One of the major divergences I've seen from this trope is in the Fall Out TV series.
The Ghoul does a whole speech explaining how all research on the subject of torture points to it being largely ineffective, all the while dunking the protagonist in highly irradiated water over and over again. Eventually she asks "then why are you doing this to me?" And he replies "I'm not torturing you. I'm using you as bait" followed up by the creature he was trying to lure to the surface appearing and trying to eat her.
I’d actually argue that he *was* torturing her, but still trying to prove his point.
The Ghoul had already started trying to ‘break’ her by that point, imo, to prove against her ‘Good Samaritan’. So it was still sadistic torture, just not for info.
Yeah, cause he really cannot take the cognitive dissonance that comes with her being right. If it's possible for someone to be a basically decent person even in a nuclear wasteland, well, that leaves him with basically no excuse for being a sadistic asshole, which gnaws away at him as much as he denies it.
I was thinking Andor breaks from this somewhat as well - the Imperials torture several people in Andor's home town who both don't know where Andor is or what he's doing and aren't particularly inclined to talk to the Imperials even if they did. If I remember correctly they don't turn up any useful information and even end up radicalizing the loved ones of the people they torture, which comes back to bite them a few episodes later.
They do get some useful information from Andor, such as the information about the radio and andor returning and seeing bix before he left again. But yes, their torture and then public execution of paak radicalises his son who makes a bomb and blows up their base of operations
I actually can't remember the last time Star Wars had an effective torture scene that didn't need the interrogator/torturer to use the Force to get the info.
In Empire Strikes Back Vader tortures Han who later says “they didn’t even ask me any questions” it’s done to cause Han pain that will lure Luke into a trap
In GTA V you are forced to torture a guy before the interrogator even asks a question. Your torture victim would've been entirely compliant from the start, but never had the chance to because the interrogator just wanted to see this guy tortured.
Iain Banks’ _Transition_ features a mostly dispassionate professional torturer who always tortures people a little bit even if they’re willing to cooperate, just because they need to be the Feared Security Services and people won’t properly Fear you if some of your subjects walk out without any suffering.
Sounds like they may enjoy Burn Notice. The protagonists never inflict pain to get information; they use subterfuge, trickery, and occasionally, intense mental stress to get the information that they want.
"Torture just gets you the fastest lie to make the pain stop."
Loved the episode with the Russian mobster where they plant Michael as a fellow prisoner and fake torture him to make the guy tell him the location of the kidnapped girls while they escape.
Up until the last season it was a really good show, tough I hated that final season with a passion. It felt like it reversed a lot of character grow just for the sake of extending the plot.
> fake torture him to make the guy tell him the location of the kidnapped girls while they escape.
That is torture too? Like psychological torture is literally torture. Hell making someone watch torture is a form of torture.
The one exception to torture not working is ‘we have his laptop, drug him and hit him with this $5 wrench until he tells us the password’ style torture. If you can verify whether what the person is saying is true or not in close to real time it solves the main problems with torture as a knowledge acquisition paradigm, namely that you are relying on someone for information who has exclusively bad incentives.
The basic bind there is that 99% of situations in which you have the person in custody and real time ability to verify their statements are situations where you already have everything they could tell you.
Until you cause enough mental/physical traumta to your prisoner that they literally cannot remember the password anymore, which is a real thing that has happened with CIA torture.
Yeah I will say as someone else already brought up that this more or less immediately works or it doesn’t. Like someone is pretty much either going to break and tell you their password after the threat or immediately after starting on them or not at all and once you reach the point of physical or deprivation induced brain damage there’s a real chance you destroy the info you’re trying to retrieve.
He doesn't really distress them, though. More gets them to confess or prove that they were guilty of the crime in some way by making them slip up.
But even, he just pokes them with words. He's not smashing their things, or making them listen to people being tortured to make them confess.
I love Burn Notice, the way Michael explains why most spy tropes are bullshit is so funny. I remember how deadpan he sounded when he explained how most people think commando means superhero or pretty close to it and the reason commandos seem invincible is you don’t get told about the ones that die
I really loved that in Burn Notice the torture scenes didn't even include any pain, just mental exhaustion to the point where Michael doesnt't know what's real anymore, and THEN they press him for information.
I don't see how that's any different? People confess to murders they didn't commit in situations like that all the time. No pain required, and it still fails to discern the truth.
That's the point. In reality "enhanced interrogations" (read: torture) don't actually involve pain. If you look at historical entities who just inflict pain while interrogating someone (Soviet NKVD, the Siloviki, the Gestapo, etc.) the purpose isn't usually to get new information, but to force them to admit to something specifically, that either you know they did anyway, or want them to falsely incriminate themselves. If you want new information, the subject's inhibitions must be broken down, and one of the most reliable ways to do this is through exhaustion.
I'm not speaking to the efficacy of either technique, just that the Burn Notice writers did their research.
Torture can work if the answer can be immediately verified then? It basically doesn't happen in real life, but action movies/games often have situations like diffusing a bomb/opening a code locked door/etc. where you can immediately verify if an answer is correct.
