Rendition

"When the player reaches the point of questioning his own involvement in a story, that story takes on a new significance, one which is not possible in non-interactive media."

I agree with the first part of this statement, that a story takes on added significance when questions of player complicity arise, but I don't think that this is impossible in non-interactive media. Well actually I guess what I'm maybe getting at is that films, novels etc. aren't completely non-interactive, in addition to all the baggage you bring to your interpretation of those artefacts you always have the choice to put the book down or leave the cinema.

An example: In Michael Hanke's film "Funny Games" (the original anyway, I've not seen the recent remake) the audience is made aware of their complicity in the violence when the main character, a vicious emotionally blank sadist terrorising a middle class family in their holiday home, speaks directly to camera "right, let's have some fun" etc. Around the time of the film's release I seem to remember reading an interview with the director where he said something to the effect that "the correct response for a decent person is to get up and leave the cinema" whilst I was totally gripped by the film I think he's probably right, it's a startling piece of film making but not one I ever intend to sit through again.

Maybe as you say games can do this kind of thing more powerfully or more readily as the players complicity is a given but I think the key thing is not that moral alternatives need to be offered within the game (in this case conversation or espionage) but that the game has to be entertaining at the same time as being genuinely morally questionable. In order to make the choice of quitting meaningful part of you has to want to continue playing.

In order to make the choice of quitting meaningful part of you has to want to continue playing.

I agree, and this is where I think Rendition fails.

The movie example is an interesting one; thanks for pointing it out. I think psychologically I would still distinguish between the two a bit, though, because if I leave a cinema, I have no effect on the story. It has already been created and continues to play out on the screen. If I quit a game, though, the story it was in the process of generating through my interaction is simply cut off. Yeah, there might be further narrative that is programmed to happen if I go on, but my ceasing to engage with it has made my individual instantiation of the story stop dead.

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Emily Short

A much more powerful work would be the one that convinced on both counts -- that some real disaster was at hand and that the torture of possibly innocent suspects was our only hope of avoiding it.

Maybe, but that hypothetical is poison.

(Question: do you have any opinion on Fahrenheit a.k.a. Indigo Prophecy?)

Haven't played it, I'm afraid.

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Emily Short

"A much more powerful work would be the one that convinced on both counts -- that some real disaster was at hand and that the torture of possibly innocent suspects was our only hope of avoiding it. Such a work might make us understand more truly what is at stake: that principles of decency and honor have a cost. That's not a reason to abandon them, but it is a fact we should be aware of, should think about and explore, before the terrifying moment of decision arrives."

Ah, the old "the terrorist knows where the nuclear bomb is so it's ok to pull out his teeth" argument. Or the Jack Bauer defense, for short.

You once said that you weren't interested in politics, but this is like a fourteen year old's view of the real world. How about the guys mentioned in this article? Can we maybe hear from the people responsible what exactly we were all 'saved' from that merited this kind of treatment?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/mar/07/spain.guantanamo

(sorry, last link was wrong)

You once said that you weren't interested in politics,

When did I say that?

I've gone through periods of disgust at American politics and political discourse, and from time to time despaired of being able to have a nuanced conversation with much of anyone, so I may have refused to enter a political discussion at some point past. But without knowing where you're bringing this from, it's a little hard to address. There's actually a moderate amount of politics in my posts both here and on my own website, though.

but this is like a fourteen year old's view of the real world. How about the guys mentioned in this article? Can we maybe hear from the people responsible what exactly we were all 'saved' from that merited this kind of treatment?

You've misunderstood my point about as completely as humanly possible.

I am *NOT* saying that it is okay to torture people if we were pretty convinced that they probably knew something that would save lives. I *am* saying that if we have the principle "we shouldn't torture people" -- which I do -- then it is useful to think about the implications of that principle. I am saying that people make decisions about these things when they're scared and irrational, and that the thought experiment (how would I feel in the moment? what arguments could I use to bolster my resolution to do the right thing?) could be helpful.

Apropos of the game, I am saying that an exploration of why torturers torture needs to present the whole problem as something other than a straw argument. It's really easy to write a game that shows us the perspective of the victimized and suggests we should be horrified. That's a natural reaction, but it doesn't do enough; it doesn't challenge the reader/player to think beyond what he might have thought when, e.g., reading that article you link to. It's not very illuminating.

No, to get into this thoroughly, the work needs to make us genuinely uncomfortable. It needs to take into account the psychological reality on both sides. It needs to understand and sympathize with both -- no, make that all three -- types of figure in this situation: the innocent victim punished for what he hasn't done and doesn't know; the torturer, going beyond the edge of human decency because of fear or loss of perspective; and, most challengingly, the terrorist who does know something dangerous, and *still should not be tortured*, *because it is wrong*.

