Jack Bauer Wouldn't Have These Issues

Richard Bartle discusses a disturbing Wrath of the Lich King quest.

I don’t mind having torture in an MMO — it’s the kind of thing a designer can use to give interesting choices that say things to the players. However, I do mind its being placed there casually as a run-of-the-mill quest with no regard for the fact that it would ring alarm bells: this means either that the designer can’t see anything wrong with it, or that they’re actually in favour of it and are forcing it on the player base to make a point. Neither case is satisfactory.

What Bartle missed is that this isn’t actually the first quest where you have to inflict pain on people until they talk – most people will make a deathknight, and as part of their creation, get a mission (complete with specially crafted weapons) to interrogate soldiers until they give up intelligence.

Of course, as a deathknight, you’re supposed to be, well, evil. Right hand of the forces of darkness, etc. etc. So it’s justifiable in that context, and even works in concert with the other quests in this sequence which make a great effort to emphasize hey, you’re not a very nice person (of course setting in motion the inevitable redemption so that you can safely go forth and rid the Outland of hellboars alongside everyone else). But, clearly, that content was reused, and done so without a whole lot of thought. Hey, we have the ability to attach “interrogate NPC” flags to equipment now? Sweet, roll up 3 more quests!

Pretty much no matter how you treat this, issues happen. If you, as Bartle suggests, give some kind of “opt-out” reaction to enable an in-character revulsion to torture, you just stuck a deep political statement into a game where dwarves tool around on Harleys and one of the first NPCs you see as a deathknight is called “Siouxie the Banshee”. If you *don’t*, you just trivialized a deep political statement, or more damningly, shown you don’t really have an opinion on the subject.

Which is all very ironic considering that games like World of Warcraft are all about slaughtering millions of creatures so you can take their stuff and get more powerful so you can take more stuff from more creatures you slaughter. In that context poking people with a painstick before you slaughter them seems like a minor issue.

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  • Zilos

    Doesn’t Wow revolve around killing things? Just checking………….

  • Pat

    What’s ironic is that the death knights have, I belive, the only quest in the game where you trick an enemy general into handing over information instead of killing them for it like all those noble heroes do.

  • Recursion

    So… killing orcs/dwarves/fairies/whatever for their eyeballs/hair/spines/armor/whatever.. killing them.. is ok…
    torturing them.. BAD..
    Ok, I get it.

    (P.S-GAME)

  • Ronin Geek

    Yes, we must beat them until they’re dead, and not stop one second sooner.

    Personally a little torture would be a nice change of pace here and there :)

  • Todd Ogrin

    Is there even ONE quest in WoW that actually offers players a choice that alters the narrative or has real consequences?

  • Wumpusbait

    …upon reflection, I find it slightly more disturbing that I had no problems with the ‘torture’ quest (Apart from finding a mob who would *talk*; most of them simply insulted me as I poked them, Monkey Island style), but had minor misgivings about the later quest where you had to execute a prisoner.

    Desensitised? Me?
    …Nah. ^_-

  • Dirk

    i’m not /at all/ happy about this. Best line in all that drivel.

  • Lenin

    I sort of thought the whole early area of Death Knight quests, where you go down to the farms and kill scarlet citizens and such, was a kind of commentary on America’s War in Iraq anyways, so why should this be offensive? It’s all thoughtful political critique.

  • Trevel

    I could be wrong, but in ACTUAL wars, people shoot and kill other people, but torturing them is also illegal. So let’s not act like being fine with killing in war and not wanting to torture is a shocking, unique development.

  • Mist

    I saw these quests in beta and was rather shocked that there wasn’t an alternative for the non-DK torture quest. The best way to do this would be to have some very limited branching, where sometime in another zone a quest appears based on the ramifications of the choice in the previous quest, but WoW really isn’t about choices. The entire game has become very forced and cookiecutterized in every way.

    It just kind of struck me as Blizzard not really caring what kind of statement they made in their games and also didn’t care about how the player felt about roleplaying their actions. I can’t say it was a significant contribution to me choosing to not buy the expansion, but it certainly was a small contribution to the total lack of coherence and direction for the Warcraft storylines and lack of meaningful player choices that led me to cancel my account.

