Kotaku has been following a story (sounds contrived, but it’s true!) wherein Richard Bartle — the man who created Multi-User Dungeons — has decided to call out a quest involving the subject of torture. Mind you it’s not the only torture quest in the game, (the Death Knight content has players murdering townspeople and harvesting human skulls) but his point is still relevant. Is it moral for Blizzard, even in jest, to more or less condone torture? The quest has you using a magical neural needle (guaranteed not to cause permanent harm!) to convince a member of the Beryl Mages to give up information on the whereabouts of a member of the Kirin Tor (the preeminent group of wizards in the Warcraft universe, and generally the good guys). The Kirin Tor has strict rules on torture, but you’re technically a free agent, so they’d rather have you do it for them. Bartle’s issue is that in order to complete the quest you must torture the Beryl Sorcerer, and there is no branching path where the player can choose not to use torture.

Now, as an act of reinforcement I agree it looks irresponsible. Is Blizzard teaching players that torture is necessary and effective? Yeah; no, that’s not good. But viewed through a different and more appropriate lense, I would have to disagree. As a commenter on Kotaku stated, you can just abort the quest and face the consequences of making the right choice; which is the loss of twenty some thousand experience — the usual experience reward. I might be playing the old school string a bit fervently here, but it would seem that someone from such nascent industry roots as inventing MUDs might have a hard time accepting that the game mechanic option of aborting the quest is a functional story element. One might, more traditionally, expect a branching story. Give the player more options. The idea that you can *actually* choose not to do the quest is quite foreign.

I’m no expert on MUD’s, but I’ve written some crude text adventures in Java. And in that situation you a) take the winding path or b) enter the cave. You’ve got to choose. From my perspective the option to organically eliminate roadblocks is more of an actual choice — that’s why it’s harder to make. You really want that experience. Sure it’s questionable, sure you may disagree with what your character is doing. But at the end of the day you need to get to level 80, because your boss isn’t going to believe you’ve been sick for more than a week. I would bet that even Bartle himself has completed the quest; I did. In fact I found the quest incredibly amusing if only for the insults slung my way by the detainee, especially as I thought back to one of the Death Knight quests that involved ‘persuading’ Scarlet Crusade soldiers to relinquish information by replacing your weapons with hot pokers and wading through huge blocks of insult text until they either spilled the beans or died.

My point is that it’s nothing new; it’s Blizzard humour through and through, and it’s done tastefully. I mean really, as much as I respect the right to get upset over something you view as irresponsible, what’s next? Accusing Monty Python of condoning torture because their Spanish Inquisition sketches were hilarious and didn’t end with a message saying ‘The actual Spanish Inquisition was really bad, don’t torture people’? I think, as Blizzard has proved with it’s quest vocabulary and subject matter, we have to respect the intelligence of the playerbase. Anyone who plays the quest and thinks torture is alright wasn’t convinced by the quest — not because it’s ‘just a videogame’ but because the subliminal pull isn’t there. I can tell when a religious informercial is trying to convince me that their faith saves or whatnot; there isn’t someone at Blizzard championing torture and hoping to convince others of its wonderful uses, and it’s easy to see that. If anything the quest text makes the Kirin Tor seem unwilling to get their hands dirty, and willing to keep some skeletons in the closet — which is called story development; it gives the Kirin Tor more character. The whole thing seems to be much ado about nothing.

By the way, the topic option on Destructoid for PC content is "Games for Windows"? Really? Jeese, maybe the PC really is dead.