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{{trope}}
[[File:Daggerfall3.png|link=The Elder Scrolls|frame|See?
{{quote|
|[[Memetic Mutation|Antoine Dodson]]
▲{{quote| "...Hide your kids, hide your wife, and hide your husband, cause they're rapin' everybody out here."<br />
▲[[Memetic Mutation|Antoine Dodson]], July 28, 2010, Channel 48 News }}
On TV, babies seem to be able to [[Infant Immortality|miraculously survive any threat]], even when faced with seemingly insurmountable odds.
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Compare [[There Are No Adults]], in which the adults are missing.
{{examples}}
== Video game examples ==
=== Action Adventure ===
* There are no children in the ''[[Overlord (series)|Overlord]]'' series, except a few in ''Overlord: Dark Legend''
* In ''[[The Getaway]]'' Alex Hammond appears to be the only child whole of Greater London.
=== Action Game ===
* A level in ''[[God of War (series)|God of War]]'' features Athens being burnt to the ground, with random civilians running around all over the place, whom you can kill if you so desire. No children are present, of course.
** There is one child that appears in the game, the daughter of the protagonist, Kratos. She is already dead before the game begins, having been killed along with her mother by Kratos's own hand, and only appears in flashbacks. This is in fact a vitally important part of Kratos's backstory, as he is constantly haunted by the knowledge that he was personally responsible for the deaths of his wife and daughter.
* ''[[The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction]]'', as it's possible for Hulk to kill random civilians.
* ''[[Sword of the Samurai]] 2'' is basically ''[[Grand Theft Auto (series)|Grand Theft Auto]]'' in Late Edo Japan... you can, indeed, draw your [[Katanas Are Just Better|katana]] on a busy market-street, and start cutting down innocent civilians left and right. Unlike ''GTA'', however, there ''are'' children. They're just [[Made of Iron]]
* In the console version of ''[[Video Game/Spider Man 2|Spider Man 2]]'', countless adults get injured and mugged and it's up to you to save them. But the only scenario in which you have to help a child is when they let go of a helium balloon and you have to go and save it, in increasingly improbable places and times (like 2 AM in the morning in the middle of Queens).
* The console version of ''[[Ultimate Spider-Man (video game)|Ultimate Spider Man]]'' allows Ultimate Venom to eat balloon-carrying children. Maybe a programmer had to chase a balloon in the previous entry a little too much.
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=== First Person Shooter ===
* Justified in ''[[Half-Life 2]]''. The Combine have suppressed human reproduction for many years (it varies between 10 and 20 years, depending on where you look), so City 17 is populated only by adults. The children all simply grew up. [[Lampshaded]] in the first chapter when Gordon comes across an empty
* Despite several towns (or perhaps the entire world) being decimated by a zombie pandemic, there are no child zombies in ''[[Left 4 Dead]]''. Taken to ridiculous extremes in the "Dark Carnival" campaign in ''[[Left 4 Dead 2]]'', which takes place in a [[Amusement Park of Doom]] without any children.
* Played with in ''[[The Darkness (video game)|The Darkness]]''. At one point in the game {{spoiler|an orphanage is blown up as an act of revenge against the protagonist}}. Everything is relatively cleaned up by the time you enter it, but there's still the matter of the {{spoiler|police-drawn chalk outlines of children's bodies strewn all over the floor}}.
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===
* Players of ''[[City of Heroes]]'' have a running joke in that the entire city lacks any children save for one, who stands in the middle of a zone infested with hostile alien monstrosities with all the invincibility of a non-targetable [[NPC]]. There are also no educational facilities below university level, although school books are occasionally mentioned as a [[MacGuffin]] to be saved.
** It is also all but impossible to make a believable child player character, even with all the size/height sliders at minimum. It's particularly noticeable with female characters, who [[Most Common Superpower|''cannot'' be given a bust size smaller than a B-cup]].
* Children NPCs are invincible in ''[[World of Warcraft]]'', even when you try to kill kids from opposing faction. There is even a holiday event in the game called Children's Week, where players can act as a "big brother/sister" to a child from an orphanage by allowing the child to accompany them while they go about their normal activities. Predictably, enemies that the player might battle while the child is present will never attack the child. Even if the player is hit by an area-of-effect attack, the child will not be affected.
=== Platform Game ===
* The later open-ended ''[[Jak and Daxter]]'' games used this.
