Jack Bauer Wouldn’t Have These Issues

>What Bartle missed is that this isn’t actually the first quest where you have to inflict pain on people until they talk

I did know about this quest, but I don’t have a deathknight so haven’t done it myself. As you say, it’s the sort of thing that would make sense in context – it’s showing you just what an evil piece of work you are, which makes your eventual redemption all the more meaningful. After all, a good character would never do such a thing…

>But, clearly, that content was reused, and done so without a whole lot of thought.

It’s possible there was thought. The way the non-DK quest is set up, the guys who want you to do the torture are forbidden by their own rules to do so (they’re “good” guys) so they ask you, as an ally, to do it for them. This is somewhat reminiscent of “extraordinary rendition”, ie. we’re not allowed to torture people ourselves so we’ll get our allies to do it. Maybe the designers were making a point about that? And maybe, to demonstrate how easy it is to accept this kind of thing, they made it part of a quest chain a lot of players will want to complete so they can get into their first Northrend instance (ie. “yeah, you say torture is bad, but you wanted something enough that you still did it, so what does that say about you?”). Either way, though, there have to be consequences to show that it IS intended you read it this way. Otherwise, it just shows that the designers either don’t have much depth of understanding, or do but it’s somewhat medieval.

>the first NPCs you see as a deathknight is called “Siouxie the Banshee”.

The first warrior-specific quest for humans down at about level 11 or 12 is to go beat up a drunk called Bartleby. I’m hoping that name was merely plucked from thin air.

>In that context poking people with a painstick before you slaughter them seems like a minor issue.

“Well gee, let’s add rape while we’re at it, that’s not as big a crime as murder either…”

In the real world, torture is banned under UN Convention and the Geneva Convention, but the killing of enemy combatants is still allowed unless they surrender first. This is because killing is seen as morally acceptable in self-defence, whereas torture isn’t. It would therefore appear that whatever the morals of the Horde and Alliance, they’re not up to the standards of most of the nations of Earth.

(Oh, and the comedy murloc quest where you wave a white flag to get to the enemy boss and then kill him is distasteful, too: if it’s wrong to kill people who are waving a white flag, it’s also wrong to kill people while you’re waving a white flag yourself).

Richard

ello>I’m curious to see how this is “fiction-breaking”.

Yes, sorry, I didn’t explain this very well.

When people play a game, they come in with some expectations of what it will be like. They buy into a fiction which, while not completely known to them (because finding out is part of the fun!), they nevertheless trust will meet their expectations. When something happens that breaks the fiction, it breaks the trust between designer and player. This is what I meant by “fiction-breaking”. It’s basically a magic circle argument.

In ancient times, before a battle took place, the extent of the battleground was marked out with stakes (or “pales”, and in the word “impale”). If you were on the battleground, you were counted as being a combatant and were fair game for being killed. If you fled, though, as soon as you left the marked-off area you were safe. If you were attacked “beyond the pale” it was a grossly immoral act – you could have run away, but you stopped where convention said it was safe, then your opponent broke the rules and attacked you.

In games (or movies or whatever), you can go in with the knowledge that you might be shocked in some ways, but if the designers (or directors or whatever) go too far – beyond the pale – then they break the unspoken covenant between you. You’re no longer living in a fictional world, you’re jolted back into the real world. Thus, “fiction-breaking”.

This explanation probably isn’t much clearer than what it purports to explain, I’d guess…

Richard

Matt Mihaly>But avatars don’t have morality. People do.

Yes, I know this.

>You’re not actually torturing a being when you “torture” an NPC. In the fiction, your character may be but it’s no more immoral to include torture in a book than it is in a game.

Let’s say J. K. Rowling brought out an 8th Harry Potter book. It’s just the same as all the other books, except in chapter 7 all of a sudden Harry goes off the rails, takes drugs, kidnaps Hermione and subjects her to untold indignities to satisfy his new-found sado-masochistic desires. Now J. K. is allowed to put that kind of things in her books if she likes, freedom of speech being what it is and all, but people who have been buying the earlier books in the series have certain expectations about what the books are like, and this would shatter them.

Likewise, in WoW: it’s not the right of the designers to put torture into WoW that concerns me, it’s what that does for the relationship between designer and player. It’s stepped over the line.

Richard

Ubvman>I don’t get this Bartle.

Yes, that’s right.

>He plays the game throughout (not that he’s “enjoying it”) – all the while holding his nose so as not to sully his academic high-falutin “credentials”.

