a purely pragmatic case that ability to kill kids would attract the kind of controversy that could hurt the game
To this, I point back to the aforementioned inane society: people getting in a tizzy over the killing of monsters.
Well, personally, I hope in real life people *would* be up in arms about slaughter of goblin children but fortunately that’s not something we have to deal with. The question of whether it’s okay to kill monsters is different from the one about whether it’s okay to have games which give the ability to “kill” computer sprites that represent juveniles of monsters or any other creature. I’ve not seen anyone here arguing that the latter shouldn’t be allowed in principle, and I think most of us would agree with you that we wish we didn’t have to operate in a world that imposes such restrictions on game content.
More generally, I don’t believe the current world is any more prone to moral panic than any previous one, though the targets have of course changed over time, and wouldn’t agree we are more “inane” now than in the past. But that doesn’t seem useful to debate, so I’ll restrain myself!