=== Role-Playing Game ===
* All of the ''[[The Elder Scrolls|Elder Scrolls]]'' games are suspiciously lacking children:
** ''[[The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion]]'' lacks anyone under the age of 15. However, like ''[[The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind]]'', [[Game Mod|modders]] managed to make them appear, although they are unkillable in both.
** In ''Oblivion'', there is even a non-playable item called Child Overall on a small corpse. [[Fridge Horror|What the hell happened to the children in Cyrodiil?]]
** ''[[The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall]]'' has two types of [[NPC
** ''[[The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim]]'' includes children, but they cannot be hurt or killed. [[Mouthy Kid|No matter how much they deserve it.]] At least one modder took advantage of this and twinked his character to summon an army of knife-wielding little girls.
*** Somewhat played straight with non-human races, however, as you see only human children in the game, yet oddly enough no Eleven or Beast-Race children.
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* ''[[Neverwinter Nights]]'':
** In ''Neverwinter Nights'', Players can destroy every guard and adult in the place, but there is a little child in one of the districts who cannot be killed. If you kill his parents, he even seeks vengeance. Protected by sheer invincibility, he will follow you anywhere in the game, [[Cherry Tapping|pounding on you with his tiny fists]]. He will follow you into every room of the game.
** ''[[Neverwinter Nights 2]]'' has a fair number of children, but peaceful [[NPC
* ''[[Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura]]'' has no real children, with the exception of one quest with an underaged elf who is still over a century old.
* ''[[Dubloon]]''. The closest to the child you will get in this game is Riley.
* Despite visiting many colonies and other places where families clearly live, no children are ever seen in the first two ''[[Mass Effect]]'' games. Partially excused by Shepard spending most of his/her time on military bases or small colonies and research facilities where families wouldn't be living anyway, but it is still a little odd to never see any on the Citadel or Illium... or Horizon, for that matter, especially because children are specifically mentioned in an e-mail received after the Horizon mission.
* The Faelands of ''[[
=== Stealth Based Game ===
* One of the levels in ''[[Hitman]]: Blood Money'' has our hero carry out a hit on a mobster in witness relocation during a child's birthday party. The clown is there, the caterer is there, but the child is nowhere to be found.
* ''[[Assassin's Creed (video game)|Assassin's Creed I]]'' is a straight example, but its sequel ''[[Assassin's Creed II]]'' and ''[[Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood|Assassin's Creed Brotherhood]]'' play with the trope: There are no children to be found in the world unless the plot calls for it, but it does several times, and one of them even meets an untimely demise near the beginning of II.
=== Survival Horror ===
* In ''[[Resident Evil 4]]'', an entire town is infected by a parasite, which turns them into bloodthirsty zombie-like beings. No children are ever seen, of course. A montage during the credits gives a glimpse of how the parasites were introduced to the villagers, and children are seen. Thus, one way or another, a lot of kids died before the game began. {{spoiler|There's a strong implication from that sequence that the children were murdered by the Plaga-infected parents.}}
* The American release of ''[[Silent Hill 1]]'' featured enemies that resembled gray skinned children with knives. These were absent from both Japanese and European releases, replaced by a less obviously human-shaped creature. The demo of the American version, meanwhile, had these gray child-things giggle like infants on spotting you; [[Bowdlerization|this was replaced in the finished game, of course]].
=== Third Person Shooter ===
* For reasons that make sense both in and out of game, there are no children anywhere in the ''[[Crusader: No Remorse|Crusader]]'' series.
=== Wide Open Sandbox ===
* The 3D ''[[Grand Theft Auto]]'' games do this a lot. Only one character under the age of fifteen or so has ''ever'' appeared in the series, in any capacity other than the radio; in ''[[Grand Theft Auto Vice City Stories]]'', Vic's love interest Louise has a baby daughter named Mary-Beth, whom you have to help protect.
** However on the radio several children have been heard and even killed, for instance a [[Jerkass]] gun safety mascot tricked a little girl into shooting herself in the head.
** Lampshaded on Vice City Public Radio show "Pressing Issues" when the host asked secessionist John F. Hickory if he'd been born in Florida.
{{quote|
** Nor are there any elementary or high schools.
*** Or playgrounds, if my memory serves.
**** Actually, GTA 3 was originally going too include kids, schools and [http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20091217163848/gtawiki/images/thumb/e/e7/Schoolbus_GTA_III.jpg/301px-Schoolbus_GTA_III.jpg yellow school-buses] however they were scrapped for an unknown reason; although many people speculate it was because of school shootings that happened around the time the game was too be released, that caused them to take kids out.
