Hide Your Children

See? This is what happens when you don't!

"...Hide your kids, hide your wife, and hide your husband, cause they're rapin' everybody out here."

—Antoine Dodson, July 28, 2010, Channel 48 News... and later Auto Tune the News

On TV, babies seem to be able to miraculously survive any threat, even when faced with seemingly insurmountable odds.

But in violent video games, children tend not to even be shown, often to the point where you suspect that they don't even exist. At all. (If they actually are all missing or dead, you have a Childless Dystopia.)

Because the Media Watchdogs won't allow it. Watching children be killed is bad enough, but actually allowing the player to do it themselves? No chance. As a result, children will often be conspicuously absent in video games. Maybe it's a school day. If they do make an appearance, it's very likely the game will somehow prohibit you from causing any harm to them. Occasionally, a daring game will go out of its way and avert this trope, in which case you can expect an definite M-rating and probably some media controversy.

Of course it's not all the watchdogs. Even Hardcore Gamers Have Standards.

This is especially common in freeworld/sandbox games in which you have the option to do just about anything (read: kill random people on the street).

Note that if the child character is the protagonist, all bets are off; apparently, brutal acts being carried out upon children are perfectly fine as long as the child is the player's character. Similarly, it's okay if there aren't any children because something else killed them off before the player got there.

Compare There Are No Adults, in which the adults are missing.

Examples of Hide Your Children include:

Video game examples

Action Adventure

  • There are no children in the Overlord series, except a few in Overlord: Dark Legend—that are conveniently invincible, and you're supposed to be helping anyway—and when you're playing the Witch Boy before his Overlord days in Overlord 2. The children there are invincible, but in retribution for their bullying and tormenting you, you get to chase them down, harassing and tormenting them, finally stranding them naked in a secret clubhouse while your minions use their clothes as a disguise.
  • In The Getaway Alex Hammond appears to be the only child whole of Greater London.


Action Game

  • A level in God of War features Athens being burnt to the ground, with random civilians running around all over the place, whom you can kill if you so desire. No children are present, of course.
    • There is one child that appears in the game, the daughter of the protagonist, Kratos. She is already dead before the game begins, having been killed along with her mother by Kratos's own hand, and only appears in flashbacks. This is in fact a vitally important part of Kratos's backstory, as he is constantly haunted by the knowledge that he was personally responsible for the deaths of his wife and daughter.
  • The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, as it's possible for Hulk to kill random civilians.
  • Sword of the Samurai 2 is basically Grand Theft Auto in Late Edo Japan... you can, indeed, draw your katana on a busy market-street, and start cutting down innocent civilians left and right. Unlike GTA, however, there are children. They're just Made of Iron—your strongest attack will do little more than slow them down as they run towards the nearest exit. Even on "Extreme mode", where everyone in the game, including yourself and the final boss, dies from a single hit, the kids remain immortal.
  • In the console version of Spider Man 2, countless adults get injured and mugged and it's up to you to save them. But the only scenario in which you have to help a child is when they let go of a helium balloon and you have to go and save it, in increasingly improbable places and times (like 2 AM in the morning in the middle of Queens).
  • The console version of Ultimate Spider Man allows Ultimate Venom to eat balloon-carrying children. Maybe a programmer had to chase a balloon in the previous entry a little too much.
  • In No More Heroes, the only child is shown after the credits after all the bloodshed is over. In Desperate Struggle, the only child is immortal, since he made a pact with Satan. Also, he's a killer himself, and rarely looks like a kid.


