Meer: Games Without Frontiers: Why We Need More Torture in Videogames | rss feed | toevoegen | e-mail nieuwsalarm | Wired News: Top Stories | 2008-12-16 03:14:51
To play World of Warcraft now, you've got to be a torturer.
In the recent expansion pack Wrath of the Lich King, there's a quest called "The Art of Persuasion" that requires you to extract information from a tied-up sorcerer. You do this by stinging him repeatedly with a creepy instrument called the "Neural Needler," a device that "inflicts incredible pain to target, but does no lasting damage." After a few minutes, the sorcerer coughs up the info.
As you'd imagine, this little slice of Abu Ghraib set the gameosphere alight with blistering, ideologically freighted debate. Some gamers were straightforwardly creeped out. Others were blasé; games already contain bucketsful of senseless slaughter, they figured, so is torture really worse?
Pioneering game designer Richard Bartle argued that the quest violated in-game canon, since the quest is forced upon people playing with narratively "good" Alliance characters (as opposed to WoW's evil Horde characters). In the end, the Art of Persuasion quest poses a big cultural, aesthetic and political question: Should games include torture?
To which the answer is simple: Sure they should.
In fact, I'll go further. I think we need more torture in videogames.
And better torture.
I should probably unpack these statements a bit. Let me begin by putting my cards on the table: In the real world, I'm unconditionally opposed to torture. This is in part because history has proven it produces unreliable intelligence. Even John McCain signed a bogus confession when tortured by the Viet Cong.
Torture advocates constantly evoke ticking-bomb situations to argue that drastic measures are OK in rare cases, but these scenarios exist only in the fever dreams of Hollywood; they are basically nonexistent in actual, recorded history. And hey, I live in Manhattan, the Top Terrorist Target in the United States. I want good antiterror intel! But you don't get it from torture.
More importantly, torture has devastating repercussions. It permanently erodes the character of the torturer and, worse, of the public that condones the torture. What's more, torture destroys a nation's moral high ground — which is why military commanders consistently oppose it — and incites further acts of terrorism. Torture has consequences.
From my perspective, Americans aren't thinking very seriously about those consequences. The torture at Guantanamo Bay, in overseas CIA prisons and at Abu Ghraib has all gone by with relatively little public outcry.
Why? Partly because U.S. officials refuse to describe or admit clearly what they're doing. But equally important, I think, is that our mass culture is filled with wildly misleading ideas about how torture works.
Consider the popular television series 24. The sheer metric tonnage of torture rose to an almost self-parodic level in the last few seasons of the show; barely an episode went by without someone being shocked, injected, waterboarded or just plain ol' beaten senseless. Yet 24 has never seriously shown any repercussions of that torture.
For example, a CTU agent in a Season 3 episode is mistakenly accused of being a traitor, then tortured with a stun gun. When the mistake is cleared up, what happens? She stands up, straightens her clothes, goes back to her desk ... and demands a raise to ensure her silence. Brassy!
And a total, cynical fantasy. Psychologists know that torture causes, among other horrid things, lasting mental-health problems. But 24's frantically violent fairy tales are typical of what passes for mass-cultural debate about torture. We're not encouraged to think about what happens next, so we don't. It is a massive failure of the public imagination.
Which is why we need more torture in videogames.
Games are excellent vehicles for helping people inhabit complex, difficult situations. They're also extremely good at illustrating consequences: If you do X, then Z and L will happen; if you do Y instead, then C and Q result.
What's more, gamers love this stuff. Several of the biggest recent games were praised precisely because the moral acts inside them had long-term consequences. In BioShock, you could either save or exploit the Little Sisters, and your actions produced very different endings to the game. In Fable, decisions made in the first 15 minutes of play (will you side with lawkeepers or cause mischief for personal gain?) change the moral tenor of your home town 15 years later. In Sid Meier's Civlization: Revolution, as with most world-conquering strategy games, failing to make an alliance upfront can screw you down the line.
