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Torture in Games

Posted by Soulskill on from the ok-torture's-bad-but-killing's-fine-right dept.

Recent comments from Richard Bartle, one of the developers for the first Multi-User Dungeon (MUD), stirred up discussion about whether virtual torture is acceptable as part of modern games. Bartle was referring to a quest in the latest World of Warcraft expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, in which players are instructed to extract information from an NPC. He drew criticism for his view from a variety of sources, but Wired is now running a piece provocatively titled, "Why We Need More Torture in Games." The author makes the case that the failure of most media to properly portray how horrible torture actually is (for example, on the TV show 24), and the increased focus on real-world topics like Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and waterboarding, could make games the perfect venue for demonstrating the "devastating repercussions" of torture.

14 of 249 comments (clear)

  1. Does it always produce true responses? by Kandenshi · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I don't play WoW or the MUD mentioned in the article, but I'm curious if the use of torture in these games does/would invariably produce honest factual information from the person/monster being tortured?

    Torture has a somewhat speckled history when it comes to getting at what's actually really going on. Torture someone enough and they'll tell you whatever they think will get you to stop the torture, regardless of if it's true or not.

    It'd be a bit more interesting I'd think if the torture sometimes works, and sometimes leads you off in directions that aren't at all productive(and might actually weaken you).

    1. Re:Does it always produce true responses? by Opportunist · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Torture produces what you want to hear. Nothing else. More precisely, what the subject tortured thinks that you want to hear so, as you pointed out, you stop torturing it.

      In short, it usually just "confirms" whatever assumption you had in the first place.

      It is utterly useless for getting information because whatever the tortured subject tells you can either be true (if your assumption was correct) or false (if it wasn't and he is making up some story to make you think that he is giving you information to make you stop the torture). And if he's really dedicated, the chance to get a fabrication increases (because making up a story is not dependent on knowing the truth, only on his motivation to end the torture).

      --
      We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
    2. Re:Does it always produce true responses? by Opportunist · · Score: 5, Insightful

      That's basically what it is. If the quest was to eat human babies (or orc babies on the other side) and there's gold, experience and prestige in it, people will do it. Not because they're not sensitive to the feelings of others, but because it's a friggin' game. I mean, we're already at slaughtering animals, people, undead, ghosts and giants, by the dozen, hundreds, thousands. Eating babies and shocking someone's nuts? We're already at virtual mass murder, who cares about the virtual rest?

      --
      We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
    3. Re:Does it always produce true responses? by Phyrexicaid · · Score: 3, Insightful

      They were torturing for actionable evidence. They had people complaining of "spells" and "curses" being placed on them. They needed to find out who was doing these horrible things. They tortured innocent people until they confessed to being the ones responsible.

      Now you have people complaining about terrorists. You need to find out where these terrorists are. You torture innocent people until they confess that they are terrorists, and tell you where their secret base is. How many people in Gitmo are innocent? How many have been released after spending a year or more there?

      --
      The meme is dead, long live the meme!
    4. Re:Does it always produce true responses? by Nursie · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Some people only understand the utilitarian aspect.

      Some folks would gladly have the government torture a "goddamn terr'st" because they are not people. And of course these same folks are usually more than happy with the idea of suspending due process because they're "terr'sts".

      This seems to come about due to a mix of racism, fear, faith in the government, a desire for some sort of revenge and a genuine lack of understanding of modern justice systems. What's more disturbing is that a lot of folk are willing to put up with a few innocent individuals being imprisoned, tortured and killed (in good faith, of course!) if it the government says it's doing it to keep them safe.

      The worst aspect of this (for me) is that I occasionally hear these opinions espoused by my own mother. Then I feel compelled to remind her that since Dad married an Iranian woman, that wrongly accused suspect could be me next.

    5. Re:Does it always produce true responses? by Opportunist · · Score: 3, Insightful

      What people fail to see is that a system like this can easily be abused against them, too, just like the inquisition was. What if, say, the government decides that the 2nd has to fall and whoever wants to keep his guns is a bloody terr'ist because only them would want to keep weapons. The whole constitution (the old piece of paper that is here to defend you, not against the terrorists, but against a much bigger threat: An overreaching government) becomes very toothless when it gets an unspoken amendment reading "only valid if government doesn't give you a label that makes all these things void".

      Because that is what the civil rights amendments are about: Limiting the governments power over you. The government must not silence you, they must not take away your guns, they must not put soldiers in your homes, they must not simply pick you up and haul you away, they must not browbeat you into confessing and so on. If they can strip these rights from you at will, the whole constitution becomes pointless, because they will of course only apply those labels to those that disagree with them, which in turn means that these amendments become void for all. You HAVE to conform with the government doctrine or your rights are gone. What kind of rights are those, then, if they cease to exist when you need them?

      --
      We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
  2. Does anyone need to learn that torture hurts? by Opportunist · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I mean, let's be sensible here. Torture. In other words, making someone feel pain (physical, emotional, pick your poison) to get something from him.

    Anyone here that does NOT know that this is something you don't really want to be subjected to? Well? I see no hands, so either people know or people know about it enough that they don't want to hear the logical followup to that question.

