Torture in Games 249
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.
Torture IS a game (Score:2)
You must mean Deception (Score:2)
While somewhat more trap-based than torture based, Tecmo's Deception [wikipedia.org] mostly fits what you describe.
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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...
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Personally I think a mixture of Sham-wow! and various Billie Mays commercials would be more effective.
Can't you just imagine the 9323rd "Sham-wow - you'll be saying WOW every time!"?
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80 hours of nonstop anything can be torture for most people, regardless of what you're doing.
Especially since if it's 80 straight hours, you're already causing multiple days of sleep deprivation.
Spycraft: The Great Game (Score:5, Interesting)
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I had that game too (still have the CDs on my shelf) and though I'm sure we'd think it was cheesy now, at the time, compared to the very simple graphics in most games it was pretty engrossing to interact with "real" people. As you described, some sequences were very effective - some were plain silly as well :)
I have the one where you're a submarine captain, too, forgot what it's called... That one was engrossing as well, except it seemed much more scripted and linear than Spycraft did. I still remember clea
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A relatively non-controversial company, Bethesda, has in fact released a game -- Oblivion -- that featured the player torturing an NPC for information [uesp.net].
(Un)fortunately, the torture isn't remotely realistic and consists of beating someone who never bleeds, with hands that never get sore. The NPC commits suicide afterwards too, but even that's a bit of a non-event.
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Spoilers Ahoy.
One of the main mission sequences in Saint's Row 2 is a progression against a gang that starts out with slipping nuclear waste into the tattoo ink of a guy that pissed you off, and later progresses to 'rescuing' (then delivering the Emperor's Mercy) to one of your lieutenant's who's been chained to a truck and dragged around town, to kidnapping the guy's girlfriend, putting her in the trunk of a car, then sticking that car on a monster truck course that the guy is going through.
Some of it is p
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Which is great for those of us with adequately working prosocial wiring in our heads, which most of us have. I think it's a great way to help make the horrible actuality a little more real than the glossed-over, glamorous version we get programmed into us from Hollywood.
But there are those of us who have our wiring messed up [go.com]. I don't know what the frequency is, and in net forums the tendency to mouth off creates a disproportionate appearance, but I imagine there are enough out there that it deserves soci
Re:Spycraft: The Great Game (Score:4, 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.
Does it always produce true responses? (Score:4, 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).
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and sometimes leads you off in directions that aren't at all productive
It would be amusing to have the player run off in search of random football players [blogspot.com] ;)
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Very interesting... I hadn't heard that story. I recently saw the movie Rendition, and the prisoner in that gives the name of an Egyptian World Cup football team as his "terrorist accomplices". Most of the events in that are based on real cases, I hadn't realised they were referencing McCain though.
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Such a deed would be pretty in-character for a Rogue and would be light amusement at best for a Warlock, but if word of a Paladin doing
Re:Does it always produce true responses? (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?
Also (Score:5, 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.
Re:Also (Score:4, 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).
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Any game that would be at all realistic would be a game that nobody would want to play.
Spending 80 dollars for a game where you got killed and then could never revive yourself certainly wouldn't be much fun.
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Strictly speaking, is it possible to slaughter undead and ghosts?
Re:Does it always produce true responses? (Score:5, 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).
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do you have any evidence to back these assumptions? I'm not talking about another talking head saying the same thing, but I mean evidence pointing to several instances where a prisoner gave details that were expected and they turned out to be false.
I Personally doubt these methods are as ineffective as everyone likes to portray them.
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Umm.... how about pretty much inquisition trial that included torture?
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Umm.... how about pretty much inquisition trial that included torture?
I don't think he's talking about torture to obtain a confession, but rather torture to obtain actionable information. I would imagine an interrogation could be set up so that the subject is asked questions with only concrete and verifiable answers. The subject could be threatened with even more torture for non-compliance or misinformation. It would then be in his best interest to tell the truth as soon as possible.
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If he knows it. If he's in the unfortunate position to know nothing of interest for his torturer, he's basically dead (or worse) if he does not lie and try to find out what his torturer wants to hear.
