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Torture in Games
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.
An old live-action video game from the mid '90s titled Spycraft: The Great Game had a torture sequence. You had to interrogate someone and had control over how much voltage to use. It was quite easy to inadvertently kill her - and I will say that the first time I hit a switch and saw an actor screaming in pain actually was very jarring. Even knowing damn well it was an actor in a video game.
www.zombieapocalypse.tv
From the article...
It's quite possible Blizzard has a much larger, slow-moving point to make about torture.
So, I would argue, might the TV show 24. Look how often the torture on that show doesn't work out as planned.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
After reading Designing Virtual Worlds I happened to log onto his MUD2 server and look around. Ahh.. memories. And so many missing features! The MUD descendants truly were fertile lands of innovation. Anyway, after about 10 minutes of wandering around in MUD2 I got sufficiently bored and tried to kill something. Bartle kindly informed me that I was a guest and guests should act more polite than that. If I wanted to create an account I could do some killing, but only in the appropriate area, etc, etc. All very British and proper. Of course, the next command I just had to try was 'rape'. Bartle hates that command, so the result was predictably hilarious. I was immediately disconnected and my IP address was banned. Beautiful.
How we know is more important than what we know.
A lot depends on how it's done of course. The point would be to learn something and not just reinforcement attitudes and habits.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Milgram_Experiment
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
A bit like stockholm syndrome, really. As you say reliability is suspect, as you've ... more or less literally made someone insane ... but it's far from 'utterly useless'. There's a shortage of 'proof' on the matter for the very simple reason that the people who do it are already confident that it works, and those that don't... well, can you really see an independant scientific study of torture? It doesn't even work, as constraining and consenting to it by definition removes it's effectiveness - the torturer has to push his victim past the point at which they can no longer cope with the abuse.
Ugly business, but it _does_ work.
Are we prepared to accept the atrocities at Guantanamo bay (and I have no doubt similar/worse things elsewhere that haven't been 'noticed') as a price for 'more security'? Are we prepared to accept the possiblity of global nuclear war as the price for maintaining our 'deterrence'?
Torture is ugly. War is ugly. And the most 'effective' is also the ugliest. Being the biggest and the nastiest and the scariest comes at the price of having to back it up occasionally. At what point do we say 'too much'?
You keep basing it off what the victim says. It's un-reliable, etc...
Torture can be useful to get what ISN'T said. What you already know the victim knows...but you'd like to fill in gaps or corroborate gaps in other theories.
In the medical field, the "pertinent negative" information....what the patient ISN'T saying is often more important than what he or she IS.
A better argument is that we can win wars without it. It is beneath us. It is wasteful and can lose your Hearts and Minds battle.
THL phish sticks
Just ask this guy. (But what does he know, he only got results like info on Zarqawi's location, not revenge.)
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
Until they add a reason that you should have let him live, you still have no consequences for killing Varimathras. If WoW offered a bit more moral consequences for your actions (maybe an achievement for "protect the innocent" or "nice guy"), maybe we'd see people thinking a little more about their actions. Then again, realizing it is a game, how many would care?
Metal Gear Solid - it had an actual torture section of the game that actually changes the ending. If you give-in to the torture, you get to save your girlfriend, Merryl. If you don't, you keep the secrets - but Merryl is killed (and, though the game doesn't show it, it is implied that she'll be raped first.) Disturbing, now that I think back on it.
Why can't all fpga/microcontroller manufacturers just release free optimizing compilers???
I recall a random tv show, one of those things that reports weird cases.
I am going to badly m aul the details of it, but here is a somewhat summary:
The case was something like murder/rape of a young girl. I believe there were 4 friends who were tried for it. What happened was the police kept the kids in the questioning room for like 20+ hours non stop. At the end I think some of them signed confessions to the murder and admitted guilt.
Only, several days later, they found the real killer, had evidence, pretty much had the guy who really did it. But what happened was due to the kid signing a confession, he was tried and found guilty, when in reality he had just signed to make the "torture" stop. In this case it wasn't the literal hot poker medieval thing, but a similar thing of caging someone relentlessly questioning a person.
But yeah, I don't know of any studies about the effectiveness of torture or whatever. Works in movies a lot though ;)
I haven't checked to see if the Horde (which my characters are) has that or a similar achievement. I do know that we have had guild members hit other guild members with snowballs while they are moving past the slimes right after Patchwerk in Nax. The snowball knocks them down and they die when the slow moving slimes hit them. Apparently several guild members aren't too concerned about the consequences (armor repair cost).
Of course you doubt it, because you want so bad for there to be some way in which our power allows us to get what we want.
My grandfather and his brother were captured by the Polish secret police in 1949. They had helped Eastern European refugees escape to the west from the Nazis during the war, but when those refugees returned to eastern Europe, Stalin suspected they were western spies. To find out who they were, and get evidence against them, my grandfather and his brother were held and tortured over a period of five years until they gave them the names of the refugees they had helped.
Was the information true? The soviets eventually got as many names as they wanted. After all that time and under duress it's not clear if the list was complete or error free. More importantly, the premise that the refugees were dangerous spies was false so even to the degree that the information was actionable it was under false assumptions.
I was told growing up that reliance on kidnappings and torture was the proof of why Communism was evil and our Democracy was inherently better. Now I know that was a lie. People like yourself, under any religious or government system, will justify evil acts to themselves if they want.
If you want to read more about it: they wrote a book.
Cheers.