  • Mist

    Addition: There’s not one, not two, but at least three torture quests in WOTLK, possibly more because I couldn’t stomach getting past level 78 in beta. There’s on in Borean Tunder, one in the DK starting zone and one in Dragonblight.

  • ello

    this intrigued me:

    ==========
    Without some reward for saying no, this is a fiction-breaking quest of major proportions
    ===========

    I’m curious to see how this is “fiction-breaking”. You simply refuse and move on. the end. Unless of course he’s hoping that if you refuse to carry out the task, your faction drops down and every waking moment you spend online you are hunted down as a traitor to the cause. I guess that could be fun for some.

  • Todd Ogrin

    WoW has never been about role-playing choices. The entire game is focused on delivering the (largely predefined) mythology. In that sense, it has always been more theatre than game; “theatre” because players participate in the story without having control over it, like an actor reading from a script.

  • Wumpusbait

    I was prompted to do more research, which reveals another Torture quest:
    http://www.wowhead.com/?quest=11648

    Where you get to ‘convince’ a NPC tied to a chair.
    You do have a choice in this case, in that you can refuse to do the quest and it’s subsequent questlines.

    …except that completing this questline is *required* to access a 5 man instance later on.
    So, no Torture = no Instance (and no phat loots/rep).

    Yeah.
    I really can’t see this ending up in the Media and blowing up in Blizzard’s face.
    Nope. Not at *all*.

  • Somedudepassingby

    Frankly, I’m not sure why is this such a big deal, considering that one of the first things a Forsaken character does after leaving the tutorial area is basically performing medical experiments on war prisoners to test a biological weapon…

  • http://www.mud.co.uk/richard Richard Bartle

    >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

  • http://www.mud.co.uk/richard Richard Bartle

    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

  • Hawken

    This must be a slow news day.

    And get off of wow your all jealous bastards.

    Pick on the piece of shit Mythic made with Warhammer it has some real exciting PvP!

  • Richard Campbell

    “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.”>

    A pale was the area where a specific law ran, usually from an occupying power (the English in Ireland and Calais, for example). If you were “beyond the pale,” you were outside of where the law ran, and you were on your own.

  • Anonyous

    I was actually surprised that the torture quest in BT resulted in the prisoner coughing up the correct information after he was sufficiently brutalized. Given that even the writers of 24 have accepted that torture sometimes isn’t a good thing and might not even get you the information that you want, I expected some sort of subversion: the prisoner being fanatical enough that he wouldn’t break; the prisoner might give false information; the prisoner might not have the information we want at all; the prisoner might die before he said anything. Hell, even some sort of Milgram experiment aesop wouldn’t have been out of the question.

    Is Blizzard completely out to lunch about hot-button issues, or do they just (perhaps rightly) think that their customers are? Were they trying to express some sort of misguided sentiment about the morality and efficacy of torture? Sure, a lot of quests in WoW boil down to genocide and/or the indiscriminate murder of innocents, but given how prominent an issue torture has been these past few years in the United States, the whole cavalier “it’s no big deal if the Good Guys torture prisoners, and it works too” approach left me scratching my head as to what Blizzard’s intentions were.

  • Anonyous

    The quest where we have to kill our an ally who was captured and threatened with rape, which naturally drove her insane, is also a real winner. Blizzard should’ve used their famous irreverent humor to come up with some honor killing-related pun for the quest title.

  • Noel

    I could be wrong… but wouldn’t the “alternative” to the torture quest be… I don’t know, not doing the quest?

    I’m more disturbed by the fact that people would be so bothered by it in the game, yet still do the quest rather than just skip the single quest. It goes something like this:

    “Oh. You want me to torture this guy? Yeah, no.”
    [Accept] [Decline]

  • Mist

    Except you missed the part where they’re all in big chains that restrict your access to important content. They’re not just single, skippable quests.

  • http://www.lawspotonline.com Kate

    yeah it’s not really a single quest, it unlocks significant content. So it’s more like it goes something like this:

    You paid for a stick shift car, but surprise, you can’t put it in high gear until you .

