Richard Bartle responds to "torture quest" issue

This is incredible. I spend an hour writing a blog entry to answer some of the points people have been making, and in response to said blog entry other people then make /the exact same points/. It's as if they read the entry and absolutely none of it stuck in their heads; or maybe they read it but were unable to reconcile what it was saying with what they believed it ought to be saying. Or perhaps they didn't read it at all, but decided to give me a kicking anyway?

Oh well, here are some further flogging-a-dead-horse replies.

torak>There is nothing in this game that goes to the sort of depth he is talking about.

What sort of depth is that? Some quests have entire one-off mini-games built into them - that one where you're mowing down undead to try cover prisoners as they make their escape, for example. I don't think it's too much additional "depth" to have a new quest appear over the quest-giver's head after you've prodded the guy once with the pain stick and found out he doesn't like it. There are plenty of cases where WoW has long quest chains that you can't do in parallel - there are some in Desolace, and then that whole Aldor/Scryer thing. Why not add a simple quest for people who don't want to torture the guy to get the information some other way? It's so easy and obvious that the decision not to do it must surely have been deliberate.

>WoW is about harvesting points and getting uber loot. That's it.

So if instead of torturing that guy with a pain stick you'd been asked to kidnap his children and rape them in front of him, you'd have been fine with that? So long as you get the points and the loot, the game fiction doesn't matter a jot to you? Just hand over those XPs and greens?

>Bartle needs to stop playing so much WoW

Oh, the irony...

I'm only actually playing WoW so that when I make comments about MMOs I don't get know-nothing jerks jumping on my case saying "how can you talk about MMOs when you don't even play them?". So I played WoW to level 70 three times, and then got another bunch of know-nothing jerks telling me I was a WoW fanboi. OK, just to stifle THOSE know-nothing jerks, I played another character all the way in LotRO (to the then level cap of 50 - I stopped before MoM came out). Is it OK now? Do I get to make the comments?

No, I don't. I can't win here! If I don't play I get sniped at, if I do play I get sniped at, if I play something else I get sniped at. Go ahead, knock yourself out, snipe away: I've been hit so many times I'm building up an immunity to bullets.

>Didn't he write an article about how he would shut WoW down because he thought it was a horrible game?

No, I answered a question posed to me by a journalist, which asked me what I would do if I could take over an existing major MMO. I said I would close WoW down. The point I was making is that WoW's success was stifling innovation elsewhere - I wouldn't actually want to close it down. I made the remark more because WoW was a good game than because it was a bad one. I'm sorry that you don't recall the visit the the hypnotist where he implanted the suggestion in your mind that I'd said the exact opposite.

>I would love to read some of his "observations" after playing a month in EVE.

Why? It's not like you'd read them before smacking me about the head for having said them.

NeuroMan42>Did I miss something... it is a GAME!!!

Yes, you did miss something. If you carefully re-read the blog entry I made that this thread is commenting on, you'll see, hidden away as a major bullet point, the statement "Yes, I do realise this is only a computer game.".

I look forward to reading the newspaper reports of your success in the "let's set fire to the cars of total strangers" game. The more cars you set fire to, the more points you get. Should the cars' owners complain, you could tell them "it is a GAME!!!" and then obviously they'd be fine with it.

Look, when you play a game there are boundaries that you don't cross. Crossing them injects so much reality that it breaks the game fiction (or "immersion", if you prefer). Now for you, torturing prisoners is not such a boundary. For all I know, you'd be fine having them as slaves - "it is a GAME!!!" and all. However, you'd have to have no morals or no sense of immersion whatsoever for you to have no point at which YOU'D say enough is enough.