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Very true. If he doesn't know, he's pretty much screwed. I'm not saying that torture is the end-all-be-all of interrogation techniques, but the common misconception that torture is useless, is harmful to the debate. There are so many better arguments against torture.
Most individuals could think of a situation where they would make the decision to torture, even if the results may possibly be false. The strongest arguments against torture do not deny that fact. They rest on the dangers of legitimizing and ins
Re:Does it always produce true responses? (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.
Re:Does it always produce true responses? (Score:4, 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?
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Such as the names of your fellow witches ?
That would require that you have some way of obtaining the answers independent of torture, which makes the torture pointless.
I suppose you could try to set up a scenario where you'd "train" the victim to tell the truth wi
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do you have any evidence to back these assumptions? I'm not talking about another talking head saying the same thing, but I mean evidence pointing to several instances where a prisoner gave details that were expected and they turned out to be false.
I Personally doubt these methods are as ineffective as everyone likes to portray them.
The witch trials in Europe: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch_trials [wikipedia.org] Unless you believe in witches I guess.
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not germane. this is not actionable evidence. this is torture committed with the purpose of making someone say "xyz". that is completely different than torturing for actionable information.
inevitably, the only data people can point to is similar situations where a confession was garnered. That is what torture is about wehn a police officer is trying to get a confession (hence it's uselessness) but isn't what torture is about when dealing with Al Qaeda. We don't torture to find out if the person is a me
Re:Does it always produce true responses? (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
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The witch trials in Europe
Were the witch trials in North America much fairer?
Less deaths in North America. Tens of thousands lost their lives in Europe, so it's a better example purely because some people choose the argument, "Well only a few people died". (e.g. the awful apologist, Lee Strobel).
Google for "Nguyen Van Tai" CIA "Frank Snepp" (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"
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I Personally doubt these methods are as ineffective as everyone likes to portray them.
Oh! Well, if "gordo3000" doubts that torture is ineffective, let's torture away!
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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, prett
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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 p
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There was a guy a couple of years ago who got FBI agents running willy nilly all over the country breaking up imaginary terrorist attacks because he was just making up shit for his torturers. I couldn't find a link though in two minutes of Googling, so I'll just point out that the Nazis and the Japanese weren't able to torture themselves to victory, nor were the Soviets, past masters of the art, able to torture their way out of the Cold War. George Bush and Dick Cheney have looked at the Soviet's stunning
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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 'effecti
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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
But the topic is torture in a specific videogame. Based on my experience with such games, I'm thinking that the likelihood of the torture victim (NPC) giving false information because of the torture is low. i think it's more likely that in a typical game world, the application of torture will yield the answers the player needs to complete the quest. Therefore, the game is not giving a true impression of torture and its effects - which often backfires on the torturer and leads them to waste time and resource
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It could well be part of the quest that the tortured victim lies and leads you into a trap, then part of the quest is to overcome the trap and kill the ones setting it for you (or at least escape them).
As a counter example, Tabula Rasa (another MMO) actually had a few quests where you could choose between cooperation and confrontation. I remember at least two quests where you interacted with a prisoner. In one case you faced the choice between giving the alien prisoner his special food before the special ag
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Torture does have blowback, especially these days where people are not illiterate and unarmed like how most of the serfs were in the Middle Ages.
Note how big government is trying very hard to fix that for you.
The quest in question.. (Score:2)
this [wowhead.com] is the quest in question. While there's a similar one in the death knight starting zone, the NPC's there are armed, and are not strapped to a chair begging you to stop.
If you look at the response column the player base was squeamish enough to create forum threads in objection. As someone who browses the forum on occasion, the first couple weeks after the wrath of the lich king launch saw an explosion of similar threads.
I think it would be better to have you torture the npc in question multiple times,
In defense of 24 (but not torture) (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:In defense of 24 (but not torture) (Score:4, Interesting)
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 [slate.com], for example:
Amnd teh New Yorker [newyorker.com]:
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They tortured the son of the Sec Def, but didn't get the info they were looking for. They either tortured, or were about to (I disremember) the Sec Def's daughter, but since she didn't have the info they wanted, that wouldn't have done any good either. They tortured the CTU-running woman of Arabic or Persian descent, but since she didn't have the info they wanted, that didn't do any good either.