    If we get desensitized to torture, to people being hurt and mutilated for fun and profit, I think something's wrong with the shows that picture it as something "mildly unpleasant" instead of what it is: Physically and even more so emotionally crippling. When we do the same in games, what does it change?

    I mean, besides games having a weaker lobby and getting the thinkofthechildren crowd up in arms about people playing torture.

    Is there a difference between watching torture on TV and executing it yourself in a game? In both cases you watch a character do it. In one case, you get to see it because you issue a command. In the other case you do because you don't issue one, i.e. don't change the channel. Where is the huge difference?

    --
    We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
    1. Re:Does anyone need to learn that torture hurts? by Opportunist · · Score: 4, Insightful

      So what the US try to tell a potential enemy is that it's better for him to fight to death than face capture?

      Dunno, am I the only one who thinks there's an inherent flaw in that logic?

      --
      We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
  3. Because its not part of the game play by Davemania · · Score: 3, Insightful

    My impression of WoW is that it is a fairly shallow game in terms of narrative with the quests. Most of these quests are simple grinding with very little aspect to rewards or consequences to the players actions. If the idea is to incoporate consequences or rewards to such things as torture, part of the gaming mechanism would've to be changed such that something valuable to a WoW player would be affected. I don't think WoW has ever presented the concept of good or bad in the gameplay, either faction can do pretty much whatever they want regardless. WoW isn't designed to disucss morality in terms of gameplay.

  4. Also by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 4, Insightful

    In the WoW universe, little is permanent. Death is a minor inconvenience, not something that is forever. If a player dies, they spawn as a spirit at a nearby graveyard and walk back to their body and resurrect. NPCs (computer controlled characters) simply respawn in the same spot after a certain amount of time.

    If the real world worked like that, well we'd probably have a rather different value system. If killing someone meant they had to walk back for a couple minutes and caused them no permanent harm at all, I imagine it wouldn't be such a big deal.

    The rules of a game world are vastly different than our own so even if you want to ignore the fact that this is just entertainment, you can't try and apply the same morals to it.

  5. Re:Asheron's Call already had this quest... by Sobrique · · Score: 3, Insightful
    I like how we get to perform some kind of moral calculus with torture vs. killing in a game, and we're able to debate which is 'more acceptable'. I mean, it's a bit like GTA3 - a game based on assault, murder and large scale theft - and the uproar about a sex scene in it.

    Either morality is relevant in a game context or it isn't - if it is, then we should be disapproving of _anything_ in the game which is immoral (and in most cases that's anything that's actually illegal - killing 'bad guys' just because they're there isn't particularly moral). If it isn't, who cares about a spot of torture within the context of World of Warcraft, which lets not forget has a fundamental underlying premise of genocide - exterminating entire races based on their species.

    Not exactly the height of morality there.

  6. Re:False positive and double blind negatives... by Sobrique · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Indeed. Assertions that 'torture doesn't work' muddies the waters on the debate. It mostly does within it's own constraints - you don't get to punch someone a couple of times and get detailed intel out of them, but you can certainly extract a lot of leads given enough time. You can also definitely elict confessions which are relevant from a propganda point of view.

    But that's not why we condemn it:

    • We reject torture because it's calculated harm to another human and we consider that against human rights
    • We reject torture because it is self defeating - the harm caused guarantees the war will continue.
    • We reject torture because of the diplomatic effect - if decent folk won't talk to you because of what you do, diplomacy is hurt.

    The effectiveness or not is a moot point - however effective it is, the price is too high.

  7. Re:Spycraft: The Great Game by unlametheweak · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The failure of most media to properly portray how horrible torture actually is (for example, on the TV show 24), and the increased focus on real-world topics like Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and waterboarding, could make games the perfect venue for demonstrating the "devastating repercussions" of torture.

    Unfortunately the authors premise is wrong. There is certainly no evidence that the more graphic news scenes that came out of the Vietnam War influenced anybody to stop going to war or killing, and neither did the images out of Abu Ghraib prison seem to influence people (who think torture is acceptable) to change their minds.

    As a person who was in the military before, there were instructors (who illegally) imposed their own (relatively mild) forms of torture on their recruits during war games when they captured people (actually these instructors consisted largely of Special Forces people who had a history of abusing their power). Even in this more controlled and sanctioned scenario the psychological trauma caused in many people will never compare to what anybody can merely see in a video game.

    If you want realism then you have to experience it for yourself. I'd rather have something more akin to what police departments do, and that is actually have volunteer officers experience the effects of tasers and pepper spray for themselves, or in the military where they have soldiers take off their gas masks in a small room with tear gas. Other than that it's all fun and games.

    As for the nut-jobs, they will always be around no matter what technology they may get their rocks off with. They need more help than just keeping them away from video games.

  8. Effectiveness by thebheffect · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The whole 'torture doesn't work' argument is valid, but only if you use the process being described. Relying on a single person's confession is bad practice. It's comparable to performing one test in an experiment and using that as your findings. One would think you would have multiple interrogations and be able sort out the differences and inconsistencies to piece together pretty accurate intel. Like other have said though, the 'accuracy' of torture shouldn't be the deciding factor. If that's where we are as a society, then maybe it's too late.