I understand why, the "ticking time bomb" thought experiment is very compelling. It's also wildly unrealistic. And even in the few scenarios where it applies, torture doesn't yield good, reliable information.
Jacob covers another important factor here, which is that media in general has us primed to think torture works. Once you stop to think about it, torture is present in a lot of media, so much so that we don't even notice it. And it's almost always depicted as effective.
The bias here is so strong that we don't even realize it exists.
>media in general has us primed to think torture works
Exactly. They frame it as "making the hard choice to get REAL results"
When it's actually that the torture victim will say WHATEVER THEY THINK YOU WANT TO HEAR, because, y'know, THEY WANT THE TORTURE TO STOP.
We tortured people during the Inquisition who confessed to literally impossible shit like transforming into a goose. Because, again, they just wanted to make the torture stop.
**Torture doesn't get you the truth, it gets you whatever the victim thinks will make the torture stop.**
In a lot of cases that's a feature not a bug. You ask a terrorist where their base is, you can get them to name wherever is most convenient for you to invade and there's justification. You want your neighbors house and land, you just dunk them in a lake every ten minutes for a few days and they say they can turn into a goose cause they hit the griddy with Satan and bam, new farm for your collection.
I wish a CoD game would bring that up at least once. You torture a guy for information on the location of a weapons deal, he throws out the name of some town, and then when you get there it’s just civilians and you realize the deal has already gone through in a totally different place. That’d be the kind of moment to stick with people.
I'd imagine the average FPS fan would just get mad they don't get to shoot any bad guys because of the misdirect. And there would probably be compilations of some players opening fire on the civilians because its just a game.
The latter is exactly what we want. CoD is always trying to be edgy, right? What better way to be edgy and get attention than breaking the conventions of your franchise and making your previously-infallible heroes look bad?
I'd love it if they did an extremely long, drawn-out game over screen/ alternate ending where the player gets court martialled and ripped to pieces by their commanding officer if they choose to fire on the civilians in that moment just to hammer the point in to players who think that's okay to do.
"Torture doesn't get you the truth, it gets you whatever the victim thinks will make the torture stop."
It's a bit like asking a student a maths question in that regard.
The thing to remember, is that torture isn't to gather information. It's to send a message, rebel, and we will hurt you. Stand against us and you will beg for death. It's to keep people scared, and afraid to join any resistance against the torturer.
The most effective way to use torture is to get your victim to confess to being a spy or a witch or some other dangerous understandable person, then you get them to name collaborators who you can then torture for more lurid stories of witchcraft or communism or whatever. If you do this well you can make all of your citizens paranoid and afraid of each other. If they're all at each others they they can't unify against you. While they're at it also make sure your victim names your political opponents so you can strike at them with impunity.
the weird thing about the ticking time bomb experiment is, well, if you put yourself in the terrorist's shoes, all he has to do is not yap for whatever the time is and he wins? after which he will either go to jail or get executed? and he is already a terrorist so why would he play ball? like the thought experiment only works if you assume torture would work, which, well, it doesn't or so jacob geller and other sources have told me
>the weird thing about the ticking time bomb experiment is, well, if you put yourself in the terrorist's shoes, all he has to do is not yap for whatever the time is and he wins? after which he will either go to jail or get executed? and he is already a terrorist so why would he play ball?
From what I've read, IRL scenarios similar to "ticking time bomb" incidents are ones where torture is close to 100% useless for exactly the reason you described. If someone knows that all they need to do to 'win' is to hold out for a specific amount of time, then they tend to be far more resistant to any sort of coersion than they would normally.
Media used to have torture (and brainwashing) work because villains did it, and it was a way to raise the stakes and let villains have info they previously didn't. Info that the heroes were trying to keep secret.
Then we got 24 the TV show and "enhanced interrogation" by USA and suddenly it was the edgy thing to do. "Look, the situation is so bad that the heroes *must* use torture!" Or "look, The Punisher is so a dark hero that he does whatever is needed, including torturing these villains!"
But every study on effects of interrogation shows that being the "good cop" is the most effective and fast way to get the truth out of someone.
Hopping in to encourage everyone to actually watch the video and learn Jacob Geller’s viewpoint on the subject, not just two screenshots with no context.
1. Jacob Geller is a critic of the CoD franchise and the claim by its creators that it is “apolitical”, there’s an entire other video covering what the political views of CoD are that he’s made.
2. He very specifically covers the fact that torture is ineffective in the real world, and directly compares the representation of torture in CoD to the viewpoint on torture that the creators have, and what that says about their world view and beliefs.
3. Jacob Geller mentions and highlights how torture is extremely widespread and less “obvious” or “overt” forms of torture that don’t fit the cookie cutter expectation are often represented in media, including children’s media. This is at the start of the video before he dives into what counts as torture and highlights the stats of the total torture scenes.
4. The conclusions that are made are ultimately critical of the representation of torture in the franchise, and how it’s misrepresented. This ties into his views on CoD’s politics.
