Bear with me:

Having dinner with my immediate family is a once every couple months affair. I'm in the middle of two brothers that both are married and already both have a daughter. Last week I called my parents up saying I have a turkey in my freezer an have some time off work, so my mom got a hold of the rest of the family and arranged a dinner at my parents house at the end of the week.

Ok, now boring preset aside:

I had been playing FFVII:CC for the whole week till then and was about 3/4 through it. Really this was perfect timing as I tend to need to occupy myself. My neice of my older brother, almost five, has always taken an interest to my PSP when I bring it to family events. When Me and My Katamari came out she stayed fixated on that PSP screen asking me to describe every little object I was rolling up and why.

"I'ts Japanese", I'd say, "I dont know what it is".

Now I had Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core in my hands and my neice came up again to watch what her uncle is doing with the little video game machine. She came up right before the climax of the Neibelheim scene where Sephiroth does this drastic thing and Cloud is doing something and Zack has to something *sorry I'm trying to avoid spoilers but if you played it or the first FFVII you know*. The first poignant thing she said is, "sorry... I don't play any of those 'killing' games". I quickly retorted, "That is good that you recognize that already."

When I was her age I was playing Atari 2600 games where like Pac-man, Pole Position, or this one game where you flew a plene into barns, and all those games represented some sort of "death" would take place as a part of your actions. Later on when we got an Apple II-e I was playing Montezuma's Revenge, and the first Mario Bros. where bopping enemies to make them go away was a part of gaming life. When the NES came out eliminating enemies through some force of aggresive weapon action was commonplace, like Contra for example. For me at that time the whole idea of the fact I was actually having to kill someone to acheive my goal never hit home as how my neice stated her recognition of what takes place in a video game.

She started talking of a game my brother lets her play that sounds alot like Spyro the Dragon (she can't read the title screen yet to know), in which she had to kill a farmer to protect herself (I never played the game so I don't really know). There was a part which she said she had to kill the farmer to save the dragon, and she showed an actual remorse for doing so, but also showed a sense of necessity to protect the character she was playing.

This is a profound revelation to me on the state of current day gaming on how it effects those still young. It also made me wonder why I never concluded to that same type of impact to life or death choices in the old-school games I have played.

My neice made me proud for her age on actually grasping the FFVII plot, although I had to simplify:

*spoiler: do not read if you have'nt played*

Neice: "why are they fighting?"

Me: "See the guy with the white hair? He's trying to take over the world and the guy with the black hair is me, and the guy with the white hair is trying to stop me from stopping him because he just found out somthing that has made him crazy and he's trying to stop me from stopping him."

This was the hard question:

"so they have to fight?"

"yes, because he is trying to take over the world and wants to keep me from stopping him"

And when it came to saving Cloud:

"Why do you have to fight them?", meaning the monsters in the cave and house.

"I have to save my friend, he is hurt and i can't bring him through these cave unless I get rid of all the monsters first."

"Why is he hurt?"

"These Scientists did experiments on him that made him hurt."

My neice seemed to be ok with killing monsters, but it was hard to explaining why I was killing people once I got to the Shin-Ra troops in the town since they were actual people. I actually had to explain to a four year old the politics of Shin-Ra and what they were doing with their experiments and why there were anti-Shin-Ra groups. I think I did an ok job doing it. She seemed to actually understand somehow why all the drama on the little PSP screen was necessary with all the "killing". The best statement she made though after that is in understanding that it was all just fantasy. Both in her world and in my world of trying to explain an "older person's game" it seemed to make everything ok that she recognized the game as a fantasy story.