** ''GTA Advance'' actually involved a [http://gta.wikia.com/School%27s_Out mission] in which you had too kidnap a school kid. This trope is still played however, when the protagonist gets pissed at his employer for hurting the girl.
** Michael De Santa in ''GTA V'' is the first protagonist to be shown with a family, though his "children" are already in their twenties during the events of the game.
* The only humans in the ''[[Destroy All Humans!]]!'' series are all middle-aged male and female suburbanites, hippies, and farmers, except for the occasional old crackpot scientist or mid-50's communist hating general. More or likely, the same character will respawn in the same spot a few minutes later, implying that they reproduce Asexually, or some such.
* ''[[Prototype (video game)|Prototype]]'' both uses this trope and averts it. You can [[I'm a Humanitarian|eat]] or just [[Video Game Cruelty Potential|slash through]] the whole of Manhattan without encountering a single child. But, the Web of Intrigue cutscenes not only feature children, they feature children who are dead, mutated or experimented on. One of the "memories" even has the creepy, distorted cry of a baby. Have fun sleeping.
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* ''[[WandaVision]]'': Despite charity events run "for the children", Westview is remarkably devoid of them except for the Halloween Episode and a line of schoolchildren used as a barrier to keep Darcy and Vision from getting back into town in episode seven. Lampshaded by Vision at the end of episode five when he points out that he's never seen anyone using a nearby playground. {{spoiler|We find out in episode nine that they've apparently been sealed in their rooms when Wanda's "story" doesn't require them.}}
=== Western Animation ===
* In the direct-to-DVD ''[[Futurama]]'' movie "The Beast With A Billion Backs", the titular Beast {{spoiler|has neck-sex with every single being in the universe}}. In the commentary track, the creators note that they very deliberately did not have any children appear in the episode.
** Actually, [[Fridge Horror|there are children in one shot]] during Fry's / Yivo's speech to the universe. The shot where several people are watching the speech outside in New New York, I believe.
** Later in the track, Bender makes a [[Deal with the Devil|deal with the Robot Devil]] - The Devil will give him an army to take over the world...in exchange for his firstborn son. We then see Bender pick up a small robot who says, "Daddy! I knew you'd come back!", take it to robot hell, and ''punt it into a smelter!''
{{quote|
'''Bender''': [[Crowning Moment of Funny|"No backsies!"]] }}
== Exceptions ==
===
▲== Action Adventure ==
* In ''[[Luigi's Mansion]]'', of all games, some of the enemies are small children. Of course, they're already dead.
** The first boss, a baby, was born as a ghost.
* The ''[[Star Wars]] Episode 1'' game allowed you to kill several children, including the Gungan children, Anakin's friends and even Anakin himself,
* There are children all over the place in the various episodes of ''[[American McGee's Grimm|American Mcgees Grimm]]'', and not even they are safe from [[Bloody Hilarious|hilariously brutal injury and death]].
* ''[[American McGee's Alice]]'' contains Insane Children. While you don't kill them directly (mostly, they get in the way), they are made into clockwork automatons that you do have to fight. However, one of them helps you in a later level.
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=== Action Game ===
* During the Venom tutorial of the ''[[Ultimate Spider-Man]]'' game, your first order of business is to devour a darling little girl holding a balloon. She is spit back out, but doesn't seem to be moving after that. This is actually a parody of the above ''Spider-Man 2'' missions.
** Sort of goes into [[Nightmare Fuel]], even if you're the one playing it. You don't just kill the child, you feed on her very life essence.
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=== Adventure Game ===
* Excluded in the game ''[[Harvester]]'', where just about anyone can be killed, and whether this has game-ending disastrous consequences is generally random. You need to kill several children to complete the game, including a mob of small children you find [[I'm a Humanitarian|feasting on their mother]]. Of course, this is a twisted horror game where interactivity is part of the horror.
=== Fighting Game ===
* ''[[Samurai Shodown]]'' has several children amid its roster. It also has moves that lets you slaughter the opponent rather messily. Aside from ''IV'', where the programming to hit two characters with the finishing moves was left out due to time constraints, ''everyone'' can be killed in brutal fashion, age notwithstanding.
