See, this is an interesting issue to explore…
When parents get children in RL, they get a biological firmware update the likes of which they haven’t felt since puberty. There’s a certain biological failsafe that prevents parents from performing eugenics, unless the defects are so severe that it’s mercy killing (Sparta…) There is a reason babies do not remember anything… I know, this statement is gonna make some people vomit, but srsly. Nature has seen alot more than we have. It knows it’s stuff…
When it comes to including children in gameplay, I see no difference in the objectification or “pixel representation” of a child and the pixel representation of any other NPC in the game.
I use to cull hundreds of baby dinos in ARK for eugenics. At first i felt a bit queezy at the practise. I felt alittle sick whenever I hear veterans brag and joke about it… i.e. “It’s practical to recycle the tards. Feed them to their brothers and sisters”… like Holy shizzle. You’d get arrested in RL for saying that shyte out in public.
But eventually I realized that it’s just a game. When Dinos stand around in the same spot, doing nothing for 4 months, it tends to get easier killing little pixels.
When you include human babies in games, and someone murders them cuz they don’t have the right skin color, eye color or gender, then offers their meat to Yog, and consumes it later while singing a Lullaby… that’s because they did not receive the biological firmware upgrade that get’s triggered when they see a bit of themselves in that child, and those big baby eyes in RL.
Your body and mind knows, that pixel representation isn’t real. You can’t fool nature.
I get it though. Mankind is not ready to face it’s mirror image, nomatter how pixellated, at that level of fidelity yet.
But just know that the shyte you do in games comes so easily because your body knows it’s fake… But when you do it for real, you got biological overrides man…trust me. What you do in games, isn’t you. It’s just your fantasy that nobody else will ever see, unless your a streamer playing Loverslab mods.