Guantanamo of Warcraft: Torture Quest Sparks Controversy
Any time someone creates a game, someone is going to be out there being a silly nay-sayer. Yes, that's right, people can be a big, smelly wet blanket when it comes to content. Sure, sometimes these complaints are justified, but it's always a gray area and I tend to take the side of the publishers. Freedom of speech and personal responsibility, blah blah. You get the point.
The inventor of the MUD (multi-user dungeon) Richard Bartle had a few things to say about World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King
Basically, you have to take some kind of cow poke and zap a prisoner until he talks.I'm not at all happy with this. I was expecting for there to be some way to tell the guy who gave you the quest that no, actually I don't want to torture a prisoner, but there didn't seem to be any way to do that. Worse, the quest is part of a chain you need to complete to gain access to the Nexus, which is the first instance you encounter (if you start on the west of the continent, as I did). So, either you play along and zap the guy, or you don't get to go to the Nexus.
I did zap him, pretty well in disbelief -- I thought that surely the quest-giver would step in and stop it at some point? It didn't happen, though. Unless there's some kind of awful consequence further down the line, it would seem that Blizzard's designers are OK with breaking the Geneva convention.
Ok, so if you're curious, here is the actual text from the quest:
It is fortunate you're here,. You see, the Kirin Tor code of conduct frowns upon our taking certain 'extreme' measures - even in desperate times such as these. You, however, as an outsider, are not bound by such restrictions and could take any steps necessary in the retrieval of information.
Do what you must. We need to know where Lady Evanor is being held at once! I'll just busy myself organizing these shelves here. Oh, and here, perhaps you'll find this old thing [torture device] useful....
The thing I find incredibly funny is that you can run around shocking the crap out of animals, people and life in general without people so much as batting an eye. It's how you gain experience. That is the game, HURTING things. It's the implication of torture that is just too much for some people.
Just keep that in mind when you're grinding through hundreds of non-aggressive animal mobs just so you can ding level 10 on your way to Ironforge. Just sayin'.
WoW Lich King Quest Sparks Torture Controversy [Game Politics]
Asterick
Posted to Video Games on 9 December 2008
· Comments (11)
Other stuff like this: cattle prod, questionable content, quests, torture, world of warcraft
I agree with you Asterick. Sam Harris made the same point in one of his books and was accused of supporting torture. Bullshit. His point was that there are so many other atrocities going on all th time, people are ridiculous to get offended over only one of them.
Sort of like when that recent school shooting happened, I mean it was awful and everything, but then you've got everyone around the world giving us these warm wishes of sympathy and people praying and all this crap. And I'm like "uh, hello, Darfur anyone?"
Harris chalks it up to our puny human brains not naturally able to grasp very large numbers and large scale consequences. That might let other primates off the hook, but we have the internet now, we can learn about all the horrible things going on in the world with the click of a mouse. I think we're running out of excuses for stupid as information is more readily available to everyone.
Hilarious.
This guy's complaining about getting to the high-levelled content in a fantasy MMO. This is some seriously screwed up stuff right there, since he HAD to attempt possible genocide on differing species across the game-world, slaying innocents, taking part in waging a war that's never-ending.. and yet THIS is the thing that causes him pause?!
It sounds like someone's spending too much time in Azeroth and not on CNN.com or any other online news site to see TRUE atrocities that are simply permitted to continue.
You've nailed it perfectly, Asterick.
The main problem with this to me is lass about morality and more about role-playing. Fighting wild beasts and players who can defend themselves is one thing but torturing a defenseless character is something people may feel like their character would not do.
I don't think that "Blizzard is OK with breaking the Geneva Convention" or anything dramatic like that. (Its a game its totally not that serious) I think that Blizzard made a poor design choice by forcing players to do something that that betrays some playing styles or possibly offends the player.
There really should just be more than one way to handle the situation in-game.
Um. You -don't- need to complete that quest to get access to the Nexus. Maybe instead of crying about something that happened in a GAME based on WAR and comparing it to real life situations, he should have looked around a little bit harder.
For gods sake, not only do you slaughter thousands of animals, you're told to commit genocide on one race (quillboars, centaur, etc), slaughter humans, EXPERIMENT on captured humans (hello, the Forsaken ain't exactly the poster children of morality!), and all sorts of icky stuff. Guess what, though? Nobody said you had to accept those quests. There's a person who made it to level 70 WITHOUT KILLING A SINGLE THING. Another one made it to level 70 just by grinding boar mobs! There's ALWAYS a way around things, and if you want to play the Morality Game, go play Hello Kitty Adventures. This is a game about WAR, violence, and all sorts of things that make you wanna cry home to your mother.
Let's just hope he doesn't roll up a Death Knight.
With quests like "Go butcher all the innocent women and children in that village" and all.
Wow. The things people come up with. I really wish you could just /ignore some people in real life.
First off, isn't this story a few weeks old? I'm sure I read about it ages ago. Just saying.
Second, I like RP as much as the next... well RPer (since non-RPers seem to in general hate RPers). But I've made peace with the fact that a lot of quests don't comply to my RP.
I just try to do as many of the quests available so that I can experience as much content as possible and then decide myself which content is appropriate for my character.
WoW really isn't that RP friendly. Some stuff makes no sense whatsoever. People who have beaten Nefarion or Illidan are treated like total newbies by some of the questgivers in WoLK.
Maybe the server description should read 'some suspension of belief required' for those to dumb to figure this out themselves.
Of his own free will, he tortured a person to get access to better loot from a dungeon. He zapped the poor guy, half-expecting somebody to stop him - what kind of human being is he who blames others for his dubious grasp of ethics?
This kind of stuff was explored in TBC with the digging-through-poo quests - you don't HAVE to do every quest in the game, and probably shouldn't if doing so will offend your sensibilities. There are other things to do in the game - and plenty of other games to play, at that.
This actually isn't the only torture quest in World of Warcraft, but I digress. I agree with most of the comments which point out that there are much worse things going on. Also note that this quest is not a requirement for anything, it's just as optional as 99.999% of all the other quests out there.
I personally saw the quest as a mirror of reality, where the US has sent prisoners abroad to get tortured since the US is bound to international law. The only way the quest could have been more of a social commentary would be if the tortured character actually went the 'say anything to get away route', and the information was incorrect. But that would be looked at as at Blizzard having a social agenda.
This complaint is just another example of people with too much time on their hands.
Steve, have a read at the Milgram Experiment. It proved that any regular, normal, nice person, will go along and torture someone if they're told to do so, pretty much.
When I think about it in relation to that, it makes this quest pretty well thought-out. And all the more fun. Yeah, take that zappin', bitches!
The political correctness brigade really need to find something better to do with their lives. Trying to force modern moralities onto a high fantasy, medieval computer game?
Imagine if these kind morons wrote World of Warcraft. Don't form a band of unlikely heroes and slay the evil Lich King! Noway mummy told me violence doesn't solve anything, instead were going to attack him with an aggressive leaflet campaign, create a petition labelled "down this this sort of thing" and if that doesn't work; then form a committee to decide how to deal with him, possibly through economic sanctions and political peer pressure.