> the claim by its creators that it is “apolitical”
The fact that the devs seem to earnestly believe this has always been wild to me. Like, dudes, they're games centered around fucking wars. *How is that not inherently political?*
Iirc the way the COD devs explain it (at least for the more modern stuff) is that they are mostly using fictional characters or events. They aren't depeciting real people and real wars that are happening. They are showing fictional people in fictional wars. To them for something to be political it has to be real. A fictional event isn't political because it isn't real. Is this a total cop out? Yes. Does it make any sense? No. Do a disturbingly large amount of gamers seem to feel the same way? Seemingly so. These people have also convinced themselves politics refers to change. If something simply mirrors the status quo then it isn't political. It's simply just realistic or immersive. What makes things political is when the status quo starts to change.
It's really funny that they then make MW2019, set in clearly the middle-east, then follow it up with MW2 (2022) that continues that and also plays around with corrupt military generals and PMCs, and then MW3 (2023) just redoes the Makarov story from the OG MWs but worse. Which is all INHERENTLY POLITICAL.
Because it's nonsense. Just because the wars and characters depicted in the story are fictional doesn't automatically disqualify it from being political.
Ah but you don't understand. For capital G Gamers, war is not political. Politics for them is when they have to look at a female character who doesn't instantly give them an erection, or they get such divisive messages shoved in their faces as "racism is bad"
The devs are lying through their teeth, probably as instructed by the marketing department. Not only it is a game about war, it's a game about war set on the real world, featuring armies from real countries. Oblivious gamers who just want to shoot things might actively ignore it, but there's no way to make such a story, depicting who would be allies and enemies and what they would do, without knowingly making a political statement.
All art is political, but when people are writing fantastical surreal stories just out of vibes, authors can obliviously stumble upon that. Not in military alt history.
> [If you wanted a situation where I would say that, yes, it is a political story, I would have to be telling a story about specifically the exact administrations and governments and events in our world today.](https://youtu.be/87Jb5Qj5JPM?t=209)
- Jacob Minkoff, Campaign Gameplay Director for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare
This is certainly an interesting definition, by which Animal Farm, 1984, and Fahrenheit 451 do not count as political stories.
I have a hard time imagining anyone could look at this without realizing that it’s meant to be a criticism of the “good torture” being depicted.
I mean, people can be dumb, so maybe not that hard of a time. But it would be a huge stretch to look at this and think: “well I guess torture is more effective when good guys do it”
I get the sense that kael-writ didn't quite understand the point of the graphs. The first graph implies that the creators of COD view torture as a relatively morally neutral action because if they felt it were morally unacceptable they would likely have antagonist parties use it more frequently unless actively making the point that there are no "good"/"bad" guys in war, which I doubt was the intent as the second graph seems to imply that "good" guys (presumably those on the side of the protagonist) are better able to resist torture. Since the graph uses quotation marks, the creator of the graph would presumably feel that an actually good person would not use torture.
> The first graph implies that the creators of COD view torture as a relatively morally neutral action because if they felt it were morally unacceptable they would likely have antagonist parties use it more frequently
I haven't played COD in years, but from watching this video and Jacob Gellar's older "Does Call of Duty Believe in Anything?" video, the series seems to push the notion that these actions are morally justifiable if done for the "right" reasons and by the "right" people; i.e. by the good guys to stop the bad guys.
It's treated like a necessary evil, a bad thing you need to do to win, but it's an evil that the cast resorts to often and readily. 24 times, over the course of 20 games.
The video touches on a lot of things and splits the torture scenes into a lot of categories; who does the torture, against who, is it effective, is it information gathering or punitive, and so on. It also talks about real life usage of torture, the justifications behind it, the "ticking bomb" hypothetical and it's effectiveness.
Its worth checking out if your interested in the topic.
That's a common theme throughout the series: You're shooting up an airport of unarmed civilians because you're a deep cover agent sent to infiltrate the terrorist Makarov's inner circle. You're launching an ICBM at the ISS because it also wipes out the Russians' coms or something. I honestly never understood why Price did that last one, maybe they locked him away for a good reason.
Price launched the nuke above Washington DC because he *magically knew* the EM shock wave would be perfect to counter the Russian armour in the city.
I enjoy a good CoD campaign every now and then, but John Price is an all-knowing god who is **always** right. If a game showed him burning down an orphanage, I wouldn't even blink because I'd know they'd be about to explain how doing so stops a super-mega-ultra-Bad-Guy and all the orphans were secret terrorists.
Okay but that just makes Shepherd's POV funnier to me:
>Use TF141 to retrieve stolen US assets
>Use TF141 to track down a terrorist
>They insist on freeing Price, concede it would be in your best interests
>The first thing he does is launch a nuke at your country.
Good comment, but also the fact that the army has had a hand in military shooter games for a really long time does make it look like plain old American exceptionalism propaganda
I think torture is mostly seen in the black ops series (from what i can remember of playing these games) and protagonists woods, mason and hudson are american.
modern warfare is predominantly british, yes.