First Person Shooter

  • Justified in Half-Life 2. The Combine have suppressed human reproduction for many years (it varies between 10 and 20 years, depending on where you look), so City 17 is populated only by adults. The children all simply grew up. Lampshaded in the first chapter when Gordon comes across an empty playground—cue ghostly laughter of children. Also, in Episode One, Resistance members will occasionally say "I'm glad there aren't any children around to see this."
  • Despite several towns (or perhaps the entire world) being decimated by a zombie pandemic, there are no child zombies in Left 4 Dead. Taken to ridiculous extremes in the "Dark Carnival" campaign in Left 4 Dead 2, which takes place in a Amusement Park of Doom without any children.
  • Played with in The Darkness. At one point in the game an orphanage is blown up as an act of revenge against the protagonist. Everything is relatively cleaned up by the time you enter it, but there's still the matter of the police-drawn chalk outlines of children's bodies strewn all over the floor.
  • In one level of SWAT 4 you are pitted against a cult and told to expect children inside. Naturally, it would be very problematic to have you deal with children as hostages, so the game seems to be put in irreconcilable position. The solution? As you proceed through the level you see cribs, childlike decorations, and stuffed animals - but no children.Finally, in the basement you find numerous tiny graves with farewell messages scrawled on the wall. The implication being that the cult members murdered their own children.


MMORPGs

  • Players of City of Heroes have a running joke in that the entire city lacks any children save for one, who stands in the middle of a zone infested with hostile alien monstrosities with all the invincibility of a non-targetable NPC. There are also no educational facilities below university level, although school books are occasionally mentioned as a MacGuffin to be saved.
  • Children NPCs are invincible in World of Warcraft, even when you try to kill kids from opposing faction. There is even a holiday event in the game called Children's Week, where players can act as a "big brother/sister" to a child from an orphanage by allowing the child to accompany them while they go about their normal activities. Predictably, enemies that the player might battle while the child is present will never attack the child. Even if the player is hit by an area-of-effect attack, the child will not be affected.


Platform Game


Role-Playing Game

  • All of the Elder Scrolls games are suspiciously lacking children:
  • Fable:
    • Fable was originally going to include children that could be killed (a widely-circulated pre-release picture showed the protagonist impaling a child on his blade), but this was scrapped at the last minute. Instead, children only appear in places in the game where you're not supposed to be able to kill anyone, at least not without glitches.
    • There are children all over the place in Fable II. You still can't kill them, but they quite distinctly notice if you try. Specifically, you get some evil points, everyone gets very upset, and the guards will chase you down... to make you pay a fine.
  • Neverwinter Nights:
    • In Neverwinter Nights, Players can destroy every guard and adult in the place, but there is a little child in one of the districts who cannot be killed. If you kill his parents, he even seeks vengeance. Protected by sheer invincibility, he will follow you anywhere in the game, pounding on you with his tiny fists. He will follow you into every room of the game.
    • Neverwinter Nights 2 has a fair number of children, but peaceful NPCs are now invulnerable and cannot even be targeted.
  • Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura has no real children, with the exception of one quest with an underaged elf who is still over a century old.
  • Dubloon. The closest to the child you will get in this game is Riley.
  • Despite visiting many colonies and other places where families clearly live, no children are ever seen in the first two Mass Effect games. Partially excused by Shepard spending most of his/her time on military bases or small colonies and research facilities where families wouldn't be living anyway, but it is still a little odd to never see any on the Citadel or Illium... or Horizon, for that matter, especially because children are specifically mentioned in an e-mail received after the Horizon mission.
  • The Faelands of Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning are also childless.


Stealth Based Game

  • One of the levels in Hitman: Blood Money has our hero carry out a hit on a mobster in witness relocation during a child's birthday party. The clown is there, the caterer is there, but the child is nowhere to be found.
  • Assassin's Creed I is a straight example, but its sequel Assassin's Creed II and Assassin's Creed Brotherhood play with the trope: There are no children to be found in the world unless the plot calls for it, but it does several times, and one of them even meets an untimely demise near the beginning of II.


Survival Horror

  • In Resident Evil 4, an entire town is infected by a parasite, which turns them into bloodthirsty zombie-like beings. No children are ever seen, of course. A montage during the credits gives a glimpse of how the parasites were introduced to the villagers, and children are seen. Thus, one way or another, a lot of kids died before the game began. There's a strong implication from that sequence that the children were murdered by the Plaga-infected parents.
  • The American release of Silent Hill 1 featured enemies that resembled gray skinned children with knives. These were absent from both Japanese and European releases, replaced by a less obviously human-shaped creature. The demo of the American version, meanwhile, had these gray child-things giggle like infants on spotting you; this was replaced in the finished game, of course.


