At PAX, I had the good fortune to catch Bethesdaâs Brink demo. While there was a lot of cool stuff in the game worth blogging about, what stuck with me was the use of torture in the game.
Of course, the game doesnât call it torture. I think the term they use is âextreme interrogation tactics.â But when is something âinterrogationâ over âtorture?â Is it just how badly you beat somebody up, or does it matter what youâre trying to get out of the person/NPC?
In Brink, this is what happens: youâre playing as a military operative in a futuristic setting. During a firefight, you sneak behind enemy lines and happen upon an injured rebel writhing on the ground. An option pops up, prompting you to press X to interrogate the guy and it looks like if you select it, your character pulls out an iPhone-iish device. Your character then shocks the heck out of the guy until he screams, âOkay! Iâll talk!â Then your objective screen updates and a new icon appears on the map.
In the grand scheme of violence in video games, itâs not graphic. Itâs actually similar to what happens to Snake in the first Metal Gear Solid when Revolver Ocelot has him strapped spread-eagle style and shocks him (as the player, you press buttons to Resist or Submit â Submitting kills Meryl and I couldnât hit that button fast enough). The difference in Brink is that my character is doing it to someone else. So on a gut level, I donât want to call it torture because Iâm the âgood guy,â right?
But then thereâs the Punisher game with interactive torture. Thatâs torture because I think the game goes so far as to call it so, but as a player Iâm comfortable with it because Iâm playing as the Punisher. Yeah, he fights for justice, but heâs not what people would call a âgoodâ guy. So itâs okay for me as a player to play as him torturing somebody because thatâs what the Punisher would do â never mind what I would do. Besides, they were probably bad people who deserved it anyway.
Now think about Red Faction: Guerrilla where youâre playing on the side of a rebel faction. Like Brink, itâs a wartime situation and gaining information is crucial to the success of missions. In one scene, explored by Stephen Totilo, an NPC sidekick âinterrogatesâ somebody for said information. With knives. Is that torture? If youâre not sure, apply the same line of questioning to Killzone 2 when Rico gets a little âextremeâ when interrogating an enemy.
https://lastchance.cc/playing-as-insurgents-volition-reflects-on-red-faction-5302517%3C/a%3E%3C/p%3E
To confuse you even more on the subject of torture, think about situations where itâs not about information â itâs about control. For example, thereâs the Grand Theft Auto: Vice City mission, Death Row and the Ransom mission in Grand Theft Auto IV. In both cases, somebody is deliberately hurting someone else for revenge or just because theyâre violent by nature. Thatâs really easy to spot as torture â but at the same time, in GTAIV, youâre playing as Niko, the guy that hits a woman tied to a chair and then takes a picture of her. You donât really want to call that torture, do you? Itâs easier just to play it down as no big deal or write it off because itâs not an interactive part of the game â so âyouâ didnât torture anybody.
Lastly, letâs talk about torture being inflicted on you, the player. In these cases, you probably wouldnât think of what youâre going through as âtorture,â (unless itâs a Saw game), but by definition, a game is deliberately inflicting suffering on you. Example: Missile Command. The game is about mutually assured destruction in the Cold War era, but at the same time, itâs a psychological exercise that tortures the player: by design, you cannot âwinâ Missile Command. Sure, a lot of early arcade games were un-winnable â but by forcing the player to realize that no matter how good you are at the game, no matter how many quarters you sink into it, you cannot save six cities from a nuclear holocaust, the game is deliberately messing with you. A more obvious example of mental anguish inflicted on the player would be Fable II â because itâs not just that your character is being electrocuted, itâs that youâre losing all of that XP you gathered and racking up evilness (which is torture to a goody-two-shoes gamer like me).
So whatâs really going on in Brink? When I zap the guy with my iPhone-looking device, am I committing torture or just âextremeâ interrogation? I didnât see an option to just question the guy before shocking him. Iâm not sure if there were other ways to get the information that the subject had. I do know that if the game actually called it âtorture,â Iâd be way less inclined to play as that class of character. For me, that would be the worst kind of torture: role-playing as a character that I want to play as benevolent, and then being forced to do something Iâm not okay with because the game has other ideas about where the line between torture and interrogation lies.
