Why aren’t there any civilians in military video games?
►http://www.slate.com/id/2303427/pagenum/all
So why are developers so reluctant to include civilians in shooting games?
Mostly, they don’t want to face the consequences of players’ bad behavior. In an interview with the website Rock Paper Shotgun, Battlefield 3’s executive producer Patrick Bach explained that he doesn’t “want to see videos on the Internet where people shoot civilians. That’s something I will sanitize by removing that feature from the game.” Bach believes that video games are serious business but that players’ irreverence is holding back the form. “If you put the player in front of a choice where they can do good things or bad things, they will do bad things, go [to the] dark side—because people think it’s cool to be naughty, they won’t be caught,” he said.
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While Bach’s argument is earnest, the logic behind it is feeble. Allowing a player to shoot a child or a merchant in a firefight is not the same as saying it is moral to do so. It should be up to the designers to decide the consequences when players do something we’d consider appalling in the real world. Does killing a civilian cause the level to end? Does it incite other civilians to turn aggressive toward the soldiers? Does the aggrieved mother or wife come screaming toward the squad, ululating in disgust and sorrow?