Third Person Shooter

  • For reasons that make sense both in and out of game, there are no children anywhere in the Crusader series.


Wide Open Sandbox

  • The 3D Grand Theft Auto games do this a lot. Only one character under the age of fifteen or so has ever appeared in the series, in any capacity other than the radio; in Grand Theft Auto Vice City Stories, Vic's love interest Louise has a baby daughter named Mary-Beth, whom you have to help protect.
    • However on the radio several children have been heard and even killed, for instance a Jerkass gun safety mascot tricked a little girl into shooting herself in the head.
    • Lampshaded on Vice City Public Radio show "Pressing Issues" when the host asked secessionist John F. Hickory if he'd been born in Florida.

John Hickory: Of course not! No one's been born in Florida since 1877, but! I've been here five years which is a very long time.

    • Nor are there any elementary or high schools.
      • Or playgrounds, if my memory serves.
        • Actually, GTA 3 was originally going too include kids, schools and yellow school-buses however they were scrapped for an unknown reason; although many people speculate it was because of school shootings that happened around the time the game was too be released, that caused them to take kids out. Contrary to popular rumour however, Rockstar denied existence of any missions involving maiming children in a Q&A post on their Newswire page.[1]
    • GTA Advance actually involved a mission in which you had too kidnap a school kid. This trope is still played however, when the protagonist gets pissed at his employer for hurting the girl.
    • Michael De Santa in GTA V is the first protagonist to be shown with a family, though his "children" are already in their twenties during the events of the game.
  • The only humans in the Destroy All Humans!! series are all middle-aged male and female suburbanites, hippies, and farmers, except for the occasional old crackpot scientist or mid-50's communist hating general. More or likely, the same character will respawn in the same spot a few minutes later, implying that they reproduce Asexually, or some such.
  • Prototype both uses this trope and averts it. You can eat or just slash through the whole of Manhattan without encountering a single child. But, the Web of Intrigue cutscenes not only feature children, they feature children who are dead, mutated or experimented on. One of the "memories" even has the creepy, distorted cry of a baby. Have fun sleeping.
  • In Red Dead Redemption, we see two children in the entire game; a kid selling newspapers in the opening cutscene, and John's son. In Mexico, it's mentioned that kids have been taking up arms in the revolution, but we never see any, for obvious reasons.
    • Possibly subverted with Luisa's younger sister, Miranda. You need to protect her on an escort mission.
  • Children do die in Dead Rising. Horribly. Either offscreen or before you ever show up. Nobody under eighteen is encountered in person in-game, the ages of young-looking NPCs listed as 18-25.
    • Dead Rising 2 features one child, the PC's daughter Katey. She can be killed through the player not fulfilling certain tasks, but not directly and her death is never shown on screen.
      • Note also there's one survivor in Dead Rising 2 who has an age of less than 18. Snowflake the tiger, who is three years old. A case of subverted with this character as that is considered the age of maturity/adulthood for the average tigers.
  • The Postal series, especially Postal 2, lacks anyone under adult age, as Vince Desi and the rest of the RWS staff felt it would be crossing a big line. Considering that the player can kill, maim, burn and/or urinate on(which means the character is walking around with his genitals exposed) anyone or anything, from civilians, store clerks, priests, police officers, Gary Coleman, Taliban members, Osama Bin Laden and even digital expies of the game company staff, as well as dogs, cattle and cats(of which cats can be used as makeshift pistol silencers!), the ability to kill children is probably considered one hell of a big line to cross. Though some NPCs will mention that they have children if they're huddled down, begging not to bekille din the many random acts of violence that seem to infest Paradise.


Non-video game examples

Western Animation

  • In the direct-to-DVD Futurama movie "The Beast With A Billion Backs", the titular Beast has neck-sex with every single being in the universe. In the commentary track, the creators note that they very deliberately did not have any children appear in the episode.
    • Actually, there are children in one shot during Fry's / Yivo's speech to the universe. The shot where several people are watching the speech outside in New New York, I believe.
    • Later in the track, Bender makes a deal with the Robot Devil - The Devil will give him an army to take over the world...in exchange for his firstborn son. We then see Bender pick up a small robot who says, "Daddy! I knew you'd come back!", take it to robot hell, and punt it into a smelter!

