No really, I’m not a big wow gamer (I hate it) but what the hell is gaming all about? For some it’s to overpass personal limits, but for the majority I think it’s to be or feel what it’s like to be something or somebody else. It’s being the hero of an action movie, or of a fantasy novel, etc… and you do stuff you wouldn’t normally do in rl, like killing, stealing, destroying and all that.

I’d never harm a person knowing there are consequences (even virtual consequences like xp loss ^^ (yeah, I’m serious about gaming)), but I have a lot of fun torturing and killing and smashing and bombing and shooting and plundering, in VIDEO GAMES, where there actually is no harm done. Like when I was a little kid and played lego it was a lot of fun to get the little guys eaten by giant monsters and emulate the screams of their suffering.

I don’t think it’s unethical, it’s the only way to sustain to these barbarian needs humans have. The only way to try and live together in a civilized society where you don’t need to kill to eat anymore, or to sleep safely or whatever.

And I think it’s hypocritical to pretend you don’t have fun when you slaughter an innocent little monster, or a gangster mob, or even a civilian in a virtual world.

GLHF everybody!

PS: please excuse my English, not my native language.

Something about the defenselessness and plaintive nature of the victim really upset me, so I can definitely see Bartle’s point re: the torture quest.

It’s not torture– no one feels pain. Can you have torture without pain? No more than you can have murder without death.

..everyone KNOWS torture works..

CIA: “This agency does not do torture. Torture does not work” CBS

Robert Fisk: “Torture Still Doesn’t Work” AlterNet.org

Interrogation expert Stuart Herrington: “Two problems with torture: It’s wrong and it doesn’t work” post-gazette.com

Coleen Rowley: “Torture Is Wrong, Illegal and It Doesn’t Work” HuffingtonPost

Apparently, not everyone got Firefly’s memo.

..are you saying it shouldn’t do that, either?

Yes, Fly, I am “saying it shouldn’t do that, either”. Show me the evidence of torture solving “real moral problems.”

For one thing the inclusion of torture is a tacit acceptance of the notion that torture is actually an effective way of gaining accurate information which is highly debatable.

I’ve never played WOW (not much of an mmo player. I’m more of a shooter person) but I’m curious as to what those who say “It is just a game” would say to Bartle’s example of a child molesting quest. Would people be so quick to dismiss it because it was “just a game?”

for instance, i would be interested to know if mr. bartle has done the nesingwary line of quests. i happen to ride an elekk (an elephant), and i know that this questline requires you to kill wild elekk to complete it. as someone who really loves my mount (in game) and also feels (in real life) that killing elephants is wrong, i have vowed to not complete the quest line.

why i feel so strongly about the elekk, when, for instance, i have been happily burning down gazelle, rhino, and other in-game equivalents, i don’t know. it must because i love my mount so much. he trumpets and grunts, and he’s been reliable for me. killing his kin just bothers me.

The first is that the quests completed during your time in WoW are the moral caliber of your character. Almost everyone I know who RPs (and I know quite a few since I’ve randomly ended up on an RP server) thinks of their quests as something they’re being asked to do. Their character is a lens for interpreting the actions they’re performing and the quests objectives say far more about the quest giver than they say about you. Most of the RPers I know LOVE that quest because it sets up the Kirin Tor (the mages who ask you to torture the poor guy) as a faction that’s willing to do anything for their cause. Essentially Bartle thinks that players will interpret this quest as “my player is a torturer now, this sucks” when far more often the reaction is “the Kirin Tor are torturers now, how interesting.”

The second assumption is that morally questionable acts must be flagged in order to be interpreted properly. WoW is full of quests that have a dark, morally shady (or just plain morally wrong!) edge to them. Of course this is more prominent on the Horde side where the Forsaken are poisoning people left and right to test out a new plague. However, even the alliance has had more than a few morally shady things they’ve done to level up and get to this torture quest. What’s notable about these quests is that almost none of them have a nice “what we just did was wrong, I hope we both learned lessons” ending. WoW has ALWAYS been a game that put you in an uncomfortable position morally and asked you to interpret that yourself, the only notable thing here is that they’ve added torture to the list of morally uncomfortable acts.

From a design standpoint, unless you do think of Torture as some especially morally horrendous act worse than what characters have done before, flagging the torture as something especially morally horrendous would have been distracting to players used to making up their own mind about these moral issues. The character can RP themselves as being uncomfortable with torture, they don’t need an NPC telling them it’s okay to not like it. Essentially, I think Blizzard’s designers have thought through the shock this quest will cause players and what the means for their gameplay and immersion much more thoroughly than Bartle has.

