Fussbett wrote:

http://www.gamespot.com/news/2004/09/02/news_6106400.html

Peter Molyneuaux wrote:

We had to definitely remove some things. I was really passionate about the idea of having children in the game. You know, here we are, we're trying to create a realistic world, and I couldn't understand why not many games had children. So I said, "Right, in this town, there are going to be children. They would go to school and they would get up in the morning, they would go home, and that's it." Within a day of releasing Fable to testing, the most horrendous, nightmarish scenes of carnage within the school had been played out. I just thought, "My God, this can never be seen by humankind. This is going to be, you know, on the front page of [British tabloid] The Sun, and the computer game is going to be banned." So that freedom needed to be curbed a little bit, because it was horrendous. That's the sort of things that you could do.

"[British tabloid]" was added by Gamespot after inital readers thought he was talking about the front page of the stellar body, giver of warmth and light, center of our solar system, the sun.

So anyway, at one point in Fable development, you could do whatever you wanted, which included killing children. Fearful of non-gaming public reaction, it was axed (PUN). If someone like Monty Cantsin was still with us, or this was a pompous website like Quarter to Three, I'd pose a thoughtful question about choices. Something like "Given enough free will, a player will eventually be able to commit atrocious crimes. Is this the developer's fault?" I could make links to the old Comics Code Authority which had absurd rules about not only boring sex and violence, but rules that affected the storylines such as all comics having to show law breakers being punished. Is it up the developer to put enough checks into the game to prevent mass genocide of innocents? Is there a cap on how much freedom we're allowed in a virtual world because human nature always loves a sick joke?

Remember when Peter told us that in Fable the children would grow their hair in the style of your avatar's hair? Well that's gone too.