You can shoot a baby in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, but the game makes it clear that you really shouldn’t.
Games seem to have different conventions when it comes to child characters. Some game franchises, such as Fallout and Skyrim, just make children invincible so that you simply can’t kill them. Some just don’t have children at all, so there’s no possibility of harming a child.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, which just came out last week, seems to take a slightly different approach. The game is billed as an even grittier, more realistic reboot of the Modern Warfare franchise, which means that it’s not afraid to put the player in tough situations.
In one such mission called “Clean House,” the player is part of a special forces group tasked with clearing a townhouse that has been occupied by terrorists. At one point, the player goes upstairs and hears a baby crying. Breaking open the door reveals the mother as she desperately tries to protect her baby from the scary men wielding assault rifles.
The way the mother moves, however, is designed to make the player think she might be going for a gun. This forces a tough decision: do you eliminate the mother as a potential threat that might risk hurting the baby, or do you hold your fire and risk being shot by a mother wielding an infant and a pistol?
There’s a third option, although to even consider it is beyond barbarous: you could shoot the baby. But if you do, the game will make it clear that you really shouldn’t shoot babies.
First, it will present the player with a simple statement: "Children are non-combatants." Then you’ll be sent back to the stairs to redo the scene. Keep shooting the baby, though, and you’ll eventually be presented with a different message entirely.
As you can see in the video, the player is asked, “Are you serious?” while a super slow-mo voice in the background says “what the f*** are you doing?” After that, the player is forced to repeat the mission from the start.
There is a clear message here that killing babies is wrong as the game prevents further progress until the player stops, it’s still disturbing in the extreme. Even though the screen immediately cuts to black and shows nothing, you gotta wonder if that’s something that deserves to be in a game at all.
Source: Game Rant