    Because truly, it’s only a game and I feel secure in my anti-torture sentiment, I reluctantly did it (actually, my hubby did it while I looked away, lol, but it’s all the same). But it sure left a bad taste.

    I also did all the evil stuff on my DK, although I almost abandoned the character when I had to execute the old friend.

  • http://www.lawspotonline.com Kate

    hm that should have been

    You paid for a stick shift car, but surprise, you can’t put it in high gear until you (openbracket) insert moral dilemma here (closebracket).

  • http://shalkis.blogspot.com/ Shalkis

    IMHO, I think that Blizzard is simply delivering what they promised in the Wrath of the Lich King trailer: Having the player characters follow in Arthas’ footsteps. I fully expect that Arthas will eventually appear and point out that the player characters have been ignoring any and all morals in their single-minded quest for fame/fortune/power/whatever. Just like he did when pursuing his vengeance against Mal’Ganis for assaulting his kingdom. It’s a roller coaster, and you might as well just enjoy the ride, because you’re not supposed to exit the ride until it has come to a complete halt.

  • http://forge.ironrealms.com Matt Mihaly

    Richard wrote:

    This is because killing is seen as morally acceptable in self-defence, whereas torture isn’t.

    But avatars don’t have morality. People do. 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. You aren’t committing an act of immorality by reading about it in a book any more than you are by pushing bits around in a database (specifically, bits that represent an NPC, which is like saying switching off a lightbulb is murdering the electrical current, to me. The important part being that unlike in PvP, there’s no person being emotionally impacted.)

    A dragon in an MMO isn’t a real dragon.

    –matt

  • Vykromond

    Hey, so, what exactly is the “significant content” that the Kirin Tor torture quest unlocks? You don’t need that quest line to access Coldarra, so… what is it exactly? At least 5 people in this comment thread including Mr. Bartle have tried to imply that refusing to do the torture quest somehow significantly limits your ability to progress in the game which is to the best of my knowledge 100% wrong.

  • Ubvman

    I don’t get this Bartle. 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”. 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? Yes, we get it Mr. Bartle, you don’t like the game (get off my lawn you kids!) and nothing will ever match the Diku you helped created decades ago.

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

  • RobX

    I agree with Bartle on this. This type of quests is not something we should see in this type of game, at least not with a rating like WoW has.

    Personaly I took offense to how torture was handled in the “24″ series from the start (think it was season 2 or 3) where torture was handled as if it was a natural and necessary thing.

    The fact that people here and elsewhere dont think this is a big issue tells a lot about todays society.

    How do 7 year olds playing WoW react to this type of quests? How does it influence them and their thinking?

  • Dave G.

    How do 7 year olds playing WoW react to this type of quests? How does it influence them and their thinking?

    Oh great, the “think of the children” argument. That’ll sure lend some much needed sensibility, level-headedness, and thought-provoking statements that this debate requires.

    I don’t really see the problem. Matt Mihaly hit the nail on the head. You aren’t torturing someone by doing these quests any more than you are committing murder by playing Call of Duty, or any more than you are addicted to random prostitute sex because you played The Witcher. You are not an immoral person because you play a computer game, and a computer game does not make you immoral.

    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. Hey, you SHOULD feel for your characters, if you care about them at all – and I may indeed feel uncomfortable at the idea of my character completing these quests. 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.

    When I was a teenager, I heard the same arguments about the games I was playing. Wolf3d, Doom, Quake. Just a bunch of old guys sitting around saying how bad and “inappropriate” these games are for kids and they’re going to grow up and be too aggressive and become killers and ohmygod won’t somebody do something about it.

    These are just more of the same arguments. A different bunch of old guys, a different bunch of games, but the same tired old crap. It was ridiculous then, it’s ridiculous now, and it will continue to be ridiculous for as long as these arguments are made (which, as far as I can tell, will be forever).

  • Lweniel

    Mist > Except you missed the part where they’re all in big chains that restrict your access to important content. They’re not just single, skippable quests.

    You don’t need to do this quest chain at all. Several friends of mine refused to do the torture with no ill effects. The end of the chain is only a breadcrumb that takes you to the next area, and you can talk to a dragon nearby without doing any quests at the tower in question and he’ll take you there no questions asked.

