What Happened When My Child Asked Me to Shoot an Innocent Person in 'Starfield'
Explaining that dad's playing a video game where anything can happen can lead to surprisingly hostile questions about what "anything" means.
My job requires that I play games in front of my children with enough frequency that I’m forced to give pause on whether the content is appropriate. Sometimes, that answer is made for me, like when I was playing Final Fantasy XVI and my oldest asked if the game dropping f-bombs counted as me swearing, because I was holing the controller. At our house, the swear jar isn’t for children swearing—it’s for the parents!
The past few weeks, I’ve had the Xbox connected to our family TV, so I can sneak in progress with Starfield when my children are distracted, or as was the case on Sunday, when my oldest has fallen asleep on the couch, providing two hours of total silence.
Starfield has guns and explosions, but it’s not especially violent, and they swear far less than anyone in Final Fantasy XVI. In other words, I don’t have a lot of qualms with playing in front of the, because it largely goes unnoticed. For the most part, Starfield exists in the background, except for my oldest to get confused by every once in a while, when the game says “Hello, Captain [NAME].” (I named my person after them.)
At one point, unprompted, my oldest started paying attention. Nothing exciting was happening, as I was in the middle of a quest that mostly involved me running from point A to point B. But she started asking questions about the world, and requested that I stop goofily running around and, instead, walk normally like everyone else.
While turning in something for a quest, I accidentally pulled out a gun. In Starfield, you can pull out a gun at any time, but otherwise peaceful characters don’t automatically view the action as hostile. By briefly holding a button, you can holster it and move on. But as soon as my daughter saw the gun, her troll-y brain started spinning. I’d told her this was the kind of game where you can do whatever you want, and this generated a question that I was not anticipating and did not have a good answer for:
“Can you just shoot anyone, too?” she asked.
“Uh, yes,” I replied. “Technically, you can shoot anyone, too.”
That’s when she asked me to pull the trigger—and prove it.
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