The Robot Devil: "Wow. That was pretty brutal, even by my standards."
Bender: "No backsies!"


Exceptions

Action Adventure

  • In Luigi's Mansion, of all games, some of the enemies are small children. Of course, they're already dead.
    • The first boss, a baby, was born as a ghost.
  • The Star Wars Episode 1 game allowed you to kill several children, including the Gungan children, Anakin's friends and even Anakin himself, which—while most these characters were annoying enough to deserve it and killing Anakin would even save the universe—was a bit of a taboo for a Jedi.
  • There are children all over the place in the various episodes of American Mcgees Grimm, and not even they are safe from hilariously brutal injury and death.
  • American McGee's Alice contains Insane Children. While you don't kill them directly (mostly, they get in the way), they are made into clockwork automatons that you do have to fight. However, one of them helps you in a later level.
  • In Terranigma, there are zombie children in Louran. Disturbingly, the girls cry when you hit them, right before they send their severed heads at you.


Action Game

  • During the Venom tutorial of the Ultimate Spider-Man game, your first order of business is to devour a darling little girl holding a balloon. She is spit back out, but doesn't seem to be moving after that. This is actually a parody of the above Spider-Man 2 missions.
    • Sort of goes into Nightmare Fuel, even if you're the one playing it. You don't just kill the child, you feed on her very life essence.
  • Completely averted in the Newgrounds flash game Chainsaw the Children.
  • In Lego Indiana Jones, you can gleefully kill your partner Short Round whenever you like. He will simply respawn a few seconds later. In his review, Yahtzee notes that doing so a few dozen times helps deal with any lingering resentment you may have for the character.


Adventure Game

  • Excluded in the game Harvester, where just about anyone can be killed, and whether this has game-ending disastrous consequences is generally random. You need to kill several children to complete the game, including a mob of small children you find feasting on their mother. Of course, this is a twisted horror game where interactivity is part of the horror.


Fighting Game

  • Samurai Shodown has several children amid its roster. It also has moves that lets you slaughter the opponent rather messily. Aside from IV, where the programming to hit two characters with the finishing moves was left out due to time constraints, everyone can be killed in brutal fashion, age notwithstanding.


First Person Shooter

  • In Prey, there are children captured by the aliens. You never get to kill them, but you get to see two die messily, and one enemy type is a ghostly, possessed little girl. She was originally going to be a fleshy possessed girl, and have a male counterpart that was a child husk stretched over an insectoid wraith, but these were dropped from the final game, likely for much the same reasons that motivate the trope in general.
  • In Deus Ex Invisible War, you can quite easily go on a shooting spree in a school populated by twelve year old girls, though the place is protected by security turrets and guards.
    • The original also had children, although there was something extremely wrong with their voices. The children in the original were killable, too. In fact, in one Let's Play of the game on the Penny Arcade forums, the player uses a rocket launcher on one, laughs, and then notes that he's laughing at having murdered a child--"A small, starving child"—though there wasn't any real use for it. In a way, though, it does fit with the game's setting—there wasn't much respect for human life in the setting to start with.
      • That's the game's setting, mind you, not its attitude - Deus Ex was and to some extent still is notable in encouraging the player not to plow through the game destroying everything in their path.
        • What's odd is that the first game had ONLY boys available for killing—there were no young girls at all, killable or otherwise.
  • In BioShock (series), creepy little girls who collect genetic material from corpses and their massive armoured guardians are prominently featured. These "Little Sisters" are apparently immune to damage as long as their "Big Daddies" live; if the player tries to shoot them or harm them in any other way, the ADAM in their bodies causes all damage to literally bounce off them. However, if the Big Daddy is dispatched, the little girl is completely helpless against the protagonist. At this point you can do one of two things with them: either rip out the symbiote that controls the Sister and carries their supplies of ADAM, killing the Sister in the process, or use a special plasmid to "cure" the Sister, meaning she becomes a normal girl again, while the protagonist will not get as much ADAM he would have gotten if he had "harvested" her. Note both the harvesting and the curing are conveniently obscured ("harvest" by a black-green mist, "rescue" by a flash of white light). According to a pre-release review, this actually happened in plain sight in an earlier version of the game shown to journalists.
    • After saving a little sister, they become a plain young girl, thank you, then run to the nearest vent to escape. You can shoot them after saving them, but your bullets will still bounce off her and a stern message will appear:

Message: "You can only HARVEST or RESCUE Little Sisters."