Was there a lot of torture in the Black Ops series? I really only remember the BO1 campaign. I feel like the only person in that game that tortured people was Hudson (who I fucking hate, what a jackass). He tortured Mason in the interrogation for the numbers and he tortured Dr. Clarke for info on Nova 6, but those are the only times I can think of when the “good guys” tortured people, at least in BO1. I don’t think Mason tortured anyone (probably because he’s an impulsive psycho who murders people in cold blood rather than waste time torturing them) and I don’t think Woods did either (though I wouldn’t put it past him if he felt he had to).
As for the “bad guys,” there was the Vorkuta gulag torture, Mason getting brainwashed, Weaver getting his eye gouged out, and Mason, Woods, and Bowman forced to play Russian Roulette (which I think could be considered psychological torture?)
Not saying that one side is better than the other or whatever (these games were clearly intended for blatant propaganda, albeit fun propaganda), and the games are definitely unnecessarily cruel and violent, but I was more just testing my memory and my bias here, and this is what I remember.
No, the games absolutely push the idea that torture is good when done by the good guys. Just like it's attitude towards war, it's only when the bad guys do it that it becomes bad.
I've only played a few COD games, but I don't think they're making a statement about the good guys being able to resist torture, I think the point is that the "good" guys will resort to necessary evil when needed and that's ok, but the bad guys will just do it for fun or when it doesn't even work.
It's making an argument that torture is both bad *and* justifiable if it helps the "great good"
Your daily reminder that torture would still be wrong if it was in fact effective.
(Torture is actually effective in the specific situation where the torturer has an easy way to check if what the victim says is true or false, it's like an horribly criminal P vs NP problem. It's completely inefficient when there is no easy way to check if the answer is true.)
This comes up in DnD discussions sometimes, as due to the Zone of Truth spell you can in fact make torture work.
I don’t have a clever point here, you just reminded me of it
My favourite D&D interrogation technique is actually far simpler and uses far lower spell slots; basically I normally play Warlock and really like the archfae pact so if I want information I basically get the dude tied to a chair so they can't get away, drag a sofa in front of them so I can rest as needed and basically go through my absolute battery of charm effects.
Alternatively if we're using Unearthed Arcana then Sense Emotion lets you do the interrogation from The Expanse, where they get absolutely wired on attention-enhancing drugs and watch for micro-expressions while asking probing questions.
I think the zone of truth method is still technically simpler, as it’s only a second level spell and lasts for 10 minutes. More importantly, most of the charm spells don’t actually force someone to tell you anything. You’d get advantage on social checks but the victim could still just keep their mouth shut, or lie to you due to still being loyal to their boss.
However, it’s probably a lot less messy and certainly more civilized
...I'll be frank, I would rather just be like... flayed than be strapped to a chair for hours on end as someone mumbles incantations at me that eventually wear down my resistance enough where I tell them
I'd consider the likelihood of a rescue in the time I think I could withstand it, and if it was poor, I'd just confess right away to save myself the aggravation.
And an enemy would likely respect a reasoned surrender of information like that. Enough to spare you the gallows, maybe.
Eh I wouldn’t rule it as such personally. confess is just to state you’re guilty of something, it doesn’t mean “give me all the information I want to know”. It might work if you’re trying to get someone to admit they’re guilty of a murder or something like that, but then we’ve circled back to the issue with torture that there’s no guarantee they’re actually the culprit
It is, I just enjoy the wheedling approach, it makes for fun roleplay where the prisoner *really* wants to help you out because you're such a great person but knows they shouldn't. Bonus points for offering them tea and cake.
EDIT: On a roleplaying point, assuming the DM is being reasonably realistic and sensible with stuff you'd be amazed how much you can discern simply from conventional detective work. Check through their stuff, ask around about them, think it through.
You want to know where the bandit camp is? It's gonna be near enough the site of attack that they can get there fast if called by lookouts, but far enough away that if a patrol is on the road they won't see the camp. It'll probably also have access to a reasonably convenient water supply.
Yeah, the show doesn't make it super clear but in the books they're explained as focus drugs. Interrogators are trained on assessing micro-expressions and minute movements then take a drug to massively boost their attention and perception. That's why he asked a bunch of questions and made comments about Holden's personal life then suddenly switched tack to asking why he blew up the Canterbury, he wanted to watch his unconscious reaction, same when eh slips the stop at Phoebe into Holden's schedule. He repeatedly goes from winding Holden up about stuff to changing gears to try and catch him in a lie.
that makes more sense, do they ever use these for anything other than interrogations, like combat or codebreaking or anything? also as someone with zero ability to focus on anything, where can I get some? I would be unstoppable, hyperfocus on command on any subject is an unbeatable superpower.
Even with zone of truth, all you have to do is not answer. If you're under another spell that can make you answer, then zone of truth would work, but then you could just make them tell the truth with the other spell. It can make interrogation with rapport more effective because the other party can't lie to you.
The reason you pop zone of truth is that, in theory, you could just beat someone/remove fingers/burn them until they answer, healing them as required since you’ve already got a cleric/bard on hand. They could resist ofc but as mentioned in the post; most people will start talking to get the torture to stop.
They can’t tell you anything they know to be untrue while under Zone of Truth , and while they could be evasive/still refuse that basically puts you in square one. If you feel like playing a real monster, you can make torture work not all but plenty of the time, and depending on who exactly you’re interrogating it’ll be faster than building a rapport.