Now for some people, torture is going to be just such a trigger point. You don't have to understand why, you just have to understand that this is so, and that it's shared by enough people that in the real world we have international conventions to try stop it. You don't have to agree, you just have to realise that torture is deeply offensive to some people. OK, so, that being the case, putting torture into WoW out of context is going to shock them. You may laugh at this, just as others may laugh if trolls got to bugger the leading figure of your favourite religion, but that doesn't alter the fact: they will be shocked. At this point, they don't feel they're playing a game any more, or at least they're not playing the game they thought they were playing. It's changed its character. The argument "it is a GAME!!!" no longer applies, because it just STOPPED being a game.

So yes, it is a game, until something happens that jolts you out of it. Or, as that well-known fictional character Wednesday Addams put it so well: "It's all fun and games until someone loses an eye. Then it's just fun".

pufonthis>I said it in the last blog and I'll say it in this one. Why should we care what this guy says or thinks?
>Now he has trouble clicking the cancel quest button

Ooh, goody, I get to use a ju-jitsu move!

If you don't like what I said, don't reply. You tell me that if I don't like the torture quest then I should simply not bother to accept it (the button is "decline", not "cancel", by the way), so why not apply that logic here? You don't like my blog post, OK, don't reply. Simple! You've solved your own problem.

I apologise to everyone else here, who do seem to get what I was saying, but jeez, some people ...

Richard

Ever play Warcraft 3? The Alliance are far from the good people! And they do never say they are the good people any where in the game they just say we do what we much to make the world a saver place for the Alliance!

This issue was over most MMO players' heads imo. I say most because not everyone's first MMO was WoW so not everyone rushed to defend it to the death (as did many newbs).

It must suck to be Bartle, it's like he can never speak his mind without a mob of newbs attacking him.

"Torak: WoW is about harvesting points and getting uber loot. That's it.

Richard: So if instead of torturing that guy with a pain stick you'd been asked to kidnap his children and rape them in front of him, you'd have been fine with that? So long as you get the points and the loot, the game fiction doesn't matter a jot to you? Just hand over those XPs and greens?"

Me: But, it doesn't ask you to do those things so it really doesn't matter does it? Players will poke a guy with a pain stick to get those greens and XP because they know that it means nothing. The character will respawn and the guy/gal behind you in line will do the
same thing to get the gear with no real recourse or moral choice. If you want to see how choices and moral decisions effect a game I would suggest the same thing as Torak and move to EVE. There are countless stories of what a players interactions and decisions while playing will do to not only a player, but a community as a whole.

"If you don't like what I said, don't reply. "

Heh, Pot meet Kettle.

Wow, Bartle put me in my place, he told me the button said "decline" and not "cancel". That's some great, jui-jitsu was it?

By your logic there would never be any game made ever. You find it hard to torture someone, but it's perfectly ok to slaughter people/animals/creatures all day and night. I guess you couldn't play a first person shooter cause that would mean you might actually have to shoot someone.

The rest of us know its "just a game" and know that whatever the heck you need to do to some poor pixel person doesn't matter and just advances the game. It's one quest that lasted what, 10 minutes? Complete it and move along. The fact that you actually used a real life metaphor to show your dislike of this phrase (burning cars) shows how disconnected you are from the reality of the situation, fake vs real.

I see you as someone who must try to cause a fuss over small, insubstantial parts of the game when everyone else just claimed their loot and moved on. This smells of you just trying to stir up things to put your name in the headlines again.

really a game is this serious of an issue, it is a shame people cant have fun and play the "game" it isnt real life you people need to get over it. dont bring religious or moral issues into play because that is a scapegoat and everyone is biased towards one issue or another. Sucks people cant have fun and enjoy themselves and people blow things wayyyyyyyyy!out of proportion. GET A LIFE PEOPLE!, and stop your bigotry ways. btw torture happens all over the world why dont people talk about that? talk about what your governments do to POW's before you cry about torture in a game, and like i said GET A LIFE PLEASE!

pufonthis>Wow, Bartle put me in my place, he told me the button said "decline" and not "cancel". That's some great, jui-jitsu was it?

The ju-jitsu was using your own argument against you. The Cancel/Decline distinction wasn't actually a part of it - I put it in because if I'd said "cancel" then someone would have leapt on my back and started biting my ears for not having said "decline".