On a side note, Cory I really wish that you’d participate in popular MMO’s more so as to get a less removed view on the subject. I know you’re fascinated by online games and you’re currently expanding Anda’s Game so it’s on your mind even more often, but all of your MMO posts seem to be written as somebody on the outside looking in. I’m unused to thinking of you as the guy that just doesn’t “get it” about any topic so it’s especially distracting on the rare occasion it does occur.

For instance if you were playing WoW or were more engaged in the lore you’d know that the very questline Bartle is complaining about culminates in something that could be thought of as the rape quest you rhetorically ask for. Now I admit the rape isn’t committed by your character, but the game IS dealing with another of these “off-limits” topics in a way that really supports the immersion rather than shaking you out of it.

There are interesting moral questions here about MMO’s such as the morality of the mercenary outlook of RPers that removes them from their actions but they aren’t the questions that are being asked in Richard Bartle’s original post and they’re questions you could be asking if you participated more in these games.

Of course with a new child and a writing career I can understand not wanting to have your life swallowed up by the World of Warcraft. Still perusing WoW blogs that are more about the gameplay and less about the academics or spending an afternoon on WoWWiki would probably be pretty edifying.

I’ve read some comments where people are infusing their ingame toons with their own personal moral code. I don’t get it. I’m having flashbacks of all of those D&D scares of the past where parents and church groups were afraid that if johnny’s paladin died in a dungeon, Johnny would be so distraught that he would kill himself in real life. I’ve always felt this was BS, but now…I’m not sure.

Of course I do find torture morally reprehensible and I don’t think it’s effective but people are getting all up in arms about an effect of a culture that increasingly condones torture as if it were the cause.

I’d be interested in seeing how many of the people in this thread pretending like even showing “effective torture” is morally wrong (a position both Cory and Mr. Bartle are smart enough not to take) have sat around feeling superior to those unenlightened souls attempting to censor art that shows too much sex or regular run-of-the-mill violence.

**NERD ALERT**
You can venture in it as early as lv 68, without having done any of the quests in that zone.
/end **NERD ALERT**

The Death Knight torture quest makes perfect sense because you’re evil incarnate at the time. The Nexus torture quest is a “information will save the world” situation – we should all be used to that from the movies. And the Argent Crusade torture quest in Dragonblight, well that’s just good old fashioned deceit and manipulation – and we should all be used to that from the news.

In the time it took me to write my Treatise On WoW Torture (an even-handed, discerning, and thought-provoking opus including links to the actual quest text and item descriptions), everyone made all the points I was going to make.

You will all be receiving cease-and-desists shortly. Thank you for your time.

Mixed bag, surely? :)

If you’re not comfortable with it you can decline the quest. Please don’t pretend you were forced to do the quest to get into an instance you can just walk into at any time and then go BOOO HOOO THE GAME WANTED ME TO HURTED THAT MAN because you’re used to the cartoony Russians In Space business from the previous expansion. A lot of the storytelling in Northrend is unabashedly dark and it’s also some of the best World of Warcraft has ever done.

Torturing somebody without any karmic repercussions isn’t too heartwarming, but it is pretty realistic. And appropriate to the tone of everything else in Outland besides.

I read through the original two posts and about half the comments here, but my largest concern was only incidentally raised: that this quest depicts torture as something that yields good information. This is why torture is beyond the pale: it doesn’t even do what it’s supposed to.

But don’t take my word for it. There was a recent op-ed piece in the Washington Post from a former interrogator who successfully used humane interrogation techniques, leading to the death of that al-Qaeda dude Zarqawi, that is definitely worth reading (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/28/AR2008112802242.html).

Since this experienced military interrogator has a lot more credibility than I do on this issue, I’ll leave you with some of his words (though I recommend you read the whole thing):

“I refused to participate in such practices, and a month later, I extended that prohibition to the team of interrogators I was assigned to lead. I taught the members of my unit a new methodology — one based on building rapport with suspects, showing cultural understanding and using good old-fashioned brainpower to tease out information. I personally conducted more than 300 interrogations, and I supervised more than 1,000. The methods my team used are not classified (they’re listed in the unclassified Field Manual), but the way we used them was, I like to think, unique. We got to know our enemies, we learned to negotiate with them, and we adapted criminal investigative techniques to our work (something that the Field Manual permits, under the concept of “ruses and trickery”). It worked. Our efforts started a chain of successes that ultimately led to Zarqawi.

[...]

