Back in December, Wired Blogger Clive Thompson penned this article. I read it, thought about it, and let it percolate for a long time in the back end of my brain, then forgot about it, until members of my Burner World of Warcraft guild picked it up and started talking a bit about it.
I've been thinking about this concept for a while; not just due to the torture quests of Warcraft when I began playing the new expansion from Wrath of the Lich King. As an active player on the Silver Hand server and a lacksadaisical player on Doomhammer, I've run the quests the writer talks about, and in all honesty, I recall my reaction being less of a shocked feeling and more of a: "Oh, really? I have to go stab a captive prison guard with a shockstick to make him talk? Okay, this might take a little longer than I expected. Gosh, I wonder if I have enough health to do this; I'm hoping he doesn't enrage or anything and attack me in the middle of the interrogation." Pain, suffering, torture of prisoners by agencies of "good" - didn't matter, really. I was far more concerned about whether or not my resurrectable character was going to get smacked around if the interrogation didn't go well.
Many of the themes in the game of Warcraft are dark, but they're also tracked with a yes/no acceptance of the mission. We're talking about a game that specifically talks about an entire world being ripped apart by magical energies (Outland) and destroying half of a world with its refugees taking shelter on another world. It's fantasy fiction in gaming and while I agree that the reflection of the themes can be violent, I can also say that the tendency of most "soft" games to go a-hunting giant rats gets old REAL QUICK. Hence, the creative guys at Blizzard find new and interesting ways to pull characters along a single-track storyline.
Part of the reason I find Warcraft so appealing is not that you have a great deal of choice in your character's arc. The quests to be accomplished don't allow moral choices. You either complete the quest line, or you don't, and gain experience and gold as a result. Everyone has the same questing experience; though the rewards from the quests are different. There isn't much leeway in this, so the social significance of the torture as presented by the writer doesn't really grab me.
In the game, I ran through the quest three times on each character. Because I knew if I zapped the guy four times, I could finish the quest and move on to my wholesale slaughter of poachers a little to the north for a druidic organization bearing a significant resemblance to the militant group PETA. I didn't care, overmuch, about the moral issue of the quest when I did it. I just wanted to get it done so I could finish the quest line and log off for the day.
It's funny, too, because I'm sure that many people who have been employed as professional interrogators and torturers throughout the ages of time don't, or didn't think about their jobs that much. It was just a job. Something to put food on the table and take home some extra at the end of the week. The fact that the people who were on the other end were dying probably didn't matter. It was just a job.
Humans have been cannibals since time out of mind; it's an open secret that during the siege of Stalingrad during World War II meat appeared on tables with no non-human animals around to provide the meat. Torture, prior to the 20th century, was a time-honored tradition to extract information / confession from individuals, including the Inquisition. The darker corners of the human psyche exist, and denying that they exist (or, in some cases, that they're fun - horror movies where teenagers who drink and have sex are killed are successful because they are enjoyed by the people watching them) simply doesn't do anyone a service.
Yes, people are beautiful creatures with love, intelligence, beauty and wisdom, but people are also hateful, stupid, ugly, and crass. Screaming out "Is it so much to ask to skin a tauren" is hilarious - I will happily admit that I made my undead rogue instead of a blood elf rogue because he's ugly and evil, and playing ugly and evil in a game is a way for me to enjoy that aspect of human foibles.
The more complex we make our games and the more involved we become the rarer it is that there are black and whites in the decisions. Checkers is a simple game; chess more so than checkers, but we don't accuse the board of violence when one checker makes it across the board through strategy to be "kinged". Parables of human violence exist in virtually any artificial construct - from the stories of Peter Rabbit to Gears of War - the format of the video game allows people to see and shape that in a much more refined, sharp format. It focuses the nasty aspects of humanity down to a small core to make a point about the cruelty of humanity, and it can make people react viscerally - not to the agony or the causality of what they're seeing - just the visceral aspects of it.
The impulse for a heroin addict to switch to methadone, then to cigarettes, then to coffee, or for a former brawler to focus on tai chi and beating the crap out of an Everlast bag, or for people to immerse themselves in true crime novels and roleplay demons online to exorcise or let their darker natures come out to play in a safe environment is one of the things that enables people to release that tension.
The need I have to create a painting or a detailed written script or comment on the darker aspects of human nature, or pour out my feelings for someone into a written letter and seal it into an envelope are able to be channeled into something else. The running joke that a writer who spends ten hours a day in front of a computer will come home and work for five hours on a story or a novel or even just catching up on email isn't untrue. I know that everyone has their methadone in one form or another.
