Battlefield 3 won't let you shoot civilians. Players are therefore deprived of experiencing the consequences of their violent actions.

I vividly remember Roy Fokker as a roguish hotshot pilot, with dashing looks and a wry smile. I also remember he was the affectionate and protective "big brother" to the young pilot Rick Hunter, whom he took under his wing after the two were thrown into a war with a desperately ruthless enemy. He was a good man.

And then I saw him die.

I was devastated. It was so unexpected. Even though Fokker flew fictional fighter craft in an animated interstellar war, I never expected that he might be mortal. Heroes never die. Heck, baddies never die.

That episode of the animated series Robotech where Roy collapsed in a lifeless heap before my eyes left an indelible impression on my 12-year-old mind. I remember reeling, sickened by the tragedy of war. The injustice of it. The waste.

I was affected.

And that's something I can certainly say never resulted from watching the other Saturday morning cartoons that I devoured in the late 1980s as a child. He Man, G.I. Joe, Transformers, Mask... the list goes on. All had been thoroughly sanitised by the tightening of broadcasting regulations in the United States in the 1980s concerning what could, and couldn't, be seen by children in cartoons.

According to the social constructivist undertones of the day, exposing children to violence would condition them to accept it as normal. It would warp their minds, turning them into desensitised sociopaths. So the regulators stripped those ubiquitous Saturday morning cartoons of all traces of violence.

Well, not quite all traces. He Man still packed an impressive broadsword. G.I. Joe and his buddies sported some serious firepower. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were equipped with apparently lethal samurai swords and sai. But, dumbfoundingly, no-one ever got hurt. And there was most certainly no blood, never any death.

So the violence hadn't actually been stripped away. Only the consequences of violence. What remained was the visceral excitement of a clash of arms, the thrill of combat, the catharsis of revenge. But no consequences.

Violence lost its salience in US cartoons of the 1980s. And in doing so, it lost its ability to affect children, to educate them about those universal themes of the tragedy and futility of violence.

To this day I am grateful for Robotech, and its Japanese progenitor, Macross. Unlike the American dross at the time, Robotech didn't treat me like an oversensitive idiot. It treated me as a mature individual who could appreciate more than just explosions and laser beams. It treated me as an adult. And I am appreciative for that.

Film and television have the power to be more than just entertainment. They can also educate. And as much as most film and TV these days is a moral vacuum, many movies and TV shows do make an attempt to deliver a moral lesson.

And if you think that a passive medium like film or television can deliver a moral message, imagine how potent an interactive medium like video games might be. In a game the moral dilemma is yours, the choice to act is yours, the consequences yours.

There have been many video games that have offered moral dilemmas, and even tragedy. Many that have capitalised on the players agency to drive home a potent message. Most recently - and most controversially - was the level dubbed "No Russian" in the game, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.

In this level you're a deep cover CIA operative attempting to infiltrate a terrorist organisation, and you need to secure the trust of the leader, Makarov. To do so, you join him and his cronies on a massacre of civilians in an airport. In the game, you have the choice to shoot and kill those civilians, some of whom have their hands raised in surrender, some who are trying to valiantly drag injured comrades to safety.

It is as chilling as it is deeply disturbing. I will admit to having never played the level myself, but I've watched it unfold on YouTube. And I don't care to ever watch it again.

Not surprisingly, the level stirred heated controversy, not least from within the gaming community itself. But the controversy over that game didn't end there. Modern Warfare 2 re-entered the spotlight when it emerged that Norwegian mass killer Anders Behring Breivik referred to it "more as a part of my training-simulation than anything else", not as much for the No Russian level, but for the ability to "simulate actual operations".

And the controversy has clearly made an impact, particularly on game developers - that much demonised group who are seen as responsible for offering hapless players the opportunity to kill unarmed civilians, shoot police and rampage through the streets on an orgy of destruction, depending on the game (or all three in some games).

Patrick Bach, executive producer at EA Digital Illusions CE, which is developing an upcoming rival game to the Modern Warfare series, Battlefield 3 (BF), recently spoke out and said he was now against giving players the choice to do "bad things" in his games:

"If you put the player in front of a choice where they can do good things or bad things, they will do bad things, go dark side - because people think it's cool to be naughty, they won't be caught..." he told a writer for the gaming blog Rock, Paper, Shotgun.

"Me personally, I'm trying to stay away from civilians in games like BF because I think people will do bad. I don't want to see videos on the internet where people shoot civilians. That's something I will sanitise by removing that feature from the game."

He couldn't have picked a more appropriate word than "sanitise." While Bach says that "games need to grow up a bit," sadly his solution of "sanitising" them will only achieve the opposite. It risks games going down the same path as cartoons did in the 1980s, patronising the audience and robbing them of the opportunity to be affected in a positive way, and all because Bach fears being blamed for offering that choice.

If video games remove the possibility of "bad things" ever happening, all that's left is the glory of guns blazing, of enemies being sheered in twain by oversized blades. All that's left is violence without tragedy, violence without moral consequence.

The notion that "bad things" in games need have no consequence is entirely fallacious. There are many that use the choice to harm the innocent as a dramatic device, and do so to striking effect.

I vividly remember playing counter terrorism simulator Rainbow Six many years ago. It was one of the first to have anything other than bad guys populate the game world, having scenarios where terrorists would be looming over hostages poised to shoot. If you had a single misstep as you burst into the room, the terrorist would kill the hostage, who would slump to the ground in an expanding pool of red. It was chilling, more an exemplar of failure rather than glorifying innocent death.

Of course there's a sliding scale. To appropriate another medium known for its moralising, Spiderman's Uncle Ben says: "with great power comes great responsibility." And we can never expect every game developer to use the power of agency and the ability to do "bad things" wisely.

But by denying them that power - or having them shy away from it for fear of popular backlash - then we undermine the very ability for video games to aid moral education. We end up producing something that trivialises violence rather than having it shock us.