Among other things, it needs to make us think about what you're calling the Jack Bauer defense seriously and from the inside, in order to make our rejection of it meaningful. It needs to get into the whole queasy possibility that there is, e.g., a threat of a suitcase nuke in midtown Manhattan, and it needs to push the player hard, hard, hard, on this problem. ARE YOU WILLING, it has to ask, TO BE RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS? (If there are other things motivating those who torture, it should explore those too. But from what little I've been able to find about the motives of those who have, e.g., waterboarded suspects, fear of what might happen if they didn't was indeed a prominent concern; both fear of disaster itself, and fear of being held responsible if they didn't do enough to prevent one.)

This hypothetical work on terrorism also needs to show the pain, the humiliation, the damage to health and sanity, the discontinuity from everything about the life they had before, that happens to an innocent victim, and it needs to push the player again. ARE YOU WILLING TO BE RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS? Could you possibly live with doing this to someone? Would you ever forgive, if it were done to you? To your brother or your lover or your friend?

And it needs to show the anger, the sense of justification, loyalty to comrades, religious certainty, pride, and so on that might motivate a genuine terrorist resisting torture, and it needs to push the player a third time: WHAT DO YOU DO WITH THIS PERSON? Is he as alien as you think? As completely devoid of any virtues? Do you hate him most of all because you can't control him?

Then we have to hope that we have the moral strength to step away at the end and say, yes, having seen and felt all that, I know what I believe is right; that it's wrong to commit acts of terrorism and also wrong to torture suspects even if I very strongly suspect their involvement. I've seen that there are real costs on all sides, real causes for sympathy on all sides, even if some positions are better than others. And I've seen the weak spots in my own personality, by which, in crisis, I might be tempted or manipulated into doing something I abhor.

This is something interactive narrative can do, though there are relatively few works that venture into such difficult territory.

The result would be dark and painful. I suspect there are people who would quit because the intensity would be nothing they wanted to deal with; it's the equivalent of saying that you don't want this job, that you don't want it to be your call, that you'd rather have someone else making these decisions for you.

Nonetheless, I think that could be a powerful work. In describing it, I realize I may sound a bit sadistic -- the play experience doesn't seem like anything remotely resembling fun, and there are places that not everyone wants to go, even in thought. But if we're going to judge -- and I believe that we must, as citizens of a democracy, because we bear some responsibility for the actions of our government -- then we should also reflect on the psychological realities involved. Here's what *I* think is the naive approach: one that puts undertrained soldiers into a place like Abu Ghraib, when they've learned to fear and distrust and dehumanize people like their prisoners, and expecting that the results will be unproblematic. If we want to live up to our principles, then we should also be aware of our weaknesses, of the realities of human nature that might make it difficult for us to stand by them, so that we can strengthen our will and develop approaches that pragmatically reinforce principled behavior. In my opinion, goodness requires not only sound principles, but also judgment and wisdom and self-knowledge.

To put this all in other words: there is no one we're free to demonize, no one whose humanity we're right to ignore, no one whose psychology we have the right to put into a black box and label "simply monstrous" and "absolutely unlike me". That goes for the tortured and the torturer alike. Labeling people as simply monstrous, NO MATTER HOW AWFUL their crime, leaves us unprepared to deal with our own moral crises.

One of my favorite works of world literature is Michael Frayn's "Copenhagen"-- the second half of the play in particular. In modern culture, Nazis are about as close as we come for a universal symbol of simple, despicable evil; but "Copenhagen" reminds us that individual officers and German scientists were human, were capable of love and loyalty, desired to see their homeland spared, and had all sorts of other common and natural feelings, even while they were carrying out mad and terrible plans. It doesn't detract from the horror of what happened. If anything, it adds to it. It is easier to accept the idea of evil done by monsters without souls.

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Emily Short

Sorry for replying to myself, but one final reflection: this discussion isn't *completely* hypothetical. I once played an RPG in which my character had some intimidation ability, and in the course of the scenario I wound up threatening one of the captured bad guys in order to get information. It didn't go as far as actually inflicting much physical damage, in the game, but it did require me for a while to try to put myself mentally into the space of someone who would be willing to try torture, so that I could credibly threaten it.

I didn't like being in that place. Didn't like it at all. One of the things I noticed is that it generated an odd, self-reinforcing sort of determination: the further I went, the further I was committed to keep going; finding no new information was not acceptable, not when I was already in so deep.

That wasn't something I would have thought about for myself without the exercise of role-playing, though in retrospect it's psychologically pretty obvious.

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Emily Short

"It needs to get into the whole queasy possibility that there is, e.g., a threat of a suitcase nuke in midtown Manhattan, and it needs to push the player hard, hard, hard, on this problem. ARE YOU WILLING, it has to ask, TO BE RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS?"