    • It's possible to kill children in another way - the final level of the first game is an Escort Mission where you have to guide a Little Sister who can open doors that you can't. If she takes enough damage, she will die and Tenenbaum will berate you - then tell you to go get another sister.
    • There is also a single scene in which you find that a family of five committed suicide in their apartment by drinking poison. Oddly, the parents show sign of decay, but not the three identical daughters.
    • You can also find a family sitting down to dinner, which had apparently been turned into a semi-living statue by deranged artist Sander Cohen (and you actually have to help Cohen in order to continue on in the game).
      • Of note is that, if you strike the parents, they make a squishy sound indicating they were/are alive. Hitting the girl produces a sound like hitting rock.
  • In Resistance 2, you don't actually face any human children... but some of the conversion cocoons and Chimera resulting from them are quite distinctly child-sized. You can break open the cocoons, killing the occupant, and the "child" Chimera try to kill you just like any others -- What Measure Is a Non-Human? probably applies.
  • Also averted in Doom 3, as cherubs look like a kind of mutated human infants, although they may be just demons.


Hack And Slash

  • This trope is horribly, horribly inverted in Drakengard. First off, there is a stage in Leonard's side-story in which you are forced to fight the child-soldiers of the Empire, who are brainwashed as the rest of the Empire's soldiers are. As you are slaughtering them all, Leonard cries out, "But Caim, they're just children!" Your dragon then loudly declares "Soldiers are soldiers!" and encourages you to carry on. Then there's the matter of the Grotesqueries, which is plain and simple Nightmare Fuel.
    • Nothing compared to the second game, which had a child (or childlike) character grow to giant size in a boss battle. No prizes for guessing what you have to do.
      • As well as being completely Ax Crazy, Arioch will actively seek out and murder small children.
  • In Diablo, there is a peg-legged young boy in Tristram named Wirt with whom you can "gamble" to buy items. In Diablo II, you return to Tristram, which has been overrun by monsters, and you can find Wirt's remains (as well as his peg leg, which you can use as a weapon, and a stash of gold he likely conned off the player character in the last game).
    • Don't forget to hang on to his leg! After defeating Diablo (and either starting a new game or moving on to the Lord of Destruction expansion) go back to the rogue camp from act 1 and combine it with a Tome of Town Portal and enter the infamous Cow Level!
    • Wirt is the exception to the rule, as no other children are seen in Tristram. However, this is justified, because the manual and NPC dialog indicate that all the other children have already been killed by the demons.
    • As a Mythology Gag in Warcraft III, you can acquire an artifact called "Wirt's Other Leg" that boosts your hero's attack power. In World of Warcraft, you can recover Wirt's Third Leg, a fairly rare and fairly powerful one-handed mace.
      • And as a Shout-Out, you can retrieve "Wart's Peg Leg" in Hellgate: London, though Wart is a much less obnoxious character and he doesn't have to die for you to get it.
  • Ninety-Nine Nights. Self-righteous psycho bitch Inphyy murders goblin children with no qualms both under the player's control and in a cutscene.
  • In Dantes Inferno, the game, there are Unbaptised Babies to kill freely...yikes.