  • The Alien

    I complained about the Kirin Tor-issued torture quest in the in-game feedback during the closed beta.

    Clearly it didn’t help. Having still-serving-Arthas Death Knights torturing people makes sense. But having everyone do it?

    Or, at least, one person per group…

  • Willias

    Except you missed the part where they’re all in big chains that restrict your access to important content. They’re not just single, skippable quests.

    Actually, they aren’t required to access any other content except for more quests. No dungeon requires that you do this particular quest line.

    That being said, this isn’t the first quest in the game that has the player do something objectionable. As someone else mentioned, there were the newbie Undead quests that have you test plagues on Alliance prisoners. I believe there is also something similar in Hillsbrad.

    I guess testing biological warfare on captives isn’t as big a deal as torture though.

  • FNORD

    @Matt Mihaly, etc:

    People aren’t suggesting that anyone who completes the quest are morally torturers. What they are saying is that the apparent attitude towards torture (it’s just part of the job of being a hero) is inappropriate.

    Drawing the analogy to violence not exactly correct, for several reasons. First, as others have noted, this is WARcraft; violence is acceptable in war, but torture is not. Secondly, there is little danger of any moderately normal mind of misunderstanding the context of the violence in videogames, this is not so with torture. There is a long tradition of violence in media, which is understood to be separate from reality; torture is much rarer, reserved for mature audiences, because the moral issues, and proper context, are harder to grasp. This is particularly important, since the efforts of the current administration has attempted blur the lines between acceptable policing/warfare and torture.

    It’s easy for a 13-year old to grasp the idea that it’s OK to kill blood elves in Warcraft, but not annoying kids at school. It’s more difficult to understand that it is OK (and necessary) to kill enemies in war, but not to torture them. Understanding what parts of the fiction are “just fiction” is more difficult.

  • http://www.gamersmind.org Tom

    Wow! More people freaking out about the “torture” quests. It is a damned game. If you don’t like it then stop playing. The story arc of Warcraft as a whole has always been a back and forth of who’s the evilest race.

    Hell wasn’t it the elves that originally blew up the world or committed mass genocide?

  • http://bdadv.blogspot.com Bonedead

    This is MMO Land, not Fox News. Jesus effin chrizist. Did anyone ever stop to think that maybe Azeroth isn’t friggin Earth? Maybe their Wartime rules differ from ours? Noooooo, that couldn’t be possible. It is fake, don’t try and make it real.

    When adults bring MMOs into real life, what happens? We argue about friggin quests and the message they convey.

    When kids bring MMOs into real life, what happens? They save their little sisters from friggin bears!

  • Anonyous

    A dragon in an MMO isn’t a real dragon.

    If I pay Iron Realms $500 for one, it’d sure as hell better be.

  • Anonyous

    On a more serious note, a question for people who don’t think this is a big deal: are you arguing that media as a whole has no perceptible influence on the behavior of its consumers, or that games are in some way distinct in this regard from passive media like television or movies? We already have the 24 example of lawmakers apparently deriving some degree of their (mis)understanding about the desirability of torture from Jack Bauer’s exploits.

    In my opinion, if Blizzard is going to address a serious issue with real-world implications in the game, they should treat it accordingly. Otherwise they should just stay the hell away from them and stay focused on their strengths of mindless grinding and stale pop culture references.

    And please, no more “b-but… the lore!” explanations. There’s a reason that the term “lollore” exists, and it’s not because Blizzard has been willing to make tough decisions to preserve the integrity of their narrative.

  • Xanthippe

    Curious.

    So the quests where one takes some mixture to a prisoner, gives it to them to drink, watches them turn into and then dies is fine, but this torture quest goes over the line?

    I’m just not seeing the major ethical dilemma here.

    (7 year olds should not be playing WoW anyway other than to play dress up and ride mounts around on mom’s or dad’s toon).

