There is a lot of controversy regarding what's acceptable to mass-murder in video games and what's not. Almost anyone who's played a lot of video games has most likely massacred thousands of humanoid artificial lives, whether you're decapitating Nazis, running down pedestrians, or blowing up soldiers by the hundreds on a RTS battlefield.
Even though Artificial Intelligence in video games is very limited right now, some people still have a problem with killing characters on a screen. Check out what a lot of people think concerning the controversial level in Modern Warfare where you're a terrorist killing unarmed civilians with a machine gun. These aren't even close to being real sentient creatures, yet some people won't even play this level because you're killing innocents instead of 'bad guys'.
Artificial Intelligent is always improving, but has a long ways to go before it becomes like we see if Sci Fi. Game designers are always trying to make the best game possible, always trying to improve upon the competition, and it would not surprise me at all if some day in the future they incorporated extremely advanced AI into games. Sentient creatures who are capable of thought and have the desire to preserve their lives. Artificial people who truly believe that they are alive, with families who care about them. They don't actually have families, but they would believe they do, to give them a realistic reason for survival. Wouldn't that make a game challenging and authentic if the people you were trying to kill were truly alive, and unpredictable, even if only inside a Save Game file on a computer?
Would this be going too far? Would these artificial people be alive enough to qualify for mercy, or are they still just objects to be blown apart in a gory mess in a video game? What do you think?