The latest Starfield controversy is a reminder that gamers really love pacifism

rockpapershotgun.com:

When I wrote up yesterday's big dollop of Starfield info I was expecting readers to focus on the stuff about housing, mechs and giant snake cults, in roughly that order. I wasn't expecting a slight stir about the inability to complete the game without killing anyone. "Disappointing", responded Youtuber Mike BurnFire in the QTs. Opined Mama Bedlam: "A fully pacifist run not existing (without mods) is a genuinely worrying sign to do with the flexibility of what the game can do". Some players took the news as a brazen provocation. As ManyATrueNerd put it: "CHALLENGE. FUCKING. ACCEPTED."

I shouldn't have been surprised. There's a rich history of pacifism in games of all stripes, with entire speedrunning scenes, schools of advanced play techniques and forum subcultures built around the act of beating the game without, you know, beating anybody up. People who hit the level cap in World of Warcraft: Shadowlands by picking flowers for 18 days straight. People who mod Stardew Valley so they can hug all the slimes. People who literally go through hell in Spelunky without raising their hand to a single soul. People who do no-kill runs of Ninja bloody Gaiden.

Within the weird and wonderful worlds of Fallout and Elder Scrolls, you've got players like Kyle "The Weirdest" Hinckley, who beat Fallout 4 on its hardest difficulty by, admittedly, bending the rules quite a bit: the game only counts a kill as player-inflicted if you use a weapon, so murdering a Radroach by "accidentally" slamming a door on its head is entirely above board. Some players style their characters appropriately: in 2021, Redditor Uebbo dressed himself up as a Courier for a pacifist run of Skyrim, though I doubt this made much impression on the game's bandit