MMORPGs

  • Although there are children present in a few major cities in World of Warcraft, there is an event where you can pick up an orphan from your faction's capital and take them around questing (read: 'killing stuff') with you. They seem to enjoy it.
    • Overlaps with What Measure Is a Non-Human? in Northrend with a quest to kidnap Wolvar pups for the Tuskarr. The Tuskarr insist that they want to raise the Wolvar to be more peaceful than the vicious hunters they normally are, but the lack of any Wolvar in their village can lead to some nasty Fridge Horror implications. Also, to capture the pups they have to be targettable, which also makes them attackable; players that don't watch what they target, or use AoE abilities on the adults, can kill the pups as well.
  • In Phantasy Star Universe, there are child NPCs and prefab PCs, and the character creator for PCs automatically scales down apparent age along with height, allowing you to make your own Kid Hero. There's even—according to the storyline—a subrace of the Beast race that never ages beyond apparent childhood, regardless of their actual age.
  • In RuneScape there are some human children you can find but can't attack, but go to the Grand Tree can you can slay little gnome children galore.
  • Though you never see a child die in Guild Wars, the canon makes it very clear that children can and do die; as one character puts it: "There were no children left after the Searing. They either grew up fast, or they didn't grow up at all."
    • And then there's Gwen. At the age of ten, she witnesses searing fire rain from the sky, is orphaned, gets kidnapped by the race who sent the Searing, and spends the next seven years toiling in a slave camp, escaping only when they attempted to feed her to a giant scorpion.
    • On a more positive note, however, children are commonplace in areas outside Gwen's devastated homeland, and even there, too, during Wintersday, when you can give gifts to the children.
  • Star Wars: The Old Republic uses smaller versions of the adult models for children (which can be somewhat... disconcerting with the girls). In keeping with the spirit of the Dark side, Republic players can threaten to kill a sick child to get a refugee demanding help to back down.


Platform Game

  • Heart of Darkness got away with death sequences that showed the kid player character crushed, devoured, incinerated and drowned in a variety of non-gory, yet non-discreet ways. Heart is one of the few realistic 2D platformers, along with Another World and the first Prince of Persia, so falling off the screen would look flagrantly out of place—and all of them are sadistic to begin with, at least in difficulty levels.


Real Time Strategy

  • In Warcraft III, you can actually kill children NPCs. Without any ill-effects. As a holy paladin. Who is also the prince of the kingdom. Yeah, seriously. And this can happen well before Arthas' corruption. Try it in the first Human mission, go nuts.


Roguelike

  • Dwarf Fortress. Not only do infants catch arrows and melee attacks initiated at the mother, the children will blithely follow their mothers into combat. Since soldiers tend to have the highest birth rates, unless you have a lot of traps outside your fort, you're not going to have a lot of children surviving into adulthood. And that's not even including the people who practice 'population control', and actively kill off the children that take up space in their fortress.
    • And that's assuming you were playing on Fortress Mode. Play on Adventurer and you can easily liberate children from Goblin fortresses to be in your party (which is a good idea, as they are useful as shields since you can't hire drunks anymore). Sound bad? How about the fact that, should you decide to invade a human town, you'll find yourself catapulting children into walls as they try to kill you? Sound bad? How about invading an elven town, where you will frequently find yourself beset upon by entire waves of children, some as young as two?
    • Not to mention the fact that berserk dwarves have a habit of splattering your walls with blood, child & baby blood notwithstanding. Dwarves in fell moods kill dwarves and make artifacts out of their skin and bones. A dwarf can make a leather bag with skin from a child decorated with the bones of said child.


