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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.

32 of 249 comments (clear)

  1. Spycraft: The Great Game by bryll · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
    1. 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.

  2. 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 Sobrique · · Score: 3, Interesting
      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.

    4. 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!
    5. 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.

    6. 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.
  3. Re:Asheron's Call already had this quest... by drik00 · · Score: 3, Informative

    Yeah, don't forget the entire PREMISE of Knights of the Old Republic (and sequel) were predicated on how you decided to act in-game. In order to go dark side (evil), you had to do some pretty rotten things.

    We play games the same reason that bear cubs play-fight, just like every other animal in the world, we teach ourselves through playing. I have a COMMUNCATIONS degree and I figured this out... you'd think the PhD's could put it together without making such a big deal of it.

    J

    --
    Beer, now there's a temporary solution -- Homer Jay S.
  4. I like Bartle by QuantumG · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.

    1. Re:Because its not part of the game play by Opportunist · · Score: 3, Funny

      Not to mention the whining. Imagine that you could decide and somewhere in the future it turns out that the item you could have gotten if you ate the baby had a bonus of +1240 instead of the measly +1230 that you got because you brought him a teddy bear. Not to mention that getting that teddy bear took much, much longer than just eating the little screamer.

      What? No, nobody will discuss whether eating the baby would be wrong or bad, why're you asking?

      --
      We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
  7. Re:In defense of 24 (but not torture) by 1u3hr · · Score: 3, Interesting
    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."

  8. Has anybody mentioned the Milgram Expriment yet? by shoor · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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)
  9. Re:Asheron's Call already had this quest... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    I have a COMMUNCATIONS degree

    oh the irony

  10. Torture in games? by Antony-Kyre · · Score: 4, Funny

    It's virtually painless!

  11. 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.

    1. Re:Also by andi75 · · Score: 3, Informative

      > In the WoW universe, little is permanent. ... NPCs (computer controlled characters) simply respawn in the same spot after a certain amount of time.

      Not so true anymore. With Blizzard's "phasing" technology, there are some really world changing quests now (in the world you see, not what other players see). For example, in my version of Undercity, Varimathras is gone for good (I killed him).

  12. 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.

  13. Re:Torture IS a game by jonadab · · Score: 3, Funny

    > Tools such as the La Susana and the Iron Maiden make it much more interesting.

    You can also use car dealership commercials. After about eighty hours of nonstop back-to-back car dealership commercials, the subject begins to lose mental control. That's when you send in the whining children...

    --
    Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
  14. Re:Asheron's Call already had this quest... by vadim_t · · Score: 3, Informative

    That's Neutral. It has several subtypes.

    Neutral: The one you specified. Somebody who doesn't specifically care much about these things. Most normal people go here, who don't spend a whole lot of time thinking about whether they're being completely moral or whether they follow the law exactly.
    Amoral: Animals. No understanding of moral issues.
    True Neutral: Dedication to Neutrality as a concept. Mostly applied to Druids. In my understanding a Druid's point of view is that things must persist. The kobolds must not exterminate the humans, nor the humans the kobolds. The druid will actively try to maintain balance between forces.

    D&D Evil:
    Lawful: Think lawyer type trying to screw people out of their money by using every legal resource to their advantage. This kind of person would argue that "Law == Morality", and that since it's legal for them to screw somebody out of all their money, there's nothing wrong with it.
    Neutral: Selfish. No honor or tradition. Driven by self-interest. Will adhere to law or ignore it, whichever brings the greatest advantage.
    Chaotic: What most games assume "evil" to be. Pointlessly sadistic, kills random people, backstabs associates even when against their own self-interest, because you see, they're EVIL and can't get along with anybody for any length of time. In the real world these would be insane.

  15. Re:In defense of 24 (but not torture) by 1u3hr · · Score: 3, Informative

    I note that all the times you cite when torture didn't work, the victim was innocent or at least ignorant. The point is when Jack tortures someone he always gets results. This all underlies the idea that torture works, that it reveals truth. All of which those who actually have experience of it (not myself, fortunately) will tell you is complete bullshit.

  16. 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.

  17. Google for "Nguyen Van Tai" CIA "Frank Snepp" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    There is a documented case during the Vietnam war: Nguyen Van Tai was interrogated by the CIA and its allies.
    Years of isolation, torture of both the subtle and not so subtle kind.
    The guy managed to give false information for years, with occasional bits of truth that was not useful anymore by the time he gave it.

    The CIA decided at the time he was proof torture was not useful. Not even a matter or ethics: it just doesn't work.

    Just Google for "Nguyen Van Tai" CIA "Frank Snepp"

  18. Torture was an important part of by ghmh · · Score: 4, Informative

    the Dungeon Keeper games. You built torture chambers in your dungeon so you could attract Dark Mistresses who helped torture your creatures to make them work harder, or your enemies creatures to make them reveal information, join your side or die and return as ghosts. Your own Dark Mistresses actually liked you more after you personally tortured them. The related torture animations and sounds were pretty cool, especially for back then. This was back before Bullfrog was acquired by EA, and Peter Molyneux was closer to delivering his promises.

  19. Re:Asheron's Call already had this quest... by YouWantFriesWithThat · · Score: 3, Funny

    what?

  20. Torture is less effective than other means by Dr.+Manhattan · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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!
  21. Re:Asheron's Call already had this quest... by chromeshadow · · Score: 5, Funny

    What do you think happens to the squares in complete rows, you insensitive clod? Oh, sure, they just 'disappear'. Murderer.

  22. 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.