Caffeine-free Diet Coke didn't just invent itself. People wanted something that tasted similar to Coke without the sugar, and without the caffeine. Without Coke as a basis for their desires and their needs, those same people dropping $10 on a case of fizzy carbonated water would simply sip tea.
When we are angry or furious or frustrated, so many of us go for a run or a walk or clear our heads in the streets, breaking ourselves out of the default world and moving us to a new environment. We act to divert the dark energies into something else - a grounding of sorts that keeps us from becoming something hated by ourselves and others. We work out in sterile gyms on plastic-and-metal machines powered by electricity and facing televisions that blare out more information to take our minds off of what we fear cleaning out in the corners of our own heads. As any teenaged kid will tell you, just shoving everything in the closet to sort out later is the fastest way to look like you have your kit together.
It's very easy, I think, to judge a game, or art, or a story, or a fictional work, or a musician that reflects the savageness of humanity's past and to accuse that work of art, fiction, or music as the culprit behind the human gestalt it portrays. In the 1980s, Jack Thompson made his entire career based around that accusation and created an idea in the conservative consciousness that you could point at the straw men of 2 Live Crew for the decisions of hundreds of thousands of urban teenagers without addressing the real core cause behind the human ugliness.
Young men who kill because they thought it was just like "Grand Theft Auto" still chose to kill, regardless of the reflective mirror they looked in that spurred them to that act. It could have just as easily have been a bunny death Flash Animation. Since "Grand Theft Auto" is a videogame, and still the favored scapegoat of many who simply don't understand the phenomenon or the technology, the blame is still laid to rest by many at the feet of the people who mirrored the reality of some aspects of humanity.
The reason I go to the desert and to Burning Man every year is that in the desert, I can play and do things that I never could in the default world. In Warcraft (or any other computer game) you can shoot the terrorist, murder thousands of bunnies hopping through Teldrassil, annihalate undead legions, munch on Taurens, crack jokes about farming dwarves for beard hair, skin yetis and take down the King of all Stormwind. In CounterStrike, you can kill terrorists with no repercussions.
One of the most telling aspects of the game for me is that I routinely roll my eyes, when the current Big Baddy, the Lich King, shows up, and starts monologuing about my character's feebleness, and how mighty he is all up on his Frozen Throne, watching me from afar. Every single time he shows up, I keep wondering why he doesn't just zap me and every adventuring character into icicle oblivion once his inept minions screw up his chances to turn me into warlock soup. It's almost to the point of ridiculousness - I half expect the Lich King to show up wearing a Dr. Evil suit at the end game fight and make references to one million gold pieces in ransom.
In order to get there, though, I'm going to have to slaughter hordes of giants, kill thousands of enemy players, cause geopolitcial strife among blue and red dragons, hunt hundreds of endangered species in a subtropical rain forest, travel back in time to correct time alterations by shadowy conspiracies, sort through myriad piles of fecal matter (for some reason, in this version of the game, processing animal and character waste is a primary component of many, many quests and subsequent poop jokes) and probably fall into lava.
None of those things are things I feel compelled to do in real life. None of the adventuring, questing, arguing, insulting, bantering, or yapping that gets done ingame spills much over into real life, and sometimes I do wonder if my creativity has been hampered by it, or honed. One thing I do know, though, is that as a direct result of playing the game, I don't feel compelled to torture random people with a pain receptor stick, slaughter orcs with black magic, or ride a mammoth across the plains of a dying world.
In a Schroedinger's Box frame of inquiry, I'd ask whether playing World of Warcraft channeled that energy away from the experiences I might have without the game as an outlet. Likewise with my experiences attending Burning Man - whether the energy I've poured into that event might have been spent at home in my community building similar expressions had I not chosen to go to the desert for a week out of every year.
But humans aren't a black box like that, in many ways. Adding torture, or murder, or deception, embezzlement, theft, or assassination to a video game, novel, or movie doesn't cause the behavior. Rather, I'd say the mirror held up to the darker aspects of our souls sometimes simply reminds people of the devil inside them. It's up to the individual who acts upon their darker human nature, not the maker of the painting, the sculpture, the video game or the novel, the pornography, the performance art or the dance to be aware of its incitement.
Or, in other words: people just do stuff, sometimes. And they don't think much about it. I'm sure if I went through and read every quest that I've ever done, or thought about every decision I made yesterday - from my purchase of gas at the slightly cheaper station to snacking on a Payday candy bar, some infinite number of possible decisions branch from each of those choices I made that have shaped my future life.
Sometimes, you're just trying to finish the quest by the time you have to go home.
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