Are you a real hero?

WoW
Should 'good guys' be able to do horrible things in games like WoW?

Clive Thompson wrote in Wired last Monday that he thinks video games in general, and World of Warcraft in particular, need "better torture" in their quests. He was referring to the minor brouhaha over

The Art of Persuasion

where you are required to torture a prisoner until he reveals the location of a "high-value enemy asset" (as the CIA like to call bosses in the real world).

The critics of the quest argue that torture is a terrible thing in real life and the depiction of it in WoW trivialises this and does nothing to show the lasting psychological scars it leaves in both the victim and the perpetrator.

The usual defence for all this is that it's just a game and by the time you get this quest, you've just spend 71 levels systematically slaughtering your way through three continents on two planets, so the use of a neural needler to extract information barely warrants a mention on your rap sheet. But this is disingenuous. WoW is normally entirely unambiguous morally; the players are the heroes, the mobs are savage, mutated, diseased beasts or agents of pure evil serving unspeakable demon lords.

That's the entire point. If your character isn't the kind of person that is carried shoulder-high whenever he visits his home town, then you're doing it wrong.

Which leaves us with a minor problem because you don't get to be carried shoulder-high these days unless you are level 80 and part of getting to 80 occasionally involves doing some fairly distasteful things.

My approach has been to adopt a sort of ethical offsetting scheme. If I need to torture a guy, I'll make sure I buff him afterwards to say sorry. And if I need to feed 10 decaying ghouls as part of a sneaky subterfuge, then I'll just kill an extra 10 ghouls afterwards to even it up. The quest giver gets rid of that burdensome yellow exclamation mark, I get the XP, everybody wins.

Well, except the bad guys. But that's the point, isn't it?

Latest in Gaming
A graphic of the PC Gaming Show
Get ready for a bounty of PC games on June 8, as the PC Gaming show is back
Astro Bot PS5 bundle
Sony officially announces new Astro Bot PS5 bundles and they're available from PlayStation Direct right now for bargain prices we can barely believe
Assassin's Creed Shadows
Ubisoft shareholder accuses publisher of 'misleading investors', plans protest outside Paris HQ
Xbox Copilot in Minecraft
Microsoft confirms Copilot can be tested by Xbox Insiders next month and shares new details about how the AI sidekick will enhance the player experience: 'It has to be about gameplay, it has to be personalized to you'
The Steam Logo on a mobile phone in front of a wall of games.
Today’s Steam Spring Sale features my absolute favorite game of all time - here's when the sale starts and all the key info
Dune Awakening screenshot showing the exploration of The O'odham
Latest Dune Awakening trailer provides a deeper look at open-world exploration on the planet Arrakis
Latest in News
Google Gemini Flash 2.0 Images
I tried Gemini's new AI image generation tool - here are 5 ways to get the best art from Google's Flash 2.0
An image of the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra from a hands-on event
Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra could resurrect an intriguing camera feature
Eurocom Raptor X18
At $15,000, this massive 256GB RAM laptop makes Apple's MacBook Pro look affordable, tiny and very, very slow
Cristin Milioti in Black Mirror season 7
Netflix launches trailer for Black Mirror season 7, giving us a look at its first-ever sequel episode and an unexpected returning character
A graphic of the PC Gaming Show
Get ready for a bounty of PC games on June 8, as the PC Gaming show is back
A close up of The Daily podcast from Pocket Casts' web page
‘Podcasting shouldn’t be locked behind walled gardens’: Pocket Casts slams Spotify and makes its web player free to all