but suggesting that this goes beyond personal preference to some kind of objective truth is overreaching, I think.

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I think it is perfectly rational for the parent creature to be concerned about the well being of their offspring.

 

Yes it is. It is not, however, rational to declare that all offspring are more valuable than all adults, which is what people seem to want to do.

 

I do not know who is pursuing objective reality, but if a group of people generally agree on something, then there is a norm. And people who disagree are declared deviants.

 

Yes, and we saw how well that worked out for Galileo and Alan Turing when "everyone agreed" that the Sun revolves around the Earth and homosexuality is disgusting and wrong. The popularity of an idea doesn't have even the slightest connection to whether it is true, rational or objectively valuable.

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homosexuality is disgusting and wrong.

But it is though, and my wife agrees.

 

As Springheel said, since people are so susceptible to it, using the presence of a child well would make it an FM to remember, whereas using them all over the place to broadhead at will would just end up as dark comic relief.

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Well, that's farce, so not really. Postal is "holy shit this is so silly" and dark comic relief is "holy shit I've never done that before and boy does it feel wrong" from which you derive laughter you'd normally hear after an offensive joke.

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Yes it is. It is not, however, rational to declare that all offspring are more valuable than all adults, which is what people seem to want to do.

 

Really? I've never seen that kind of declarations. It makes no sense as without the adults the offspring have no/low survival chance.

 

Yes, and we saw how well that worked out for Galileo and Alan Turing when "everyone agreed" that the Sun revolves around the Earth and homosexuality is disgusting and wrong. The popularity of an idea doesn't have even the slightest connection to whether it is true, rational or objectively valuable.

 

I was expecting you to play the Nazi-card. ;)

Anyways, with children it is different. The welfare of children is rational for the individual. If you zoom out to larger scale, you will discover that a nation-wide welfare of children is also rational: the future of the nation will eventually depend on the children. It is not at all a surprise to me why protecting children is a strong norm in many cultures. It just is rational on many levels.

 

Because of the strong emotionality of the topic, I think -for me- it is probably good to remain considerate towards the taboo and not glut oneself in child-massacres in TDM. I wouldn't even want to do such a mission. Occasional devices with bloody cradles will be just fine.

 

I wouldn't have a problem is someone made a glut-mission. But I would understand those, who would think it is bad taste, and would not start calling them hypocrites.

Clipper

-The mapper's best friend.

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Yeah, sorry, that was sarcasm. I figured you'd recognize it when you saw it. :)

 

I couldn't tell if it was the facetious rhetorical ploy kind or the joking kind. I usually have the opposite problem: assuming ridiculous opinions are sarcastic and receiving incredulous looks when I laugh.

 

We're not discussing whether or not it's logical or understandable to worry about the welfare of children, by the way. It's having the same reaction with pretend ones that I find silly. I see how people get to it, but I find it odd that it genuinely affects some. What I find even sillier is that people will chuckle at a matured guard with an arrow in the face but children are somehow more valuable or sacred than what they grow into. If it isn't hypocritical to make a dark joke out of a grown man with an arrow in his skull because he's not real but rush to protect the virtue of similarly pretend kids, I don't know what is.

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  • Personally I couldn't give a rat's ass about the "think of the children" hand-wringing and am disgusted by the idea that works of fiction should be censored to protect people's delicate little sensitivies,
  • but obviously adding more fully-animated AI models to the game is a lot of work and an FM author who wanted to introduce children would need to take this on for themselves.

  • spot on
  • and that is the crux of the matter, our only Ai modeler atm is Springs and he dosent exactly have a lot of free time.

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Damn, missed that somehow in my search! I'd like to see that discussion but it says I don't have permission to view the topic. :huh:

 

Well, it sounds like there is some strong sentiment on the subject on either side and TDM will end up strictly being an adults-only affair. I just wanted to gauge the mood of the community on the matter.

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Really? I've never seen that kind of declarations. It makes no sense as without the adults the offspring have no/low survival chance.

 

It's implicit in comments about violence against children being worse the violence against adults, or people being squeamish about fictional non-existent misfortunes happening to fictional non-existent children while gleefully watching adults being butchered six ways from Sunday in the name of entertainment. It seems that an arbitrary child's life is considered more valuable than an arbitrary adult's life, simply because of their age.

 

I was expecting you to play the Nazi-card. ;)

 

Eh? Neither of the examples I gave involved the Nazis. Well, Turing was active in WW2 but it was the British state that persecuted him, not Hitler.

 

Because of the strong emotionality of the topic, I think -for me- it is probably good to remain considerate towards the taboo and not glut oneself in child-massacres in TDM. I wouldn't even want to do such a mission. Occasional devices with bloody cradles will be just fine.

I wouldn't have a problem is someone made a glut-mission. But I would understand those, who would think it is bad taste, and would not start calling them hypocrites.

 

That's fair enough. I don't have any problem with people not wanting to make such missions, and I don't have any problem with people not wanting to play such missions. I don't even have any problem with not adding children into the core mod due to lack of mapper interest.

 

The only thing I would have a problem with is some kind of blanket ban because "It's Immoral!!!!". Grandstanding about "morality" in a game which simulates theft and murder requires an epic level of hypocrisy.

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