Hooray, Now You Can Kill Kids in Skyrim

Back in September, Bethesda’s Pete Hines got into a scrape on Twitter with some PC gamers who resented the fact they were not permitted to kill children in games like Fallout and now, Skyrim

“It’s sad that modders are forced to fix a game that’s being released as broken,” sniffed one. “Because we don’t let you kill children,” Hines shot back. “Got it.”

Even though committing a crime in front of a child makes him an immortal tattle and a tremendous pain in the ass to your designs, whatever they are, Bethesda is never going there, for obvious reasons. (“Video Game Gives You High Score for Killing Children! Next on Nancy Grace.”) Well, aspiring child killers of Skyrim, rejoice, for modders hath delivered the means of murdering the wee ones, barely nine days after the game’s release.

The mod is available on Skyrim Nexus [registration required; you’ll also need to unblock adult content in your preferences]. “Allows the children of Skyrim to die. Affects the Breton, Imperial, Nord and Redguard children,” says its description. “Also lets you play as them if you create a new character with the mod enabled, a funny, unintentional bug.”

Fine. Go kill ’em. But this isn’t “fixing” a broken game. There are games in which children can die—BioShock? Hello? But in that example, by then they were either sub- or nonhuman, and their deaths were part of an active choice the player must make to advance the story along one of two paths.

People who want to pick a fight about the legitimacy of killing kids in a video game need more than “I need to be able to do that randomly because it’s an open world game” to justify it.

Killable Children Mod for Skyrim [Skyrim Nexus. h/t John W.]