=== First Person Shooter ===
* In ''[[Prey]]'', there are children captured by the aliens. You never get to kill them, but you get to see two die messily, and one enemy type is a ghostly, possessed little girl. She was originally going to be a fleshy possessed girl, and have a male counterpart that was a child husk stretched over an insectoid wraith, but these were dropped from the final game, likely for much the same reasons that motivate the trope in general.
* In ''[[Deus Ex: Invisible War|Deus Ex Invisible War]]'', you can quite easily go on a shooting spree in a school populated by twelve year old girls, though the place is protected by security turrets and guards.
** The original also had children, although there was something [[Dawson Casting|extremely wrong]] with their voices. The children in the original were killable, too. In fact, in one [[Let's Play]] of the game on the [[Penny Arcade]] forums, the player uses a rocket launcher on one, laughs, and then notes that he's laughing at having murdered a child--"A small, starving child"
*** That's the game's ''setting'', mind you, not its attitude - ''[[Deus Ex]]'' was and to some extent still is notable in encouraging the player ''not'' to plow through the game destroying everything in their path.
**** What's odd is that the first game had ONLY boys available for
* In ''[[
** After saving a little sister, they become a plain young girl, thank you, then run to the nearest vent to escape. You can shoot them after saving them, but your bullets will still bounce off her and a stern message will appear:
{{quote|
** It's possible to kill children in another way - the final level of the first game {{spoiler|is an [[Escort Mission]] where you have to guide a Little Sister who can open doors that you can't. If she takes enough damage, she will die and Tenenbaum will berate you - then tell you to go get another sister.}}
** There is also a single scene in which you find that a family of five committed suicide in their apartment by drinking poison. Oddly, the parents show sign of decay, but not the three identical daughters.
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=== Hack And Slash ===
* This trope is [[Inverted Trope|horribly, horribly inverted]] in ''[[Drakengard]]''. First off, there is a stage in Leonard's side-story in which you are forced to fight the child-soldiers of the Empire, who are [[Mind Control|brainwashed as the rest of the Empire's soldiers are]]. As you are [[Kill'Em All|slaughtering them all]], Leonard cries out, "But Caim, they're just children!" Your dragon then loudly declares "Soldiers are soldiers!" and ''encourages'' you to carry on. Then there's the matter of [[Cosmic Horror|the Grotesqueries]], which is plain and simple [[Nightmare Fuel]].
** {{spoiler|Nothing compared to the second game, which had a child (or childlike) character [[Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever|grow to giant size]] in a ''boss battle''. No prizes for guessing what you have to do.}}
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===
* Although there are children present in a few major cities in ''[[World of Warcraft]]'', there is an event where you can pick up an orphan from your faction's capital and take them around questing (read: 'killing stuff') with you. They seem to enjoy it.
** Overlaps with [[What Measure Is a Non-Human?]] in Northrend with a quest to kidnap Wolvar pups for the Tuskarr. The Tuskarr insist that they want to raise the Wolvar to be more peaceful than the vicious hunters they normally are, but the lack of any Wolvar in their village can lead to some nasty [[Fridge Horror]] implications. Also, to capture the pups they have to be targettable, which also makes them ''attackable''; players that don't watch what they target, or use [[Area of Effect|AoE]] abilities on the adults, can kill the pups as well.
* In ''[[Phantasy Star Universe]]'', there are child [[NPC
* In ''[[
* Though you never see a child die in [[Guild Wars]], the canon makes it very clear that children can and do die; as one character puts it: ''"There were no children left after the Searing. They either grew up fast, or they didn't grow up at all."''
** And then there's [[Break the Cutie|Gwen]]. At the age of ten, she witnesses searing fire rain from the sky, is orphaned, gets kidnapped by the race who sent the Searing, and spends the next seven years toiling in a slave camp, escaping only when they attempted to feed her to a giant scorpion.
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=== Platform Game ===
* ''[[Heart of Darkness (video game)|Heart of Darkness]]'' got away with death sequences that showed the kid player character crushed, devoured, incinerated and drowned in a variety of non-gory, yet non-discreet ways. ''Heart'' is one of the few realistic 2D [[
=== Real Time Strategy ===
* In ''[[Warcraft]] III'', you can actually kill children [[NPC
=== Roguelike ===
* ''[[Dwarf Fortress]]''. Not only do infants catch arrows and melee attacks initiated at the mother, the children will blithely follow their mothers into combat. Since soldiers tend to have the highest birth rates, unless you have a lot of traps outside your fort, you're not going to have a lot of children surviving into adulthood. And that's not even including the people who practice 'population control', and actively kill off the children that take up space in their fortress.