No, you completely misunderstand. I’m not doing this for any academic credentials at all (maybe half the academics at the conference I went to last week not only didn’t play games but were actually proud of it; playing MMOs hurts my academic credentials). I’m doing this for credentials when I speak to gamers.

>Then he grabs on to some aspect of the gameplay that does not fit his politically correct worldview as just one more thing to bash the game?

Have you read my blog? I put all sorts of things in there, at varying levels of significance. It’s not as if I was writing some gravitas-filled treatise on the morality of WoW, I was just blogging about something that had annoyed me that day. I didn’t get Colchester Leisure Centre jumping on me when I moaned about the stupid barrier system on their car parks. You, however, feel perfectly happy to weigh in with accusations that I’m looking for sticks with which to beat Wow.

>Yes, we get it Mr. Bartle, you don’t like the game

No, you don’t get it. I DO like the game – it’s one of my favourite MMOs. I just don’t like having to play it.

>(get off my lawn you kids!) and nothing will ever match the Diku you helped created decades ago.

This would make more sense if I had actually helped create a Diku. However, as I have never been to the Datalogisk Institut Københavns Universitet, it seems unlikely that I would have worked on their game (especially as I’d been working on MUDs for 13 years by the time DikuMUD was written).

>I’m just thinking, why the F – do the MMOG blogosphere still consider him as any sort of a relevant commentator these days?

Beats me. However, when people as ill-informed and eager-to-snipe as you start throwing around their opinions, it can only make me look relatively authoritative.

Richard

Dave G.>You aren’t torturing someone by doing these quests any more than you are committing murder by playing Call of Duty

Yes, that’s right. However, when you sign up to play CoD you know what you’re getting into. When you sign up for WoW, you know what you’re getting into. You have expectations of what will be there and what won’t. I know there won’t be Coca Cola bottles or Vote Obama signs or Wear a Condom posters unless in some parody form.

Except, in this particular quest, it breached those expectations. I was not expecting to play a game where my “good” character, doing quests for a “good” faction, had to torture some prisoner. Maybe it was within the bounds of what YOU were expecting, but it wasn’t what I was expecting (and I’m not the only person who didn’t like it). It broke the fiction.

>You are not an immoral person because you play a computer game, and a computer game does not make you immoral.

Of course not, but then I never said this was the case. Torture is fine in games when depicted in context – I haven’t played as a DK, but it sounds to me as if its use there makes sense. It shows just how evil DKs start out. In the example in question, though, it doesn’t make sense – there’s no reason for it, and it’s completely out of context. It’s unpleasant to be asked to do it, and while doing it doesn’t make me immoral, it does make me wonder about the morality of whoever designed it.

>If Richard can no longer separate in-character game behaviours from real world, real life thought processes and feelings, then it is he who has lost perspective.

I’m glad you put the “If” there, although it’s a little alarming that you might think that somehow I had lost the ability to determine fact from fiction here…

>But equating completion of an in-game quest to condoning torture and creating a generation of children with the “evil bit” set is blowing it way out of proportion.

I gave this as an example of how the inclusion of the quest could be read, had it been done to make some point. I’m not saying that’s how it was intended, but if a designer wanted (through their design) to make some kind of political statement about the real world, this is how they would do it. However, I ruled this out in the end, because there was no confirmation that it was some kind of statement. If, for example, you had lost 10,000 points of Kirin Tor reputation for doing it, that would have shown that it was making such a statement. The fact that it’s treated as a run-of-the-mill quest suggests it wasn’t an attempt to use WoW as a vehicle for Art.

Personally, I think Scott is right. Someone just re-used a new quest mechanic without really giving it a lot of thought.

>These are just more of the same arguments.

No, they’re a different argument entirely. This is the argument that says you’re fine seeing racist abuse in South Park but if the same abuse appeared in The Simpsons you wouldn’t be happy about it.

Richard

Amaranthar>According to him, it’s better to give the choice to players, and thus it’s socially redeeming.

Well, that would depend on the choice.

>So you get some kids playing “evil” things out of choice, and perhaps a degree of spite and meanness. Building that kind of thinking, reaffirming it, growing the planted seed. And that’s ok, according to Bartle.

Gawd, you really don’t get what I’m saying here.