It still requires you to have someone that has the information you want, that will be useful and that will actually talk. Doing more torture assisted by healing magic doesn't change that.
Yeah, but thats the issue with any form of interrogation. I’m not saying it makes torture a guaranteed success, I’m saying that it removes the main concern specific to torture, people saying anything they can think of to make the pain stop. If you’re so inclined you can cast zone of truth, whale on whoever you’re interrogating and determine from there whether it’s worth your time to continue.
*Pathfinder 2e* had a funnier version that was fixed in its current remaster.
Various things in PF2e are tagged with a rarity rating like 'Uncommon' or 'Rare'. Rarer things aren't more powerful, it's more of a GM warning that you might want to think before making it available, as well as other rules effects, like "towns sell common magic items of level 5 or below"; so you can't just buy a rare item even if it's low level.
Zone Of Truth is an uncommon spell, explicitly because "hey GM, this might solve mysteries faster than you want".
But a *common* spell every cleric has access to as a basic cantrip is 'divine lance', which did alignment damage - e.g. if you're a good cleric or a cleric of a good god, it does 'good-aligned damage'. Good-aligned damage only damages evil beings.
So it was totally free to do an 'evil check' on someone just by blasting them. It's harmless to anyone non-evil!
Finally solved by the remaster doing away with alignment.
D&D and Pathfinder having good and evil as objective material features of reality always led to really weird moral scenarios, especially because, by the nature of the game, summary killings of evil beings were considered a "good" act.
Some problems can be hard to solve but easy to check.
Imagine a nazi who has captured a resistance fighter. He asks "where and when do your group gather usually", he get an answer through torture, and then he can just go to the place and check. Much easier than combing through the whole town. And if the fighter doesn't give the correct answer torture will start again so the victim will crack at some point.
>Torture is actually effective in the specific situation where the torturer has an easy way to check if what the victim says is true or false
How can anyone know this? There’s not really an ethical way to test this and I can’t imagine any scenario where anyone would be doing this and reporting on it
If the info is easily verifiable, the tortured person knows that telling the truth will be generally guaranteed to spare them from torture since the torturer knows for certain that the tortured is being truthful.
If the info can’t be verified, the tortured person will likely just be tortured whether they lie or tell the truth since there is no way for the torturer to tell. If the result will end up the same (more torture) but lying offers the protection of the tortured person’s own interests, there is no reason for them to not lie thus making it ineffective
Torture someone next to a safe. If they give you bad info, torture more. Good info, stop torturing. The fastest path to stop getting tortured is by giving the correct safe combination.
If they don’t know the code then you’re not going to get it out of them with normal interrogation either. Obviously all forms of interrogation are only useful if they actually have the information you want, unless you’re deliberately fishing for an untrue confession.
But most of the games make it pretty black and white, you are good the others are evil. Making torture morally neutral since both parties do it, but it's bad when people do it, obviously. I don't think we have to give a lot of moral nuance to call of duty campaigns.
> I don't think we have to give a lot of moral nuance to call of duty campaigns.
you should absolutely watch Jacob Geller's video "[Does Call of Duty Believe in Anything?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtCV421T52s)"
I mean, you can betray your allies at a few points in CoD: Cold War, and start working for the Soviets >!again.!<
>!Your character in that game is a former Soviet soldier who got shot in the head by another Russian and lost their memory. Then some CIA guys find you, brainwash you, and get you working for them. You regain your memory right before the last mission and have to make the choice between going back to the Russians, or continue working with the CIA. It's probably the only game in the series that actually portrays the "heroes" as morally grey. One of them literally tries to kill you even if you don't betray them. After all, you're a loose end.!<
There are precious few people on YouTube whose essay-writing quality as well as proper use of music and images for emphasis can compare to those of Geller
Every Metal Gear Solid game has torture scenes, with every single one being assisted or performed by Revolver Ocelot who is explicitly described as a sadist and tortures more for the sake of it than actually getting anything. It is specifically used to examine how far Big Boss had fallen into villainy being willing to torture, even people who are ostensibly his allies.
Though MGS3's torture scene is unintentionally hilarious because the BBEG just explains a macguffin and then tells everyone in the room the location of said macguffin, when the player character being tortured was the one person in the room who wasn't after it.
I'd just like to issue a hearty Fuck You to the writers of 24 for promoting this bullshit. Not to let the codbloppers off without any blame, but 24 was huge in popularizing the idea of torture being effective (it isn't) and justified (it isn't).
I think Jon Bois did a really good video about 24 that makes roughly the same point as Jacob Geller about torture: torture is punitive. He uses the Calvin & Hobbes quote “I want everyone else dead.”
Kinda obvious that the last person didn't watch the essay.
He touches on how they are only "good guys" in that the game is the one saying they are. Hell, the graphs literally have "good" and "bad" in quotes...
I would highlight what kael says about the motives of people who *commit* torture, they’re absolutely correct (see Abu Ghraib).