...aaaand you've lost me again. Where do you get this stuff? Can you name a single instance when the torture of a suspect has led to the discovery of a suitcase nuke (or anything similar) anywhere?

Let me remind you of what these two men recently released from Guantanamo are suffering. "Banna is said to be severely depressed, suffering from PTSD, and to have diabetes, hypertension and back pain, as well as damage to the back of his left knee. Deghayes is also suffering from PTSD, and depression, is blind in his right eye, and has fractures in his nasal bone and his right index finger."

So, on the one hand, we have a hypothetical suitcase bomb plot that never seems to materialize. On the other, two very real men who have been tortured savagely, and may never recover from their experiences. Factoring in the former to any serious project about torture is an insult to the latter.

Torture is only a 'complicated' issue because the Bush administration have made it seem so. It's as 'complicated' as pedophilia or mass murder; should we invent games that show these 'from the inside' too?

(And I can't remember where you said you weren't interested in politics--it was on an early 'PTT' post, is all I remember. Maybe you have guest bloggers?)

So, on the one hand, we have a hypothetical suitcase bomb plot that never seems to materialize. On the other, two very real men who have been tortured savagely, and may never recover from their experiences. Factoring in the former to any serious project about torture is an insult to the latter.

"Torture has never led to any useful discoveries" may be a valid argument in this case, but I don't think it covers the *motivation* side of things. (I'm also not sure whether it's true. Even if you think John Kiriakou's account of Abu Zubaida's revelations is a lie meant to justify American war crimes after the fact, I'd be willing to bet that at some time somewhere in the history of the world information gained by torture has saved lives. That's not a justification.)

But some torturers really have (as far as I can tell) been motivated by the fear of serious repercussions (either specific outcomes, or vague and unspecified ones) if they didn't get results. Again, there aren't a lot of materials in which CIA agents detail what they thought and felt at the time, and I was thinking largely of John Kiriakou's comments here again; e.g.:

"In 2002, I believed that desperate times called for desperate measures. And we were so convinced that al-Qaida was planning another massive attack that we really felt that we needed to do anything to get the information to disrupt it," Kiriakou tells Robert Siegel. (Source.)

You can, again, argue that he's lying and that the CIA was motivated simply by programmatic sadism throughout the agency; while that kind of sickness is (I think) rarer in entire organizations than in individuals, it's not inconceivable. However, I suspect that there *was* real fear, and that anything that wants to explore this meaningfully needs to incorporate that psychological fact. It's not the same as saying, "hey, I think the Bush administration might be right" or "cut these guys a break, they were up against a lot."

I concede that the specific suitcase nuke example may be too melodramatic and cartoonish. Evoking an unspecified fear of an unknown disaster (which could be anything) would be more realistic about the situation at least in the US in 2002. Generating that sense of vague but powerful foreboding is also, unfortunately, quite a bit more work, especially in a short game or story, where specifics are key to getting the player involved. But perhaps it would be a fairer treatment, more in line with the aims of such a hypothetical work.

However, the real essence of my argument is that people in torture situations seem, at least some of the time, to believe that they are in the Jack Bauer scenario, even if they're really not. Therefore that scenario needs to be dismantled, shown to be a bad and insufficient argument, rather than ignored.

One way to dismantle it might be through statistical points, by showing, e.g., that torture often leads to shaky confessions and unreliable "facts", since those tortured may say anything they think the torturer wants to hear. I might have suggested building that fact into the game, but what I was imagining here here isn't so much a simulation game (let's try torturing people and see whether it's a practical solution to our problems!) as a narrative one (let's look at the mindset you're led into if you do this, and recognize that it's a bad, bad place).

(And I can't remember where you said you weren't interested in politics--it was on an early 'PTT' post, is all I remember. Maybe you have guest bloggers?)

I am not Greg Costikyan, if that's what you mean. I think he's the one who made an off-the-cuff remark about avoiding politics. PTT posts are written by a variety of people; you can see which of us it is in the by-line.

And no, my disagreement with you here is not motivated by a lack of feeling for the Guantanamo suspects you name, or for anyone else who suffers torture. I do follow the news, and I did read that article, and I condemn and reject the system that caused this.

What I'm saying is that it's possible to feel anger and sorrow for the victims, and *also* at the same time feel some comprehension of the motives that might lead people to do these things. This isn't an insult to anyone, it's not about taking sides, and it's not meant as a justification for the torturers! I have not claimed there was any genuine moral ambiguity here. But I think that showing that *even* in the face of fear and confusion, and the dread of being blamed for bad outcomes, torture is wrong, would make a more powerful statement than a propaganda piece that solely concentrated on the outcomes of torture, as gruesome as those are.