Role Playing Game

  • You can murder children in the first two Fallout games, though the resulting penalty to your reputation makes the rest of the game nearly unplayable. The European version removed the children by turning them invisible, which makes the town full of pickpocketing urchins even more annoying then it was already.
    • The game rewards creativity: players sick of the Den's pickpocketers have the consequence-free option of planting live grenades in their inventories by means of the Steal command. This will cause such entertaining visual effects as the child's body exploding into a red mist, while his head goes rocketing upward with a trail of blood.
    • And then, enter Fallout 3 which promptly makes use of the "present but invincible children" subclause by not allowing the children to die. You can shoot them, stab them, nuke them, burn them, etc. but you can't kill them or splatter their brains all over the pavement. Or maybe just use them as living shields...
      • Somewhat to be expected, considering the epic debate over children in Bethesda's previous game Oblivion.
      • However, there are mods that disable the "invincible flag" and various other additions, so the whole thing can be a bit moot.
      • Fallout 3 doesn't even bother going out of its way to tell you that the two children in Megaton have somehow "escaped" the atomic blast. They can probably be assumed dead.
  • Played literally in Phantasy Star IV, the entire population of a town has been turned to stone by the first major villain of the game; the player can bring the party around to see all the statues who were once residents, but most of the buildings are locked up—except one house. Inside, there are two adults, standing in front of the stairs leading into their basement. If you walk around them and go down, you'll find their two young children hiding, frightened but otherwise in perfect condition, and they'll tell you that their mother told them to hide down here and be quiet.
  • The first form of the last boss in Parasite Eve Is, in fact, a baby. Wich is the Ultimate Being. As such, it keeps developing, eventually becoming an adult, and a bizarre gelatinous skull thing.Also, Aya's dead sister; Maya, is a key character in the game, as well as being in the true final boss fight.
  • A big exception occurred in Ultima VIII, where it was possible to round up a bunch of children near the edge of the starting town and start hacking them to bits. Doing so resulted in a very powerful guardian coming to kill you in their defense, but especially nearer the ending of the game, that guardian was perfectly beatable.
    • Even bigger exception in Ultima V: there is a dungeon room full of children in jailcells. To proceed to the next area, one has to pull a lever which opens the cells, letting the children out. More precisely, letting them out with a very clear desire to kill. As you are the Avatar, the paragon of virtues (and acting virtuous IS monitored by the game), this creates an interesting moral dilemma. Some (if not most) players rather chose to flee.
    • Even outside the dungeons, children aren't necessarily faring well. The player will meet a child enslaved to extort information from her mother, another child subject to brutal punishment along with his father for a trivial offense, and another child in hiding and slowly starving since his father was unjustly imprisoned.
    • The dungeon room is even worse in the brilliant remake Ultima V Lazarus, where you hear the children laughing as you approach, and hear them screaming in pain as you and your companions mercilessly kill them.
    • In fact, rooms with children is a Running Gag in the later Ultima games—there's usually a dungeon room somewhere in each game that is populated with children with the generic monster AI, that will attack the player. There's been one in pretty much each game since IV.
    • In Ultima IX a boy highwayman demands gold from the Avatar, taunting him on being unable to fight a child. Whether the boy is given gold or not, he immediately flings powerful fireballs while laughing. Killing him results in a hefty karma penalty. Near the game's end, the Avatar comes across a girl who has been incurably poisoned with a toxin that will slowly, excruciatingly and inevitably kill her, and she begs the Avatar to end her suffering. Whatever choice the Avatar makes, the Guardian will beam a Hannibal Lecture into the Avatar's head over it.
  • The World Ends With You features various child NPCs—mostly just scenery, but one of them, Rhyme, is a major character. It's established fairly early on that anyone in Shibuya during the "Reapers' Game" is at risk of being Erased And you actually get to see it happen to Rhyme partway through the game.
    • Nevermind the fact that since everyone in the Game is dead, you get a brief blink-and-you'll-miss-it flashback of her and her brother about to be run down by a truck.
  • Chrono Cross features a nine-year-old girl. As a Boss Battle. Go ahead and beat the crap out of her. She even shows up again in another Boss Battle, with her co-workers, a big brawler and an axe swinger, and is considered at least equal in power to them.
  • In Avernum 1-3 there are children in towns (where they are unlikely to be harmed). However, the young of Exclusively Evil races like goblins and giants almost never never appear. The slithzeraki are an exception. In the first game, when they are universally evil, you can slaughter a tribe's young with no negative consequences. (In fact, to complete one quest it may be necessary.) In the second game, you can do the same thing in very similar circumstances, but now that many slithzeraki are friendly, it's heavily implied you shouldn't. In Avernum 4-5, where towns are more likely to be wiped out, children show up a lot less. However, Avernum 5 does give you the option to wipe out several baby giants.
    • In the original version of Exile II, destroying the enemy slithzeraki children is first described as fun, but when complete, your party feels Tears of Remorse because you shouldn't be killing children even if they are enemies.
  • In Dragon Age you have the option of killing a young child as a way to solve a quest. The game makes you suffer for it, though.
  • In Baldur's Gate you can kill children although it will decrease your reputation significantly (although not any more than killing any other civilians).
  • Despite the infamous trailer for the game, no children appear in Dead Island. However, the death of children is mentioned frequently in conversation and the storyline.


