A question occurred to me when I was playing Battlefield: Bad Company 2. Do henchmen have families too?
I was playing that airplane level in the latter half of the game, the one where you’re getting closer to the big baddie, stealthing, running and gunning down the enclosed corridors, taking cover behind cargo crates, popping out occasionally to gun down some mooks. I was sprinting to the end point, the anticipation of reaching the climax of the game rising as I did so…
…when something caught my eye and stopped me dead in my tracks.
Beside a couple of posters (one for a pay-per-view boxing match, another bizarrely endorsing the consumption of kiwi fruit) lay a row of lockers, one of which had three photographs stuck to it: the first showed a wee baby, its face scrunched up cutely as it lay under a blanket; the second had a man holding another small child while smiling, and the final one depicted a man making a devil sign with his hand at the camera.
The owner of this locker obviously had a loving wife, at least one child and a lot of good friends waiting for him back home. Had I just gunned down the individual, callously ending his life for my own game? Had I just killed a man who had only taken this job to ensure his family could pay the bills and keep food on the table? Will his widow receive a phone call telling her that her husband had reported for duty on a plane that never came back?
And what of all the other hundreds, thousands, nay, millions of enemies I’ve gunned down in countless titles before? Had I inadvertently irreparably ripped apart a huge number of families, tearing them apart by dispatching sons and daughters, wives and husbands, mothers and fathers? What if my actions drove orphaned children to seek vengeance, placing them into a never-ending, perpetual cycle of violence?
All these questions flashed through my mind in the space of a few seconds, long enough to make me think that there may have been larger consequences to my actions than I previously thought.
At that point, though, a bullet flew past my head, causing me to throw myself to the ground, scrambling for cover. I looked down the sights of my gun and took aim at my assailant: if it turns out to be me or him, the way I see it, it might as well be him.
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