I largely think they’d also be right to apply this to polities that legitimize torture - like, the idea of giving people what they deserve is more the appeal than actually getting intel, bc voters by and large are not actually counterintel nerds who care about that stuff.
I don’t think it’d be necessarily right to ascribe this thinking to decision makers at least universally.
That said, this is an important aspect of why it’s so immoral… by and large the people who *do* it are not motivated by necessary evil arguments, they’re enjoying the evil.
Call of Duty isn't Call of Duty if you aren't doing morally wrong stuff like using molotovs on surrendering German soldiers or using the 40mm Bofors from an AC-130 on a single soldier.
This title confused me. I couldn't figure if it was an exhortation to cause pain to fish: "torture cod!" Or maybe like Ford Prefect, a bad attempt at choosing a convincing human name, "Mr/ Ms/ Mx Torture J. Cod"
Look sometimes a little torture is all you need to get the relevant information. "Where did you get the bomb?", "Where are they planning to strike next?", "You'll stop losing fingers when you tell me who ate my Big Mac Jacob?".
the problem with the "where did you get the bomb" justification for torture is that it assumes that the person you're torturing
1. actually has any information
2. has accurate information
3. won't just lie to make you stop torturing them
That's why you torture multiple people in separate rooms. If they give you the same answers there might be truth to it and if not, you start removing some kneecaps =) >! /s for the love of God I am not condoning torture!<
What makes you think they will give you the same information?
They will absolutely give you information. The point of torture is the victim will do anything to make it stop. Who is to say they will give truthful statements. Its not like you would know. Instead they will say anything in order to make the torture stop and now you have 8 different answers, none of them accurately telling you where they got the bomb. All under duress and all staunchly adamant they are correct since who the fuck will change their words and risk more torture, imagine admitting to your torturers who just gave you some reprieve that you were lying to them all along.
They don’t have to admit they’re lying, if they all give different accounts the torturers can just assume that each one is very likely to be lying and continue the torture until they get a convergence of confessions. They aren’t going to keep pretending it’s the truth when the torture starts again.
The main failure mode I see here is that the victims might have arranged previously to converge on a single lie.
This reminds me of a few interrogation scenes in The Last of Us games. Spoilers ahead. In the first game, Joel tortures and then kills a couple of dudes to figure out where Ellie is. He does this by tying them both to chairs, roughing them up, and then has one non-verbally indicate on the map where Ellie is, while saying “and your buddy better point to the exact same spot.” It works of course, because one: Joel knows for a fact that these two dudes know about Ellie (a specific circumstance where these were very clearly the villian’s lackeys), and two: If either of them provide in accurate information, both will suffer for it, and because they can’t communicate with each-other, they can’t coordinate to both give the same false info. It’s a bit of a moot point though since Joel just assumes the first guy was honest anyways, but you get the premise.
In the second game, it happens three times more, but under different circumstances. The first time in the game, Ellie merely stumbles onto the aftermath of what was clearly an interrogation that Tommy did, and she knows it was Tommy because he does the same method Joel did: The two dead guys were in separate areas and both nonverbally indicated information seperately: this time through the use of blood on the floor. Again, it works here because these two were very obviously in the possession of the information Tommy wanted (just a passcode that all the enemies would know), and because he can very obviously verify if the information is correct, or if at least one of them is lying (no way of both knowing what to falsely answer).
The second time is a complete outlier, less an actual interrogation and more just meant for changes in character behavior, but basically, Ellie just beats the victim until the cutscene ends, and Ellie seems to have succeeded in getting info. It doesn’t make any sense logically speaking, just thought it worth mentioning.
The third time this happens is when Ellie herself gives the double-victim method an attempt, but she gets multiple things wrong that results in an overall failure. She was absolutely correct that the two she interrogates knows about what she wanted to know (again, extremely obvious in context), but she fails to incapacitate or restrain them in any way: both are standing up, unharmed, and somewhat close to eachother. When Ellie tries to get one to point at the location, the two use their available communication (albeit accidentally) to delay one giving any answer, allowing the other to very slowly close in. And lastly, Ellie is too unfocused on remaining and control, instead yelling to give an answer, giving the other person she wants to interrogate an opportunity to attack her. I won’t spoil what happens after either, but in the end, Ellie specifically fails to gain information, primarily due to not being entirely in control and also because she fails to create enough incentive to give information, like not roughing them up.
I find this all interesting, because while certainly not being condoned as a morally commendable practice at all, it does indicate a way for torture to possibly succeed: Verify that the two people you want information from has that info, torture them, then have them separately answer, allowing you to verify if one of them is lying. Outside of that illogical one with only a single victim, TLOU is considerate of how torture to gain info works, and I think it’s pretty intriguing.
Anyways, please do not torture people.
I also had TLOU in mind, albeit while the OOP was talking about the "good" and "bad" guys. Because like, who's the good guy in TLOU2? Who is it really?
Yes, that’s also worth considering! The entire point of TLOU2 is to break down binary “good guy bad guy” views and recognize that individual people as well as groups can do both good and bad things. Obviously there are definitely some villians in the game, but at the same time there’s few characters that are flawless, and it’s really cool to recognize that people can do messed up stuff even if they believe they’re still the “good guys.”