** And that's assuming you were playing on Fortress Mode. Play on Adventurer and you can easily liberate children from Goblin fortresses to be in your party (which is a good idea, as they are useful as shields since you can't hire drunks anymore). Sound bad? How about the fact that, should you decide to invade a human town, you'll find yourself catapulting children into walls as they try to kill you? Sound bad? How about invading an elven town, where you will frequently find yourself beset upon by entire waves of children, some as young as two?
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=== Role Playing Game ===
* You can murder children in the first two ''[[Fallout]]'' games, though the resulting penalty to your reputation makes the rest of the game nearly unplayable. The European version removed the children by turning them invisible, which makes the town full of pickpocketing urchins even more annoying then it was already.
** The game rewards creativity: players sick of the Den's pickpocketers have the consequence-free option of planting live grenades in their inventories by means of the Steal command. This will cause such entertaining visual effects as the [[Ludicrous Gibs|child's body exploding into a red mist, while his head goes rocketing upward with a trail of blood]].
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*** However, there are mods that disable the "invincible flag" and various other additions, so the whole thing can be a bit moot.
*** ''[[Fallout 3]]'' doesn't even bother going out of its way to tell you that the two children in Megaton have somehow "escaped" the atomic blast. They can probably be assumed dead.
* Played literally in ''[[Phantasy Star IV]]'', the entire population of a town has been turned to stone by the first major villain of the game; the player can bring the party around to see all the statues who were once residents, but most of the buildings are locked
* {{spoiler|The first form of the last boss in }}''[[Parasite Eve]]'' Is, in fact, a baby. {{spoiler|Wich is the Ultimate Being. As such, it keeps developing, eventually becoming an adult, and a bizarre gelatinous skull thing.}}Also, Aya's {{spoiler|dead sister; Maya, is a key character in the game, as well as being in the true final boss fight.}}
* A big exception occurred in ''[[Ultima VIII]]'', where it was possible to round up a bunch of children near the edge of the starting town and start hacking them to bits. Doing so resulted in a very powerful guardian coming to kill you in their defense, but especially nearer the ending of the game, that guardian was perfectly beatable.
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** Even outside the dungeons, children aren't necessarily faring well. The player will meet a child enslaved to extort information from her mother, another child subject to brutal punishment along with his father for a trivial offense, and another child in hiding and slowly starving since his father was unjustly imprisoned.
** The dungeon room is even worse in the brilliant remake ''Ultima V Lazarus'', where you hear the children laughing as you approach, and hear them screaming in pain as you and your companions mercilessly kill them.
** In fact, rooms with children is a [[Running Gag]] in the later Ultima
** In ''[[Ultima IX]]'' a boy highwayman demands gold from the Avatar, taunting him on being unable to fight a child. Whether the boy is given gold or not, he immediately flings powerful fireballs while laughing. Killing him results in a hefty karma penalty. Near the game's end, the Avatar comes across a girl who has been incurably poisoned with a toxin that will slowly, excruciatingly and inevitably kill her, and she begs the Avatar to end her suffering. Whatever choice the Avatar makes, the Guardian will beam a [[Hannibal Lecture]] into the Avatar's head over it.
* ''[[The World Ends With You]]'' features various child [[NPC
** {{spoiler|Nevermind the fact that since everyone in the Game is dead, you get a brief blink-and-you'll-miss-it flashback of her and her brother about to be run down by a truck.}}
* ''[[Chrono Cross]]'' features a nine-year-old girl. As a [[Boss Battle]]. Go ahead and beat the crap out of her. She even shows up again in another [[Boss Battle]], with her co-workers, a big brawler and an axe swinger, and is considered at least equal in power to them.
* In ''[[Avernum]] 1-3'' there are children in towns (where they are unlikely to be harmed). However, the young of [[
** In the original version of ''Exile II'', destroying the enemy slithzeraki children is first described as fun, but when complete, your party feels [[Tears of Remorse]] because you shouldn't be killing children even if they are enemies.
* In ''[[Dragon Age]]'' you have the option of killing a young child as a way to solve a quest. The game makes you [[Tear Jerker|suffer for it]], though.
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=== Simulation Game ===
* ''[[Black and White]]'' leaves the player free to torture, sacrifice, and otherwise maim children, but it dings the [[Karma Meter]].
** If you're going for the evil-deity-good-creature combo, this is actually a good way to counterbalance all the nice things you have to do to train your Creature.