All MMO design is making some kind of statement. Designers have many decisions they could have made, so the ones they actually did make must in some way reflect their views. So, if someone wants to create an MMO which puts forward a particular political or moral viewpoint, then OK, I personally may be pleased or horrified by what they’re doing, but unless it goes to far then the laws governing free speech allow it either way.

I most certainly as not saying that merely because an MMO includes something, that makes this something automatically good, wholesome and fun. There are many things in the current MMO paradigm that I don’t like (eg. stereotyping characters by race), but that other people are fine with. That’s how freedom of speech works: if I want to be able to say what I think, I have to accept that you get to say what you think, too.

So no, I don’t think that subtly trying to manipulate players into accepting unpalatable ideas is a good thing. However, stopping people from saying things I don’t like, merely because I don’t like them, is worse.

>At any rate, I’m glad to see Bartle confronting his own “we’ve got your children” thing.

What “we’ve got your children” thing? I haven’t mentioned children once in any of this.

Richard

Matt Mihaly>They already have you committing mass murder and essentially (futiley) attempting genocide on a regular basis.

They have you committing mass killings; whether it’s murder or legitimate homicide is another matter. There’s been no genocide in the game from what I’ve seen so far, at least not genocide described up front as such (eg. you may find that having 50 players all trying to do the same kill-the-murlocs quest means there are no murlocs left in that tribe until the respawns appear – it’s a tragedy of the commons kind of genocide, not a deliberate “wipe them all out!” one).

>I also note a lot of players of WoW on here seeming to disagree that it’s damaged their relationship with Blizzard.

Are there any saying it’s enhanced it?

It’s something that has disturbed some players (but not all), but up until now I haven’t seen anyone saying that they enjoyed torturing the prisoner; those who don’t object to it seem to take it in their stride, but they’re not raving about how great it is you can torture people in WoW.

If you add up the cumulative effect of the opinions of all players, many more people disapproved than approved, and the rest seemed not bothered about it.

>Is it possible that you’re injecting your own preferences here but presenting them as universals?

I was most definitely stating my own opinion, yes, but I wasn’t claiming any universality. If my opinions were universal, Blizzard wouldn’t have done the torture thing in the first place. I was claiming:
1) I, personally, did not like being asked to torture the guy. YOU may be fine with it, but I wasn’t. I’m not the only person who didn’t like it, either.
2) There are legitimate reasons for putting this kind of shock thing into a game like WoW, but:
2a) If (as a designer) you’re going to put this kind of thing into a game deliberately, you have to have consequences to show that you are indeed doing it deliberately. There are none here.
2b) It’s possible that the designers didn’t know it was going to shock anyone. They may have the same attitude to torture that you do.
3) Neither 2a) nor 2b) is satisfactory.

Now there are people here saying that they have different expectations of what’s fine in Wow. Fair enough, if they think that torture is of small consequence compared to everything else they do, that’s their opinion. They’re probably lobbying the UN to have the convention on the treatment of prisoners repealed right now.

However, Blizzard should have known that some people would baulk at torturing people. If they didn’t, that’s bad – someone there should have picked up on it. If they did, well that means they’ve kept it in deliberately, in order to make some point. What would that point be? Well it could be text (“you think the bad guy is bad, but actually you’re just as bad as he is”) or it could be subtext (“how do you like the fact that your government does this?”). In either case, though, there has to be a consequence for it to be a statement. Otherwise, it’s like an “if” with no “then”. Why is that important? Well, because without it the message is entirely lost on those players who weren’t shocked by it. If you don’t think there’s anything wrong with torture, you’re not going to think you’re following in the footsteps of the bad guy by doing it, unless you get some kind of feedback. The only feedback you get is that the good guys (the Kirin Tor) like you more for having done it, which seems to say that the decision was the right one. That’s even more disturbing, though!

>Are you really advocating for one-dimensional caricatures? Mortals who can only be evil or good, where those are rigidly and objectively defined? Maybe I’m mis-reading you, but that’s what it sounds like you’re saying.

It’s not what I’m saying. Yes, of course there are ambiguities, and of course people have different opinions of things. However, I was playing a game that I felt operated within certain conventions, and when I encountered something that broke those conventions then it changed the nature of the game I was playing. If I were playing a game that was altogether darker in theme, then I’d be OK with torture because it was in context (even though I’m not OK with it in real life). This was just not in context. This isn’t an argument about good and evil, it’s about being asked to do something I didn’t want to do for no apparently justifiable reason, and what this says about the standards of the people who asked me to do it.

