Video games are usually a teenager/adult-only affair, with everyone fighting in the battles being age-appropriate and with sufficient traits/flaws to make their fates reasonable. Every protagonist is an able-bodied adult male or female. However, occasionally in this day and age, you come across a game featuring children, either as a driving force for the protagonist's motivations or as a representation of an important moral choice. It is around this time that the social and action dynamic of the game often changes to reflect the subject matter.
Bioshock: In this game, the player (you/me) is presented with what I believe to be one of the bravest gameplay mechanics I've ever seen in a title: the moral and practical consequences of the salvation/destruction of a child. Your character, through a sequence of seemingly random events, discovers a city at the bottom of the ocean that thrives on ADAM, unstable stem cells harvested from sea slugs that are modified to give the citizens of Rapture (said city) varying abilities, from an improved physical appearance to the ability to move objects telekinetically. The player, in order to survive, splices their DNA with Adam in order to combat the remaining residents of the city who have spliced their own DNA until they lost their minds. During the course of the game, the player comes across Little Sisters (shown above), little girls who have been implanted with the ADAM-producing slugs and conditioned to collected ADAM from the corpses around the city, and are given a choice:
On the one hand, you can choose to forcibly remove the slug which kills the little girl in the process, a reprehensible act but one that yields a very large amount of ADAM with which to combat those trying to kill you.
On the other, you can choose to save the little girls by removing the slug safely, allowing the girl to live, but giving you a limited amount of the genetic material in turn.
As you do not obtain much of the material throughout the game, each little girl is a decision, both for the character and for you: can you live with the death of a little girl on your conscience?
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