Simulation Game

  • Black and White leaves the player free to torture, sacrifice, and otherwise maim children, but it dings the Karma Meter.
    • If you're going for the evil-deity-good-creature combo, this is actually a good way to counterbalance all the nice things you have to do to train your Creature.


Stealth Based Game

  • The Thief games have quite a few 'child-like things' but there are far fewer children around than there logically should be; the game involves sneaking around houses in the middle of the night when children should be at least present, if asleep. However, you encounter the ghost of a child in Thief II and Thief III, and something that might be a child transformed by mad science in Thief II, as well as a couple of robotic children (sometimes very annoying and... yes, invulnerable). All these are used for their disturbing qualities.


Survival Horror

  • While more than a few kids die in the game Rule of Rose, the game is noticeably shy about showing it happen, keeping the deaths off camera and featuring empty clothes in the place of bodies. Even though in this game, the children are the bad guys. Although the enemy Imps resemble children with either bizarrely distorted faces or the heads of animals, and it's not at all shy about showing them dying gruesome deaths.
  • Fatal Frame has the ghosts of children who will help you some of the time but other times they will attack you like the adult ghosts and have to be dispatched like adult ghosts. It probably helps that defeating a ghost once does not stop it popping up again at a later time—they'll usually keep hassling you until a suitably dramatic final battle—and your weapon is a magical camera.
  • Undead baby clones show up as enemies in Dead Space. Drop-kicking them into a wall is possible, and even encouraged.
  • Dead Rising Appears to play this straight at first glance, due to the fact that out of the 50,000+ zombies in the mall there is not one child. However, the reason that two of the human psychopaths (Adam and Cliff) are the way that they are (Read:Insane) is due to the fact that they had to watch children be killed by the zombies (even worse with Cliff as the kid killed was his granddaughter). Also, one of the survivors who can be rescued by Frank is a woman who was helpless to stop her baby from being devoured by zombies. There is also the Easter Egg on the title screen.


Turn Based Strategy

  • Averted in Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones, where there are two chapters where civilians, including children, are on the field. While you cannot harm civilians, enemy units often attack them, and generally kill them in one hit. While you can defend them, doing so is not strictly necessary, and you can still beat the level if one of them dies, although even one civilian death will prevent you from getting the rare items that civilians give you at the end of the chapter.


Turn Based Tactics

  • Averted in Jagged Alliance 2: children appear in most towns and, like other civilians, can get caught in the crossfire, or murdered for a huge hit in morale.


Wide Open Sandbox

  • No-one dies in Bully, but there are elementary-school kids. After one too many yelled out 'I'm telling!', it was too much, and they just had to be beaten until they disappeared. Granted, even touching one shoots your Wanted Meter to max, but sometimes they just deserve it...
    • Its even possible to deliberately humiliate the younger kids; by taunting them enough times until the context sensitive "Humiliate" option becomes available, the player can provoke one of the little kids into flinging himself at Jimmy, being held back by the head just out of punching range, before Jimmy crisply sidesteps and sticks out his leg, and puts the kid flat on his face via momentum... or, Jimmy grabs the kid by the nose and lifts him up onto his tiptoes, the kid moaning in pain the entire time.
  • Even Spore averts this. In creature stage, you can kill baby animals of another species, which makes sense considering how real life carnivores often go for the young. (Note that doing this will make that species hate you forever- you'll pretty much have no choice but to extinct them.) But it's a bit more morbid in tribal stage, when attacking another village allows you to kill their babies as well. Civilization and Space stages play the trope straight, though, unless you enter a Galactic Adventure that allows it.
  • Children in the Zoo Tycoon games, although never actually attacked by zoo animals, will run away in a panic if an escaped predator comes near them.
  • Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven averts this somewhat, with Frank's daughter Alice appearing in-game, where you have to rescue her and her mother at an airport. A pedestrian who bears resemblance to Alice appears in the opening FMV, but other than that, no child besides her ever shows up in-game.
  1. ↑ Grand Theft Auto III: Your Questions Answered – Part One (Claude, Darkel & Other Characters)
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