=== Stealth Based Game ===
* The ''[[Thief]]'' games have quite a few 'child-like things' but there are far fewer children around than there logically should be; the game involves sneaking around houses in the middle of the night when children should be at least present, if asleep. However, you encounter the ghost of a child in ''Thief II'' and ''Thief III'', and something that might be a child transformed by mad science in ''Thief II'', as well as a couple of robotic children (sometimes very annoying and... yes, invulnerable). All these are used for their disturbing qualities.
=== Survival Horror ===
* While more than a few kids die in the game ''[[Rule of Rose]]'', the game is [[Gory Discretion Shot|noticeably shy about showing it happen]], keeping the deaths off camera and featuring empty clothes in the place of bodies. Even though in this game, the children are the bad guys. Although the enemy Imps resemble children with either bizarrely distorted faces or the heads of animals, and it's not at all shy about showing ''them'' dying gruesome deaths.
* ''[[Fatal Frame]]'' has the ghosts of children who will help you some of the time but other times they will attack you like the adult ghosts and have to be dispatched like adult ghosts. It probably helps that defeating a ghost once does not stop it popping up again at a later
* Undead baby clones show up as enemies in ''[[Dead Space (video game)|Dead Space]]''. [[Dead Baby Comedy|Drop-kicking them into a wall is possible, and even encouraged.]]
** [[Dead Space 2|The sequel]] takes this to a new level. The tentacled babies return, but new to the series are exploding infants and swarming five year olds, [[Dead Baby Comedy|who's heads you can punch off.]]
* [[Dead Rising]] Appears to play this straight at first glance, due to the fact that out of the 50,000+ zombies in the mall there is not one child. However, the reason that two of the human psychopaths (Adam and Cliff) are the way that they are (Read:Insane) is due to the fact that they had to watch children be killed by the zombies (even worse with Cliff as the kid killed was his granddaughter). Also, one of the survivors who can be rescued by Frank is a woman who was helpless to stop her baby from being devoured by zombies. There is also the [[Easter Egg]] on the title screen.
* ''[[Days Gone]]'' does feature killable children, but the "children" in question (specifically those aged ten to fourteen) have degenerated into infected Freakers, known in-game as "Newts".
=== Turn Based Strategy ===▼
* Averted in ''[[Fire Emblem:
▲== Turn Based Strategy ==
▲* Averted in ''[[Fire Emblem the Sacred Stones]]'', where there are two chapters where civilians, including children, are on the field. While you cannot harm civilians, enemy units often attack them, and generally kill them in one hit. While you can defend them, doing so is not strictly necessary, and you can still beat the level if one of them dies, although even one civilian death will prevent you from getting the rare items that civilians give you at the end of the chapter.
=== Turn Based Tactics ===
* Averted in ''[[Jagged Alliance]]'' 2: children appear in most towns and, like other civilians, can get caught in the crossfire, or murdered for a huge hit in morale.
=== Wide Open Sandbox ===
* No-one dies in ''[[Bully (video game)|Bully]]'', but there ''are'' elementary-school kids. After one too many yelled out 'I'm telling!', it was too much, and they just had to be beaten until they [[Everything Fades|disappeared]]. Granted, even touching one shoots your [[Wanted Meter]] to max, but sometimes they just deserve it...
** Its even possible to deliberately ''humiliate'' the younger kids; by taunting them enough times until the context
* Even ''[[Spore]]'' averts this. In creature stage, you can kill baby animals of another species, which makes sense considering how real life carnivores often go for the young. (Note that doing this will make that species hate you forever- you'll pretty much have no choice but to extinct them.) But it's a bit more morbid in tribal stage, when attacking another village allows you to kill their babies as well. Civilization and Space stages play the trope straight, though, unless you enter a Galactic Adventure that allows it.
* Children in the ''[[Zoo Tycoon]]'' games, although never actually ''attacked'' by zoo animals, will run away in a panic if an escaped predator comes near them.
* ''[[Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven]]'' averts this somewhat, with Frank's daughter Alice appearing in-game where you have to rescue her and her mother March at an airport. A pedestrian who bears resemblance to Alice appears in the opening FMV, but other than that, no child besides her ever shows up in-game. [[Video Game Cruelty Potential|Gunning down Alice and March]] is possible, though this obviously leads to mission failure with the game telling you [[You Bastard|what the hell you just did]].
{{reflist}}
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