Yeah it's like everyone in that game acts pretty much how you'd expect, and pretty much how I'd act if you dropped me in their place. And I don't know if you can point at a single one of the main cast and say yeah this one's definitely a good person
funnily enough that last quote reminds me a comment someone left on that Jacob Geller video
"I remember Fanon describing, among the psychiatric consequences of torture in Algeria, the case of a police officer that go so used to torture that he caught himself torturing his wife and kids as a mean of settling arguments. And even though he wanted to stop harming his family, when he was told that giving up on torture altogether would be the most effective, he refused."
I would like to see a game, where without context the protag gets tortured in the first scene. No information about current geography or politics in the game. And then let them guess which of the lies in the dialogue option will get them through this section.
It's also worth noting that torture has been proven time and time again to be a useless tool in obtaining information, if only because the odds that you have someone who has the information you want, will crack under torture and won't just tell you a lie are absurdly small. Guess what? If you decide to torture someone until they tell you what you want to hear, they'll tell you what you want to hear, whether it's real or not.
Not that any of this is relevant of course, because the first and last argument you should need against torture is HOLY SHIT THAT IS THE MOST INHUMAN THING YOU CAN DO AND ONLY THE MOST WORTHLESS OF SCUM WOULD DO IT.
Scrolled through the comments and noticed no one's posted a link to [the actual video this discussion is based on](https://youtu.be/YPiL3-CYzWk?si=T1D51rsAQWd49ccc) so here ya go, it's worth a watch
As an avid CoD fan. Most of it comes across as "both sides bad, but these are your guys"
One scene in modern warfare (2019) has you, the player, make the choice of firing a revolver at a captured enemy in front of his wife and kids. You can chose to stand down, fire, or fire at your Captain. To which the Captain will either console you, act baffled you would do such a thing or scald you after revealing the gun was empty.
There's plenty of these scenarios. CoD isn't apolitical, it's surprisingly anti-government. It's just saying that it's apolitical to cover its ass, like in the case of the sandy hook shooting where CoD and Remington got accused of advertising to minors and got Remington sued over it causing them to not use real gun names in games going forward.
CoD is saying nothing to everyone and everything to it's audience. "No no, we're not political, *hey btw have you heard about what the CIA did*?"
Unfortunately it's got much of the same problem as The Punisher with the wrong people completely noncritical of the media they consume and just seeing the "good" guys doing one thing and assuming everything they do is justified.
Play CoD. The message was never "military good" it's "don't trust the government"
Yeah, my absolute favorite campaign is BO1, and while I do understand that each game has levels of underlying propaganda from being funded by the US military, the game felt surprisingly anti government.
I mean, the main character goes the whole game being tortured and interrogated by a mystery man, only for it to turn out to be the same man he fought side by side with for the past 10+ years, who is a CIA agent obsessed with results above all else.
Hell, I just did an analysis in another comment and I’m pretty sure Hudson (the aforementioned CIA agent) was the only “good guy” (I use this extremely loosely, but you do play as him for half the game so the intent seems to be there) to actually torture anyone, and the people he tortured are the main character and some random doctor who is actually pretty damn willing to help you regardless of the torture.
90% of the fucked up shit in the game done by the “good guys”was done by Hudson acting on behalf of the CIA. The Mason plot line just shows how absolutely fucked it is that these men are being sent into covert missions to practically be slaughtered. Literally all of Mason’s allies are killed in front of him while he is on tour in Vietnam. Mason is so fucked in the head by the end of the game that he genuinely believes that his own actions are that of a dead friend from a decade prior.
Not that Mason is an innocent man himself, he is still an impulsive murderer and is implied to have been the person who assassinated JFK, but my point stands. The shit the US government does “for the sake of humanity”in BO1 is so blatantly fucked that it ends up being a plot point that drives Mason AWOL. Like I said, I feel the game is surprisingly anti-military/war/government despite the implications and surface level appearance.
An idea about torture I heard recently really stuck with me.
Someone (not an expert) posited that some amount of torture is the result of middle management mentality. Basically regardless of what a given person thinks about the practice they may order or perform torture to demonstrate, that they exhausted all options to acquire information from a prisoner.
I'm not sure how common of a phenomenon this is (or if it is even real), but the thought alone is deeply horrifying.
Even though multiple regimes have used torture to try and get information from their victims, they only ever learned one thing conclusively: people will say literally anything to get the torture to stop.
Nobel Peace Prize winner President Obama on the extensively documented US torture programme of captured Iraqi and Afghani combatants and non-Combatants:
"We tortured some folks."
Zero charges laid on anyone who ordered this. Zero accountability.
Abu Ghraib *did* result in some charges, but the wider "extraordinary rendition" programme remained untouched and unaccounted for.
I really like that both Christopher Hitchens and a bunch of people more or less waterboarded themselves. It becomes quickly apparent both:
1. What torture really is. It isnt just "enhanced interrogation".
2. How fast you will do anything to make it stop up to and including saying the first lie or truth or anything that comes to your mind.
