‘I can’t kill a wolf but will happily watch a Sim drown’: murder and morality in video games

From being unable to harvest ‘little sister’ characters but happy to kill others freely, to playing the Legend of Zelda as a vegan – gaming ethics are complex and highly personal

I can kill foxes but I can’t kill wolves. Not in real life, obviously – in real life I send emails eight hours a day – but in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, where every animal is an arrow away from becoming a fortifying meal. Shoot a wolf and you’ll be rewarded with a thick red slab of raw prime meat, but I can’t do it, I just can’t do it, even though they often attack me in packs. They look too much like dogs.

I can kill a fox – even though they never attack me, and they often let out sad little yelps – but many other gamers can’t. One post in the Tears of the Kingdom subreddit is entitled, “I can’t shoot the foxes” and has almost 500 upvotes. “They’re so sweet and nice I can’t bring myself to hurt them,” the original poster wrote. Continue reading...


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