[Gikoku Harakami]

"The local Massachusetts paper where Irrational Games is based examines the shock value and moral dilemma of killing characters that resemble young girls in the recently released BioShock for Xbox 360 and PC."

Originally Posted by GamePro

Steve Adams of Quincy's Patriot Ledger writes, "[BioShock] is testing the limits of the ultraviolent gaming genre with a strategy that enables players to kill characters resembling young girls."

Rather than marginalize gaming as a weapon of mass destruction, the article accurately describes the gameplay in which players decide if they want to terminate the "Little Sisters" for maximum strength, or rescuing the little boogers for only half the "serum."

"As a piece of art, we want to deal with challenging moral issues and if you want to do that, you have to go to some dark places,'' said 2K's Kenneth Levine. ''And 'BioShock' certainly does go to some dark places."

Some gamers still don't feel comfortable with the prospects of killing the youngish female characters, however.

"I can understand how some people would be against doing certain things in video games even though they're not real,'' one poster commented on GameSpot. ''For example, if there was a game out there that allowed you to play as a pedophile and you had to do stuff, I would never play it even though 'it's just a game.'"

We gave BioShock a perfect 5/5 review score.

To each his own, is all i can say.

[HodgePodge]

People are only attacking this because it's a game. If the protagonist in a book or film killed a little girl, people wouldn't even blink

[black.]

^^very true

[TRA Rotid]

Why am I not surprised.

[Dark Drakan]

You dont actually see what you do them and you cant hurt them directly anyway so i dont think they have a leg to stand on.

[Orpheus Lupus]

Besides that, you can rescue them (which is what I've been doing). If you desperately don't want to kill them in game but do it anyway, that's your fault. (unless you're trying to get all the endings and such) and in a manner of speaking proves you've got some morality issues (and don't pay attention to Tenabaum, apparently) :-P

[Dark Drakan]

Originally Posted by Orpheus Lupus

Besides that, you can rescue them (which is what I've been doing). If you don't want to kill them in game but do it anyway, that's your fault. (unless you're trying to get all the endings and such) :-P

Yeah thats right, its not like you can go around mercilessly gunning down children or anything. You have a moral choice to make and it does it really well.

[Hexadecimal]

if you do choose to harvest them, you do it by removing the parasite, not by putting a gun to her head... in the game Dr. Tannenbaum compares it to taking a patient off of life support since she can't live without it... euthanasia is not the same thing as murder at all...
and yes, you have the option to save her, but not saving a person isn't murder either... it's being an asshole, but that's a far cry from murder...
people just love to jump on the anti-gaming bandwagon lately

[Orpheus Lupus]

It's because it's something new. THere's been a lot of anti-new thing bandwagons, some of them having a point and others pointless. Many people tend to think as if they were being controlled by a hive mind :-P Everyone just sort of goes with the flow, which is good sometimes but not ALL THE TIME. Mcarthyism, for example.

[FableFreak]

Originally Posted by Hexadecimal

if you do choose to harvest them, you do it by removing the parasite, not by putting a gun to her head... in the game Dr. Tannenbaum compares it to taking a patient off of life support since she can't live without it... euthanasia is not the same thing as murder at all...
and yes, you have the option to save her, but not saving a person isn't murder either... it's being an asshole, but that's a far cry from murder...
people just love to jump on the anti-gaming bandwagon lately

Very good points there Hex.

[Albion Knight]

Sound like to me that they are reporting on second hand info instead of checking it out first hand to see what the game is REALLY about.

Originally Posted by HodgePodge

People are only attacking this because it's a game. If the protagonist in a book or film killed a little girl, people wouldn't even blink

The movie The Omen comes to mind. The whole thing is about trying to kill a little boy. Doesn't one of the protagonists kill a girl in Of Mice and Men

If you take something like that out of context it's bound to raise some eyebrows and some money for the newspaper that writes about it.

[Orpheus Lupus]

Yeah, in Of Mice And Men Lenny unintentionally kills her (partially, in my opinion, due to bad "parenting" on certain person's parts). I must admit that that book actually disturbs me a little, far more than any video game I've played, yet it was required reading in my school. I sort of felt the same way about many of the other books and short stories we read in school; Don't get me wrong, I love books, I practically devour them. But sometimes I wonder about the things they made us read being slightly hypocritical as far as the school system's opinions were :-P