BoingBoinging

Found a post on BoingBoing today that concerns a quest in World of Warcraft: Torture in Videogames – a moral dilemma

All the main points in defense of the quest had been made, but I thought something should be said for its actual excellence. Quests like this represent a measure of dignity returning to the story telling in Blizzard games.  There were flashes of that in WoW vanilla and some big tasty dignity steaks in Warcraft 3′s non-expansion campaign.

One really important thing games are able to do that lets them be a viable art form is put players in morally uncomfortable situations. That’s done pretty deliberately in Wrath in increasingly questionable circumstances. Not only are the torture quests worth defending, they’re worth praising for being really well done.

If you’re not comfortable with it you can decline the quest. Please don’t pretend you were forced to do the quest to get into an instance you can just walk into at any time and then go BOOO HOOO THE GAME WANTED ME TO HURTED THAT MAN because you’re used to the cartoony Russians In Space business from the previous expansion. A lot of the storytelling in Northrend is unabashedly dark and it’s also some of the best World of Warcraft has ever done.

Torturing somebody without any karmic repercussions isn’t too heartwarming, but it is pretty realistic. And appropriate to the tone of everything else in Outland besides.

I did everything I could short of calling Richard Bartle a giant wuss.  Which he is.  He invented MUDs.  But it wouldn’t have helped my case.

But he is a wuss.