In other words, the vibe I get from the show is that torture doesn't work out nearly as often as its cheerleader
Re:In defense of 24 (but not torture) (Score:4, Informative)
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And in all those cases they go: "Oh, well, no permanent harm done, move on. Have a pay rise."
In those cases they may show that torture doesn't always work, but their reaction to having screwed up is so apathetic that they give the impession that while torture may not always work, you have nothing to lose by giving it a go.
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... we're the good guys, right?
Nope.
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The thing is that people in the government and military identify with Jack (see the articles I cited), they think that those pure in heart (like Jack, and themselves, because everyone like to think they are) can torture and get truthful results.
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So, I would argue, might the TV show 24. Look how often the torture on that show doesn't work out as planned.
That's because they never give Jack enough time! He asked for *five* minutes alone with the suspect, dammit!
The best was when he was interrogating a guy, and shot the guy's *wife* in the leg. BAD ASS! :-)
I like Bartle (Score:4, Interesting)
After reading Designing Virtual Worlds I happened to log onto his MUD2 [mud.co.uk] 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.
Does anyone need to learn that torture hurts? (Score:4, 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?
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Your mention of 'physically' and 'emotionally crippling' effects is significant. One reason societies torture is it often messes the victim up permanently. The theory goes, leave a person barely able to walk, starting or even fainting at every loud noise, and trained in submission, and you have a person who won't make an effective enemy. He or she may hate your guts, but won't actually be functional enough to pose a threat. That's actually the most frequent goal, rather than to get information. And the goal
Re:Does anyone need to learn that torture hurts? (Score:5, 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?
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'enemy' there's that word again. i hate that word. it's being used a lot to stop you thinking for yourself.
Because its not part of the game play (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Because its not part of the game play (Score:4, 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?
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No, but I know MMO players.
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For example, during the dragonblight line, you'll discover several things, such as the fact that the Azure dragonflight is forcing several mages to preform tasks after threatening their families with death, one such encounter leads to a heart felt letter from her father thanking you. At the end, after a major battle, you'll see a fire bakes landscape and the screams of the injured and
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certainly the after-effects of torture are not part of the gameplay. Once you've tortured the NPC to "extract" the information, what then? You go on your merry way, never looking back, and don't consider or even remember the NPC again.
Its not as if there's a sub section where the NPC goes back home to the wife and kids.
Now, if the NPC went back to the family/tribe/whatever and they took one look at him, decided that the player was an evil, warmongering SOB that deserved to be given a bloody nose, and thus r
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On PVP servers, waiting for quest text isn't always an option. Go ahead and try to hang out at Hemet Nesingwary 's(Jr. now?) camp and read a book of quest text with all the 40-level-higher-than-you gankers hanging around.
Also, I tried for a long time to avoid coordinate addons and "quest helper" type sites and addons. I did (tried) the shaman water quest in the barrens back in the day without addons. They don't actually tell you enough to do a lot of quests. Unless you consider running around the entire
Has anybody mentioned the Milgram Expriment yet? (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 [wikipedia.org]
Torture in games? (Score:5, Funny)
It's virtually painless!
Torture rocks! (Score:2)
One of the best parts of Shivering Isles was walking around town and interrogating citizens with the help of the royal torturer and his shock spell. There's another part where you, dungeon master-like, subject treasure hunters to various obstacles that either kill them or drive them mad.
Good times. :-)
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Yeah, that was a riot, unlike the vanilla Oblivion where the main quest requires you to do good deeds regardless of your character, the Shivering Isles quest requires evil. Then Knights of the Nine is absurdly over-pious to the point of being downright tedious, such as having to not do anything evil just to use the equipment you earned from 5-10 hours of questing!
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ah yes, Dungeon Keeper 2 [wikipedia.org]... where you built a torture chamber and shiny-black demon ladies would come to serve you. You'd drop captured opponents in the chamber and they'd appear tied to wheels and chairs while the dark mistress whipped them. If there were no opponents to play with, the mistresses would tie themselves to the devices. The sounds were quite fun too.