So this, really, is the problem with World of Warcraft's torture sequence. It does not model any consequences. You torture the sorcerer, but nothing particularly comes of it. You just move on to the next quest.
This would be lame in a TV show, but is arguably even lamer in a videogame, because it's not too hard to imagine all sorts of repercussions that would have been dramatically fascinating while actually enhancing the gameplay.
For example, Lich King maker Blizzard Entertainment could have made the Art of Persuasion quest optional — but endowed it with some unusually lucrative loot or experience. That would have made it a genuine moral quandary: Should you do a superbad thing for a really desirable result?
Or how about this: What if you got blowback from torturing the sorcerer? What if other non-player characters got more aggro, attacking you more often because of your reputation as a torturer? And maybe some Alliance NPCs would simply refuse to give you further quests.
On the other hand, what if becoming a torturer made the game easier to play? What if it burnished your rep as a dangerous character, making future quest opponents so scared of you that some battles became simpler? After all, that's one of the neoconservative arguments about torture: You show the world who's boss. Blizzard could have programmed not only the consequences that would be predicted by a bleeding-heart liberal, but those posited by a neocon.
What we need, if this isn't too weird a phrase, is better torture design.
I'll issue several caveats here. One is that I haven't played Lich King myself, because I don't have a high enough WoW character. I'm relying on reports from Lich King players, so I could be entirely wrong about the Art of Persuasion, though I doubt it.
Here's a more nuanced caveat: Some players I talked to think Blizzard has been quite thoughtful about how torture plays into the world of Lich King. The dialogue accompanying the Art of Persuasion has several coy references to modern geopolitics: The quest-giver tells you he personally isn't allowed to engage in torture, but because you're a foreigner, you can — a seeming reference to extraordinary rendition. And other quests in Lich King — I won't give out any spoilers here — require you to mount some other fairly sadistic attacks. It's quite possible Blizzard has a much larger, slow-moving point to make about torture.
If true, that's great. Because personally, I'd like to see games that had more torture — and better torture — in them. In this alarming chapter of American history, they might wind up fueling the best public debate yet.
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Clive Thompson is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and a regular contributor to Wired and New York magazines. Look for more of Clive's observations on his blog, collision detection.
http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/485212852/gamesfrontiers_1215
Meer: Help Us Steve Jobs You're Our Only Hope: Big-Box Retailers: Why We Need iTunes and Other Online Stor | rss feed | toevoegen | e-mail nieuwsalarm | Gizmodo | 2007-04-28 08:18:41
An article in the Wall Street Journal today drives home why record labels need to hop on the DRM-free digital music train to get their wares out there. Wal-Mart, Best Buy and their ilk are now responsible for at least 65 percent of all music sales—including online stores—and they're reducing the amount of music they carry as CD sales drop. Do we really want Wal-Mart dictating what music people listen to?On top of granting more and better shelf space to big-name releases like Justin Timberlake over say, Mike Patton's latest work, and skewing sales that way, Sam Walton's legacy flat-out refuses to sell certain titles. And matching the 20 percent plunge in CD sales this year, it's planning to shrink store real estate dedicated to music by an equal amount. Best Buy's also cutting down on the amount of space it gives CDs, so expect the number of titles they carry—8,000 to 20,000, versus defunct Tower Records' up to 100,000—to be cut as well.
Result? Big name, mainstream sludge will be pushed even harder by default. As space shrinks, so does choice.
Online stores have unlimited shelf space. They carry an unlimited quantity of millions of titles. While they're no substitute for dropping by your local record store, increasingly they're looking like the most viable way to keep choice alive in the music industry. Even just the iTunes home page has way more variety than the weekly promo displays at Target.
All of this adds up to yet another reason why the Big Four and other labels need to drop DRM to spur music sales online—it's for their own good, really. If they're still interested in keeping the industry alive, at any rate. – Matt Buchanan
Can Music Survive Inside the Big Box? [Wall Street Journal via Consumerist]
Image via Flickr
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