I’ve been playing The Walking Dead, and am sort of surprised that I’m enjoying it, since I hate zombie games. Did some writing at Gamasutra in re why even people who hate ‘zombie games’ are likely to enjoy it — maybe because the glut of zombie stuff out there has kind of been missing the point, shambling clumsily past the kernel of why we find undead apocalypses enduringly fascinating.

My friend Katie Williams said on Twitter that she is “kinda really sick of video games using children as plot devices to elicit ‘emotional’ responses in players.” So am I. There’s a bit of that in Walking Dead; the protagonist (if you ever wondered how to pronounce my name, it’s same as his) is humanized somewhat by the task of protecting Clementine. The resource allocation is more complicated when there are children around, raising the question– albeit bluntly, clumsily — of whether compassion for the helpless is an essential survival skill.

I actually like the Kid Thing as a device for Walking Dead. The unkillable kids milling around a warzone to remind you you’re a jerk or whatever, not so much. The “oh my god y’all, there’s kids!” thing is a little bit of a lazy narrative device in most contexts, just like “oh my god y’all, there’s guns” is basically a lazy design device, if you ask me (you didn’t ask, but I’ll stand by that one.)

Expect more kids, though. The reasoning’s transparent: Lots of professional game developers are men who’ve been making games that they and their friends would like since their late teens, early twenties. I’m not convinced that an intense focus on games as a primary hobby or career isn’t in part a way to avoid adulthood for a lot of people. At least, I think it can be.

But now we’ve got an economically-mature commercial industry and these devs are now in their 30s and 40s. I think when game creators start having kids of their own, they naturally start wondering about how their  work fits into that. I think we see a lot of children shoehorned onto the battlefield because it’s a literal translation of what’s happening in these guys’ lives. They feel the conflict of developing a certain type of game  with the role of adult parent.

The saucer-eyed little girl asking you why you had to shoot the bad guy is probably a reflection of the saucer-eyed kids waiting at home for Dad and Mom who’ve been crunching in the studio. We probably feel the collective anxiety of not being sure what to say to ‘em, I guess.

Anyway, I picked Duck, for one thing. I feed Clem first, usually. Sigh. I’m so easy.