It should be noted it was all a bit tongue-in-cheek.
How realistic? IRL torture doesn't yield info (Score:2)
How realistic are they going to make the torture?
Will the NPC say, do or admit to *anything* to make it stop?
Will the information obtained be inaccurate?
Will the player eventually find out that the character he's spent 4 game hours torturing, was actually the wrong guy all along?
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How realistic are they going to make the torture?
Well, let's see. The quest giver gives you the wand of zapping or whatever it's called. You go to the guy with the yellow question mark on his head, target the dude, click 4 times, and get the quest finished signal, then go back to quest giver for the next quest. So, yeah, not so realistic.
It's a game.
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Considering games like Manhunt 2 are possible in this day and age, it's not an unreasonable question.
False positive and double blind negatives... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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But that's not why we condemn it:
Torture is less effective than other means (Score:4, Interesting)
Playstation Home (Score:2)
That "whole world in your hands" song is a textbook study; I'm sure Sony will update the next version of Home to include the necessary virtual waterboard and beatings so we can enjoy it as its composer intended.
Torture was an important part of (Score:5, 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.
two words: (Score:2, Offtopic)
SHIRE!!!
BAGGINS!!!
hang your head in shame, "nerds", that no one has posted this yet
Blizzard started it. (Score:2)
They were just antagonizing me up I had to kill 15 extra mobs for the last random drop for a quest item. I think a little torture of an npc is more than fair.
Not fair (Score:2)
Yes it is unfair in games especially when being spawn camped and instantly getting blown to pieces over and over and over each time I spawn, its torture!
Oh, you're talking about a different kind of torture.
WTF? (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Yep, just like everyone who's ever played a FPS knows exactly how terrible the horrors of war are.
And I've played enough Tetris in my life to know exactly what it's like to be a bricklayer.
I wonder how far they will go in the 24 pinball ga (Score:2)
I wonder how far they will go in the upcoming 24 pinball game and how much will have to taken out when the game is set to adult mode moderate and / or family vs full.
Does anyone remember MGS??? (Score:3, Interesting)
Effectiveness (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Asheron's Call already had this quest... (Score:4, 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
Re:Asheron's Call already had this quest... (Score:5, Funny)
I have a COMMUNCATIONS degree
oh the irony
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You can be evil, and still do 'good' things to achieve evil ends, but in that game, you are evil by doing stupid things like randomly kill people all the time, or pick fights for no apparent reason or benefit.
The evil in KOTOR was pretty stupid most of the time, an
Re:Asheron's Call already had this quest... (Score:4, 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.
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Right, and having to torture an NPC teaches you what? How to torture and that doing so is acceptable?
The intent may, and I am making a big assumption here, may be trying to teach the "horrors of torture", but some will take it as a lesson plan for acceptable behavior. Whoever did this in WoW didn't think it through and is irresponsible.
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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 t
Re:Asheron's Call already had this quest... (Score:5, Funny)
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As usual, it's a matter of degree. It's kinky if you use a feather for sexual pleasure. It's pervy if you use the whole chicken.
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Wild guess: because they're different things?
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I think the argument he tried to make is, how can you say dropping an anvil on a Roadrunner is ok when you don't think Coyotes should kill Roadrunners. One is a precursor to the other. This makes them effectively the same, for most cases (excepting where physics stops working for no reason, etc).
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Yes, because every time someone is shot or injured, he drops his weapon and surrenders. Just like the Japanese did, and the Russians did, and the Vietnamese did, and the Filipinos did, and the Americans did and do, and our current enemies do.
*/sarcasm*
History is replete with examples of people fighting on after being shot. Some with minor wounds, others wit
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History is replete with examples of people fighting on after being shot. Some with minor wounds, others with horrific, fatal wounds who fought on as long as they could.
History is also replete with examples of people who stop fighting when the battle is lost. There'd be no concept of "prisoners of war" if there weren't.
The truth is somewhere in the middle. Some combatants will fight to the death, others won't. This variety of responses is generally not reflected in game AI.
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In COD4 you actually get points for knifing enemies who are crawling along the floor wounded.