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.

Comments

Spycraft: The Great Game

[bryll]

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.

I like Bartle

[QuantumG]

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.

Re:In defense of 24 (but not torture)

[1u3hr]

So, I would argue, might the TV show 24. Look how often the torture on that show doesn't work out as planned.

Seems to work just about all the time -- unless it's Jack being tortured. And the creators of the show exhibit no such agenda.

See this Slate article, for example:

Jack Bauer--played by Kiefer Sutherland--was an inspiration at early "brainstorming meetings" of military officials at Guantanamo in September of 2002. Diane Beaver, the staff judge advocate general who gave legal approval to 18 controversial new interrogation techniques including water-boarding, sexual humiliation, and terrorizing prisoners with dogs, told Sands that Bauer "gave people lots of ideas." Michael Chertoff, the homeland-security chief, once gushed in a panel discussion on 24 organized by the Heritage Foundation that the show "reflects real life."

Amnd teh New Yorker:

This past November, U.S. Army Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan, the dean of the United States Military Academy at West Point, flew to Southern California to meet with the creative team behind 24. Finnegan, who was accompanied by three of the most experienced military and F.B.I. interrogators in the country, arrived on the set as the crew was filming.... Finnegan and the others had come to voice their concern that the show's central political premise--that the letter of American law must be sacrificed for the country's securitywas having a toxic effect. In their view, the show promoted unethical and illegal behavior and had adversely affected the training and performance of real American soldiers. "I'd like them to stop," Finnegan said of the show's producers. "They should do a show where torture backfires."

Has anybody mentioned the Milgram Expriment yet?

[shoor]

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

Re:Does it always produce true responses?

[Sobrique]

You misunderstand torture. Hurting someone to get an answer to a question does this - the subject will do whatever is necessary to end the pain, and that includes telling you what they think you want to hear. However the point of torture isn't to do that - it's to 'break' them mentally, and force them to disconnect from reality and previous motivations and emotions. It's using torment (physical or psychological) to ... essentially drive them insane, and distort their trust relationship towards their torturer.

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.

Torture is less effective than other means

[Dr. Manhattan]

Just ask this guy. (But what does he know, he only got results like info on Zarqawi's location, not revenge.)