It may depend how you hide it in the game.

Example -- Bioshock has the Little Sisters which the player has the choice to 'harvest' them (kill them by tearing their guts out) , but the actual violence is covered up by a green cloud of mist and the sounds of violence are largely eliminated for the child murder going on (yes its a sorta- mutant child with glowing eyes but since it can be 'saved' as an alternative and restored to being a 'cute' child...)

That was in a game from 2007 with a sequel in 2010

SO the realization of actually doing the deed is clouded and hasnt the impact of showing it in even partial detail - easy for the player to pretend its virtually the same as walking over a powerup.

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So anyway, if there is a differing 'morality' then it needs to be explained/reasoned why it exists (your example of 'offing' children actually exists (and extensively advocated) in our own world with excuses as bad as being 'inconvenient' or 'unwanted' being sufficient reason to allow it -- yes Friends thats right here in River City ....)

And yes making the object of this immoral morality inhuman or dehumanized will help (at least to get you past the censors) -- why do you think mass slaughter of zombies/nazis/mutants/terrorists doesnt seem to generate much hubbub for existing games ???

We might see it in more detail but now its some 'other' that we hardly relate to....

Personally, I don't believe in morals, because most "moral values" I know about are vague and "true just because they say so".

Don't touch a hot stove.

YOU CAN'T TELL ME WAT TO DO!!!1!

* burns hand one or more times until the pain response prevents further hand-burning efforts *

Morals aren't a source of authority, they are a shortcut, a table-of-contents entry into an encyclopedia of experiences.

Morals are a form of optimizing behavior patterns to the environment in which we exist.

In the Frontier days of the 1800s, there was value in breeding large families; expansion to fill the Wild West. And the Industrious Man who earned his keep through hard work was a valuable asset at that time. So the Book of Mormon, which was written at that time reflects that specific set of values. But it's frozen in time, and thus a bit out of date.

The world of the 2000s is full of people, and so large families are no longer as valuable as they once were. So the morals of the day are fear of sexual intimacy, homosexuality, and anything else that slows breeding.

Just Say No To Drugs. Smoking is Evil.

Morals are also the basis of alot of social conventions which simplify things and increase efficiency (which our modern world really cant exist without)

People like predictability (something dating back to the first realization of tides/animal migrarions/season/agriculture) because if they can get some assurance they can predict things correctly, theyn they dont have to waste as much effort maintaining versatility (countermeasures against risks) and can concentrate on things which are to their advantage (ie- more food stockpiled with a reasonable assurance someone wont simply steal it)

Social conventions have most people play by a set of rules which people largely agree on (or if they dont agree at least they know how things will work)

Morality is used to justify many of those conventions.

Lack of conventions ??? Anyone who thinks that anarchy is 'cool' is someone who has no understanding of what anarchy actually is and never really experience it themselves.

Anyone who thinks that anarchy is 'cool' is someone who has no understanding of what anarchy actually is and never really experience it themselves.

Here's two characters I've met that cause calamity and disasters everywhere they go. There's no fixing them, only avoiding them:

1. Rebel Without A Clue, says and does the opposite of everything he hears or is told to do, and claims this makes it appear as if he's being original and interesting.
2. Mr. Unintended Consequences, doesn't believe in all that expertise and skill nonsense. Meddles with everything in sight until it breaks, then claims 'I didn't know that would happen.' Often seen muttering to himself 'Why didn't I think of that?'

Have you seen others?

If you want to portray an incompatible morality, I can think of 2 ways to make your players accept it:

1. Justify it: Show players what benefit your morality brings people. In games, this is most easily done by actually giving people rewards for doing the "right thing". As far as I can tell, games with a good/evil karma meter do this by their very nature. No one would willingly choose the evil route if all the useful powers were on the good one. I would caution you, however, that the player gets a different message if following your morality is rewarding in itself, compared to having quests that require you to do "moral" things. I'm not an experienced designer, so I can't tell you whether one of those is actually better than the other, or if it's a matter of delayed gratification or what, but they are definitely different.
2. Incorporate it into your setting: It's very very hard to show a player a completely mundane world, change something drastic, and expect them not to bat an eye. To take your example, if your game took place in a setting where institutionalized child-killing was the only thing out of the ordinary, no one could help but think "this is very wrong, and stopping it must be a goal in this game". If, in addition, you chose not to call attention to it, and never even explained why it exists, the game would increasingly alienate the player, until they could no longer take your world seriously. (If you want to be the next Kafka, this could work.) The alternative is trying to justify or at least explain it (in the narrative, gameplay or both). On the other hand, if you made it clear that the world you've created is not ours, you might be more able to get away with something like this. If the species is non-human (and to downplay the cuteness factor, as sunandshadow pointed out, non-humanoid), and if the other, non-baby-killing scruples of this species also seem strange/wrong to us, you could at least keep the alien morals from ruining immersion.

The flip-side of this -- if you don't mind being polemical, or at least having black and white morality -- is that you could make one's morals completely unjustified, or make them seem like an awkward tumor on your world.

Relating to a pink haired dwarf of different sex (as indicated by WoW) is easier than imagining themselves as an animal torturer.

Flinging birds to their death, for the express purpose of killing pigs. Very popular game.

My point is that the poster cannot imagine himself torturing animals, while sitting at a desk discussing issues in a forum. This is another personae, a person who has a moral set very similar to what is expected in real life modern society. The person playing Birds is not the same person. The person playing birds is quite comfortable working hard to get a high score by killing pigs in imaginative ways.

I think that we are much better at swapping between sets of morals than we are even conscious of.

I think that we are much better at swapping between sets of morals than we are even conscious of.

Why can't being willing to kill cartoon birds and pigs in a video game be in the same set of morals as being unwilling to do the same to real birds and pigs?

Because people know they are ultimately just changing a few bits inside a computer and thats more akin to "killing" a pawn while playing chess and totally different from torturing a real live creature?

That's what I meant. The two are completely different things, so it seems perfectly consistent to say both "I would play Angry Birds" and "I would never torture animals."

Because people know they are ultimately just changing a few bits inside a computer and thats more akin to "killing" a pawn while playing chess and totally different from torturing a real live creature?

"it's all just pretend anyway..." Porn is just pretend, isn't it?

But even if we restrict our examination to video games, there's still some significant peculiarities. If it's all pretend, and we can easily sort out the real from the fiction, why then do we have problems with slaughtering women and children in video games? Why do we have to de-humanize the enemy into zombies/aliens/robots? Why can't a player enact non-consensual sex or breeding? Or possibly the oddest one of all: Why is it ok to kill someone for their weapons, ammo and health packs, but cannibalism is not ok -- killing them to eat their flesh for nourishment?