I know the counter-argument well — that we need the rough stuff for the truly hard cases, such as battle-hardened core leaders of al-Qaeda, not just run-of-the-mill Iraqi insurgents. But that’s not always true: We turned several hard cases, including some foreign fighters, by using our new techniques. A few of them never abandoned the jihadist cause but still gave up critical information. One actually told me, ‘I thought you would torture me, and when you didn’t, I decided that everything I was told about Americans was wrong. That’s why I decided to cooperate.’

[...]

I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for al-Qaeda in Iraq. The large majority of suicide bombings in Iraq are still carried out by these foreigners. They are also involved in most of the attacks on U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq. It’s no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse. The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me — unless you don’t count American soldiers as Americans. “

In several of the early Tauren quests you have to go out and cull cuddly looking woodland creatures. The purported goal of these missions is always to “Restore the Balance of Nature.” I got a sordid kick out of this, even though in real life I don’t enjoy hunting at all.

Once, at a much higher level in the game, I was working on a quest when a cuddly looking woodland creature meandered across my path. Without hesitation I blasted it with a spell. Another player who happened to witness this approached me and typed: “WTF?”

I responded: “Balance of Nature,” and continued on my way.

I don’t know if it’s an inherently bad thing to allow something in this game that would be unconscionable in real life. I don’t like to kill sentient bipeds, or even cuddly woodland creatures. In fact, I’m a freaking vegetarian. But killing is fun in video games. So I think it should be left up to the tastes of the players to determine whether it’s okay to allow torture in WOW.

Personally, I don’t think I would enjoy it, and that’s coming from someone who really got a kick out of blasting an infant deer with an arcing bolt of death.

Why get so hung up on the torture issue, anyway? There are routine massacres going on nonstop in Azeroth… nobody ever questions that. Am I supposed to believe that carving someone up with a magical axe is innocent roleplaying hijinks but poking someone with a cattle prod is taboo?

Am I to now believe that Blizzard is condoning racism because they put this little wrinkle in their game? No. As a man of color, I sadly have come across the same sentiments in RL, but I was not put off or shocked by finding this ingame. I thought it was a fine example of following the Lore of the game. Just because the trolls are now allies of the blood elves, doesn’t mean everyone has to be nicey-nicey.

As for torture, it was a viable way to get information in the Medieval age, which I think is where WOW would be/is set if it were to be put into a historical context. Sometimes even the “good guys” have pull up their big boy pants and get their hands dirty.

Because sex is still a no-no in gaming. There IS a child kidnapping repeatable daily quest where you have to gather up 12 babies in a bag (well raccoon-humanoid…things) and deliver them to a walrus…guy. It’s not clear what exactly he does with them, only that they can’t be allowed to grow up and become “bad”.

So you can worry about WOW players gathering up babies in bags in real life, or you can just chill because it’s a game.

1 episode of standover tactics in a storyline made up of 1000 physical assaults and cold-blooded murder and assassination?

Either it’s a game (so yeah, chill) or you really think there is some deeper psychological connection with you and your character and all the killing, looting and slaughter you cause.

Me, I actually feel there is a connection (it wouldn’t be as much fun unless there was) but hey, I can tell the difference. … unless a very nice car pulls up alongside me and I get a little twitchy with the desire to go all GTA on the drivers ass…

I offer you a (very slightly tangental) comic:
partiallyclips

There’s something fundamentally evil about WoW. It’s a corporate vision about what a world of adventure should look like; you spend all your time trying to acquire stuff that is just that tiny little bit better than the garbage you already have. The people who say it’s great training for project managers are right, but that’s *why* you shouldn’t play it. A) most project managers are evil B) who sits down to plan an adventure and says, first thing we need is a manager?

The guys who built World of Warcraft set up a world of magic where everything revolves around money. Can you imagine anything more nihilistic? Imagine if you had magic at your disposal and you were *still* trapped in a rat race. The toons all live in a consumerist wasteland of constant killing. It’s like some late-70s sci-fi satire, except people *want* to be there.

Let me tell you the secret of World of Warcraft: it *is* satire. People think there’s no way to win the game. They get addicted to chasing gold and the next shiny new weapon. But there is a way to win the game. It’s when you step back from the keyboard and say, fuck this, I have too much self-respect. That’s when you’ve *won* the game. If you never got addicted, you haven’t played; but if you never deactivated your account in disgust at what you’ve become, then you haven’t won yet. The whole point of WoW is, let’s model this disgusting nihilistic worldview, and see how long it takes for people to demand better of themselves.

1. If “it’s just a game” then why not add rape quests and child mutilation quests too?

2. Not having a “torturer” class in the game means that it’s possible to play for years without encountering it or deciding whether it’s the kind of thing you want in your play. Adding torture to a game that never had it is noteworthy and, for some players, shocking