What video games have to teach us about childbirth and childbirth support

Design patterns are meant to provide a rubric of problem-solving strategies for common design problems in software engineering. This paper presents the patterns that 34 commercial video games have come to use in representing the birth of a child, and asks, "Where do babies come from?", "What are babies for?", and "How do you support a virtual mother (in labor)?" to gauge how deeply the design patterns have entrenched themselves in modern video games. We found few commonalities between the 34 games; indeed, we found that design patterns as solutions to open problems do not seem to exist for childbirth scenes in games. However, patterns of depicting birth, the mother, and the child, do exist. We suggest that these patterns are a crutch -- causing more harm than good for the players of the games by the inaccurate and incomplete scenes surrounding birth.