>By your logic there would never be any game made ever.

I'd ask you to explain how you came to this conclusion, but I don't think you actually gave it any thought in the first place. Go on, apply it to Tetris, that should be an interesting exercise.

>You find it hard to torture someone, but it's perfectly ok to slaughter people/animals/creatures all day and night.

This is covered by another one of the bullet points in the blog entry I made that you're quite happy to criticise despite not having read it. However, just for you, so you don't have to figure out how to click a hyperlink, here's the relevant paragraph: "I am aware that playing WoW means you get to kill thousands of creatures. I am aware that murder is a worse crime than torture. Murder is a worse crime than anything (other than mass murder). However, previous quests have not exactly asked you to commit murder (at least for the Alliance — I don't know about Horde). It's always been for some morally justifiable purpose (self defence, most of the time). Whether you believe that torture can ever be morally justified or not (personally, I don't), you can't justify it in this particular case. Sticking a pain stick up some prisoner's jacksy to make him talk is uncalled for. Jeez, a simple Eye of Kilrogg will find out all you want to know for you, you didn't even need to capture the prisoner in the first place!"

>I guess you couldn't play a first person shooter cause that would mean you might actually have to shoot someone.

Oh, here's another example where I can simply quote back at you a paragraph from the very blog entry you purport to be criticising but haven't read: "When I signed up to play WoW I knew it had fireballs, so I expected killing. I knew it had rogues, so I expected thieving. I had to wait until the second expansion to find out it had gratuitous torture. This does not fall within the parameters of what I was expecting. It's as if you were reading the new book 8 of the Harry Potter series and Harry turns to drugs and uses his magic powers for sport to blind people. JKR can put that kind of stuff in her books if she likes, freedom of speech being what it is and all, but it's shattered your expectations. I wasn't expecting consequence-free torture quests in WoW. Getting one was a shock."

See? I'm not actually complaining about the content. Why do you think I am?! The more you try to mock me about something I never said, the less credible and more ignorant you appear. It's just extraordinary you'd do that.

>The rest of us know its "just a game" and know that whatever the heck you need to do to some poor pixel person doesn't matter and just advances the game.

So you'd be fine if you'd been asked to conduct anal intercourse with a rabbit instead? Just so we know where you stand (er, presumably behind the rabbit). If your backstop is it's just a game so it doesn't matter, you'd do anything for the points, you wouldn't care. Wear the Nazi armband? Sure, just hand over those XP!

At some point, EVEN YOU would find something so unpleasant that it would cause you to think twice about it. Then, for you, it would no longer be a game. At that point, you may finally understand why "it's just a game" isn't a universally applicable get-out clause.

>The fact that you actually used a real life metaphor to show your dislike of this phrase (burning cars) shows how disconnected you are from the reality of the situation, fake vs real.

No, it shows how disconnected you are. Those people who play MMOs are real. They have real feelings and real emotions, and can't help feeling distress when they get an out-of-context torture quest. You want to impose a fiction on them, "it's just a game", but the fiction broke when the out-of-context thing happened. Those are real people, just like the example you chose to respond to they were real cars. It's not a game any more at this point: there's too much reality involved.

>I see you as someone who must try to cause a fuss over small, insubstantial parts of the game when everyone else just claimed their loot and moved on.

Well, you see me wrongly. If I were going for publicity, why would I post on my own, little-read blog when I was being email-interviewed by a publicist for IMGDC at the time? Or when I could have posted on Terra Nova, which has a much larger readership?

>This smells of you just trying to stir up things to put your name in the headlines again.

Remind me why I would want my name in the headlines again? Just so I know the nature of your misunderstanding of me...

Richard

This is great. Every day I stop by here, write some stupid comment about Bartle in some topic I really haven't even read and he replies with a long, heart-felt reply. The next day I return to get his goat again. The man is totally clueless.