That would actually break expectations, though I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. It’d break expectations because Harry Potter doesn’t, to my knowledge (I’ve only seen the movies, so don’t know much about the last two books in the series), already engage in things worse than kidnapping Hermione and raping her or whatever. This is fundamentally different from WoW, where you’re already engaging in simulated mass murder regardless of which faction you play on.

>In other words, to echo a previous poster, Harry Potter has a “speed limit 55″ sign, whereas you seem to want WoW to have a “speed limit up to 55 or over 105″.

I want WoW to have the same speed limit throughout. In some areas it might be slower, and in other areas faster, but there is an overall limit. If all previous content has been at 55mph or slower, then suddenly something comes out at 105mph, then that’s going to change my driving experience somewhat. Now some people may have thought the limit was 105mph all along, and be glad that finally they got out of that tiresome 55mph zone. Others, though, were playing in the belief that it was 55mph, and if it suddenly goes to 105mph for no good reason, well that’s going to affect them.

Richard

Sheepherder>Blizzard is trying to draw parallels between the player and Arthas, who is an evil badass because of his quest for revenge, zealotry, and his misguided attempts to save Lordaeron from the Burning Legion and the Scourge.
>The problem is that they’re really bad at it.

This is it in a nutshell.

Richard

Xanthippe>Philosophically, I don’t have a big problem with torture in certain circumstances. I had no trouble doing this quest.

What if the guy hadn’t known the answer to your question, and had died after a few pokes with the pain stick? Would that have been disturbing? Or is the basis of your argument that it’s not a real person being tortured, so it’s (literally!) immaterial?

>What is the difference between Richard’s objections and a PETA member’s objections to slaughtering animals?

Well, animals aren’t sentient and people are.

It doesn’t matter in this example anyway – I’m against torture, but that doesn’t mean I’m against the depiction of it in MMOs or books or films. What I’m against is the depiction of it in a way that breaks the covenant between designer and player.

I encountered the quest where you have to put wolf people’s children in sacks a dozen at a time today (it’s a daily). So we’re looking at one of the following:
a) the designer doesn’t think that’s kinda sick in any way.
b) the designer does think it’s sick but thinks that makes it amusing.
c) the designer believes children can be born irredeemably evil.
d) the designer wants to make some point, but doesn’t want to tell us what it is.
e) the designer wants to make some point, but hasn’t done so very well.
f) [more]

There do seem to be several of these morally dubious quests. I don’t know if it’s a deliberate pattern, though. Is rescuing mammoths in one quest only to be told to slaughter them for their blubber in another deliberate or just coincidence?

The more of these there are, the greater the chance they’re deliberate rather than “let’s re-use the torture quest” style accident. That would be fine if there were confirmation of it by giving the choices immediate consequences. There isn’t, though, so if this new inclusion of morally ambiguous quests is deliberate, it’s probably either a misfired attempt to darken the atmosphere or as a result of some general design decision to give players some insight into the mind of the bad guy. This latter idea would be laudable if they gave the feedback. They don’t, though.

Aside: I can see I’m going to have to stop blogging about WoW, it always seems to end up with me spending hours writing posts elsewhere explaining what I mean…

Richard

SheepherderMaybe I’m misconstruing him and he thinks there is no place for this in WoW at all and that Blizzard has no right to introduce it in, I don’t think this is necessarily his reaction though.

You’re right, it’s not my reaction. Blizzard can put what they like in WoW – it’s their game. Likewise, people don’t have to play if they find it leaves a nasty taste in their mouths.

Iconic>I actually don’t mind the quest that Richard was talking about, because contrary to his assertion, it’s actually NOT required for entrance to the Nexus.

Yes, it seems they changed it at some point. I thought it was required, because people kept LFGing saying that you “need the flight path”. It seems you don’t.

Still, that doesn’t alter the basic point: you’re asked to torture some guy for no defensible reason, with only good things happening if you do and nothing happening if you don’t.

>the way I understand it is that the Wolvar children are being kidnapped in order to protect them from the war that’s going to engulf their parents.

Well, that’s what they said, yes. Even if they’re not going to slaughter them when you’re not looking, this still sounds warped to me.

Richard

Vivianne Draper>And hello…. the humans that are kept prisoner in Undercity? In the alchemy area? And are milked for blood and stuff? How gruesome is that. Bartle is just NOW getting upset over gruesomeness in WoW? Where the hell has he been?

Playing Alliance…

Richard