  • Delmania

    lollore, indeed,
    The whole Death Knight concept in WoW is highly flawed, and is another example of where Blizzard is willing to take the lore established from the previous games and twist it around until it has no meaning anymore. The original Death Knights were Horde warlocks who committed ritual suicide and were then resurrected in the bodies of slain human knights. The second generation of Death Knights were human paladins who had been spurned by the populace due to perceived inaction during the undead plague (paladins are immune to it). Essentially, they got tired and angry of being blamed by those they protected, forsake their vows, and aligned themselves with the Lich King. This third generation of Death Knights just makes no sense. Death Knights are what they are because Arthas gives them their power. The Death Knight quest, from what I understand, leads you down that path, but then at the very end you “trick” Arthas and rejoin the Horde or Alliance, yet somehow, you get to keep the power that you got from him. The concept of the Death Knight is similar to that of the warlock, with the exception that while most warlocks do align themselves with the Burning Legion, the source of their power does not come from the Burning Legion. Warlocks aren’t necessarily evil, more like power hungry.

    Neither the alliance nor the horde is supposed to be evil, yet the addition of Death Knights, along with this torture quest, real life implication aside, is yet another attempt to please their playerbase by grafting on a concept that makes no sense. At least in Warhammer, the bad guys don’t have to pretend to be good.

  • http://www.golemizer.com Over00

    Ubvman said
    I don’t get this Bartle. 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”.

    I’d suggest you read this interview

    One one side people are telling him “You can’t complain, you don’t play” and on the other side, others like you are telling him something that sounds like “Stop playing, we don’t want you to complain”. It’s a lose-lose situation for him I guess.

    I just don’t get why it hurts so much some persons when one have a different opinion.

  • Delmania

    “So the quests where one takes some mixture to a prisoner, gives it to them to drink, watches them turn into and then dies is fine, but this torture quest goes over the line?”

    Touche, I suppose the point of contention is, if I recall correctly, that quest is one of the low level undead quests. That fits in with the (remaining) lore as the undead are not good by any stretch of the imagination and are actively working to develop a new plague.

  • Amaranthar

    I can understand Bartle’s point here. But I think he’s bass ackwards.

    According to him, it’s better to give the choice to players, and thus it’s socially redeeming. 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.
    As opposed to a one time quest that’s dictated and beyond choice, that’s there to make a point that this character is of an evil bent, perhaps beyond his control or choice…in a fictional game world.

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

  • Blackblade

    … People READ the quests?

    /End Snarkiness

  • Merc

    Richard Bartle jumps the shark.

  • http://bdadv.blogspot.com Bonedead

    Hey guess what, video games make kids violent.
    TV makes kids violent.

    Just thought I’d let you know, since I just figured it out and it isn’t an incredibly rotting decaying dead horse, or anything like that.

    *Y to the izAWN*

  • Aufero

    There is, as has been pointed out, a substantial difference between the Death Knight torture quest (in which you’re an evil minion of a soulless king, raised from the dead and sent to visit destruction upon the living – not a situation that occurs much in real life) and the later quest in which you’re a heroic figure torturing a bound, helpless prisoner until he gives you the information you want.

    I had a real problem with the second one. I kept wondering if I was missing some option to stop.

    There are earlier quests in the game in which you kill prisoners in various horrible ways, (mostly feed them poisons) but those are all given to you by undead quest givers. From the viewpoint of the playable undead race in the game, they’re justifiable. After all, the people giving you the quests have already died in similar horrible ways themselves and come back to life – to them, death (particularly death from the plague they’re trying to re-create) is a desirable process that weeds out the unfit and creates new members of their race.

  • http://forge.ironrealms.com Matt Mihaly

    Someone wrote:

    Yes, we get it Mr. Bartle, you don’t like the game (get off my lawn you kids!) and nothing will ever match the Diku you helped created decades ago.

    Someone needs to bone up on his history! Richard didn’t create DIKU. He co-created MUD, which predated DIKU by approximately a decade.

  • harl

    Meh. It’s a game. It’s fantasy. You can do things like torture and not have to worry about the morality of it. Next are we going to bitch about all fiction that has tourture in it?

    To make the leap that tourture in a video game means tourture in real life is ok requires a truely disturbed mind.

    Its impossible to
    make moral choices about what I do to pixels.

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