To put this another way: "torture leads to horrible, ongoing suffering, and can cause psychological damage that outlasts the physical" is true. It's a distressing and powerful truth, and as I said, I think it belongs as a major component in this discussion. All the same, this forms an argument of the same *kind* as the suitcase nuke argument, which is to say, an argument about outcomes. It is thus an argument susceptible to being ignored any time that someone has (or thinks he has) a genuine reason to fear another worse outcome (deaths of many people). It weakens at the point when we need it to be most compelling.

A more lasting argument, less susceptible to such attack, is the argument about means. Torture degrades the humanity of everyone involved, which is in itself an evil. Whatever we might fear, whatever we might imagine in the moment that we can avert, whatever ideas we have about the suspect's guilt and what he "deserves" as a result, these means are inherently destructive. They fragment the self-conception of the person tortured; they sicken the torturer and (by encouraging acceptance of the unacceptable) they sicken the culture to which he belongs.

This argument is the reason I suggested that the guilty terrorist also belongs in our story. It's not because I'm taking the line that terrorists have a point, America deserves what it gets, etc., though some people do argue this. The confrontation with the guilty terrorist might at first lighten some of the moral compunctions the player might have, but I think it might challenge the player to realize that -- inasmuch as this situation is a power struggle between torturer and victim -- winning may have an inherently unacceptable price.

It's as 'complicated' as pedophilia or mass murder; should we invent games that show these 'from the inside' too?

Maybe.

This point begins to skate away from being political and towards philosophy (or, possibly, theology). I suspect our disagreement is partly about the nature of evil.

In my admittedly limited observation of the world, there are people who have a mindset allowing them to do sadistic things, but (esp. barring mental illness) few of them got there by *setting out* to be evil. There's usually some path by which they arrived there that involves initially understandable motives. And think it's possible to be interested in that path, and to feel some sorrow on their behalf, while still condemning their actions, working to stop them, and believing that they have caused terrible harm to others (for whom you also feel sorrow and anger). It's not a question of *siding* with the culprit. It's not a question of thinking he should avoid punishment. It's a question of strengthening our thinking and sense of purpose so that we do not ourselves at some point in our lives let ourselves be motivated by fear and desire for power to do what is inhumane.

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Emily Short

No-one commits evil with the belief that they're not doing the right thing. Tony Blair, for instance, hasn't been able to shut up about how pure his motives were in his Iraq decision, which I'm sure would give the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi dead some comfort if they were still around to hear it.

This brings me to the only wrong note in your reply (which was, as always, gracious and thoughtful--and I appreciate you responding to the content of my previous posts and not the tone). When you say "I'd be willing to bet that at some time somewhere in the history of the world information gained by torture has saved lives", it makes me cringe.

Of course torture has saved lives. Otherwise, The Nazis, Saddam Hussein, Stalin, The Khmer Rouge, and countless other desperate, paranoid, power-crazed types wouldn't have used it. They were, every single one of them, protecting themselves, saving lives, 'doing good' in their minds, just as someone is currently doing good on your behalf right now in a soundproofed room.

Well -- I'm not sure that this

Otherwise, The Nazis, Saddam Hussein, Stalin, The Khmer Rouge, and countless other desperate, paranoid, power-crazed types wouldn't have used it.

...is quite true. I mean, my impression is (reinforced by some conversations I've had elsewhere over the last few days -- your responses have pushed me to give this topic a lot more thought) that in some of these cases torture is being used purely as a punishment/deterrent: a way of personally breaking your opponents, of showing that people who stand up to you will have their resistance forcibly taken away. (Some of the most sickening things I've read on this topic have not been about the physical damage, though that's nasty enough; it's about the dissolution of sense of self brought on in the tortured. This strikes me as a more serious violation of someone's humanity than the physical suffering alone, as awful as that is.)

Anyway, I appreciate your input. You have brought me around to thinking that it probably would be too cartoonish and melodramatic -- and inaccurate -- to give the player a clear-cut motivation (Manhattan will become a radioactive wasteland!) rather than a more vague/queasy one (we know that somewhere out there people are planning more attacks like we've already experienced, but we can only guess at the extent of their resources). Of course, since games/interactive narratives thrive on specificity and clearly-defined scenarios, the latter case would be a lot harder to shape well. But it's probably still worth trying.

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Emily Short

"My impression is... that in some of these cases torture is being used purely as a punishment/deterrent."

Unlike in the United States, where it is used purely for good?

Surely you realize by now that that's not what I meant.

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Emily Short

That wasn't my point. I'm saying that no society adopts torture without, to its mind, the purest of intentions. 'Security' and the 'safety of citizens' for example. After a while, this morphs into 'punishment' and 'deterrent', just as it has in the USA.