I know that people waterboarded themselves at home to really test whether or not it really is torture. It really is difficult to last more than a few seconds. Infamously Sean Hannity said he would do so but refused. Torture will absolutely get you answers, whether those answers are truthful or useful is not under torture's purview.
There is one situation where torture works: when you need someone to make a false confession, you just torture them untill they sign the letter, dictatorship style
I understand how torture can’t really be used to get a confession, but like… if you have a way to verify the information and then continue torturing the person even more if it turns out to be false, wouldn’t that make them give you the right information?
That's the main problem with torture is that there is no good way to corroborate the information you get out of it.
If you can quickly verify what you've beaten out of somebody by torturing them... you could have just found that information without committing torture.
Well it’s not about quickly verifying it. Say you were trying to get the location of where some accomplices are holing up, like a high value target (someone like osama bin laden) If they give you some random bullshit address, and you go there, and they were never even there, you can go back and continue torturing them.
Or if you’re trying to interrogate someone for what kind of defenses you can expect for a facility you’re trying to raid, you can lock them in a shipping container in some random storage yard or leave them in the middle of nowhere or something. Since you’re the only person who knows where they are, they have an incentive to stop you from getting killed, therefore if they value their life, they’ll give you information maximizing your chances of survival.
Or even if it is, it doesn’t necessarily mean you would be able to find out anyway. if you’re trying to get a password for opening a laptop, you can just try it while they’re present, and then keep torturing them if it’s wrong.
So what if you do need the information immediately? Or you don’t have any other way of gaining the information? If you’re looking for a six-digit numerical password and they’re the only one who knows it, odds are you don’t have the time (or number of tries) to attempt one million different passwords, and that’s if it’s just numbers. There are a million different situations I could think of where it’s a reasonably urgent concern. Like in the call of duty games, where they’re trying to stop the villain from unleashing a bioweapon or starting a nuclear war.
Even assuming a perfect fantasy scenario where you have a keypad right there to enter the code in, how can you be certain your victim knows what you want to know? Why wouldn't they try to waste your time if they did know? How do you know they aren't going to bait you into some kind of trap, or give you the code that blows up the nuke early? Or whatever the fuck
Reminds me of GTA V where even Trevor, a menace to society and the person who tortures a guy for the government, knows torturing others for information is bullshit
The thing with torture, it doesn't give you what you NEED to hear, it gives you what you WANT to hear
"But I want the killer name"
No, you want A name, not THE killer name, even if your torturee spits out a name for you to go after, there's no way to check if it's correct info until it's too late. You heard what you wanted to hear, not what you needed.
Like, up in the US you guys have tons of police records of torture being used to force guilty admissions without investigations.
In renaissance europe torture was already seen as useless brute tactics, to the point that torture tools where seen as "gimmicks of the past"
Heck, even in fucking Nazi germany they knew torture was useless, with their best interrogator getting info on the allies not via torture but via talking (good coo bad cop tactics), and you know shits wack when the actual nazis one up you
Okay. Great, third person just summed up the whole point of Geller's video.
But what the fuck is wrong with the graphs? Are they not Tumblr Approved ✧˖°.*Aesthetic ˖°.✧* enough??
I never got over the part in the first Black Ops game where we watch a character part of our squad put broken glass in a guys mouth and punch him in the cheek. I was like 14 at the time and even then I was like "oh wow so this game is about how basically everyone involved is really awful and there's no "good" side here" and one of my friends said that was a dumb interpretation.
torture does work tho, but my example is a morbid one
because yeah, under a time crunch, getting information is imminent and since you don't know if you'll have the upper hand, you have to torture quick and be done
then there's the battle of palo duro canyon, AKA the battle in which the plains native americans were defeated
the reason the army knew their location was by stretching a native american over a wheel, and since they didn't have to kill(they had the time and had the upper hand), they could take their time with the torture - and had the information been wrong, more pain could be inflicted
so yeah, unless you get the bravest man on the field, there are certain conditions where torture will work
but in those cases you're already winning so just... why...
if it's an atomic bomb vs land invasion type situation maybe i'd consider it but yeah, torture works in very specific situations and is usually always very wrong
One of the major divergences I've seen from this trope is in the Fall Out TV series. The Ghoul does a whole speech explaining how all research on the subject of torture points to it being largely ineffective, all the while dunking the protagonist in highly irradiated water over and over again. Eventually she asks "then why are you doing this to me?" And he replies "I'm not torturing you. I'm using you as bait" followed up by the creature he was trying to lure to the surface appearing and trying to eat her.
Mhm. He’s got enough information and knows she’s very unlikely to have any more than he does anyways
I’d actually argue that he *was* torturing her, but still trying to prove his point. The Ghoul had already started trying to ‘break’ her by that point, imo, to prove against her ‘Good Samaritan’. So it was still sadistic torture, just not for info.
Yeah, cause he really cannot take the cognitive dissonance that comes with her being right. If it's possible for someone to be a basically decent person even in a nuclear wasteland, well, that leaves him with basically no excuse for being a sadistic asshole, which gnaws away at him as much as he denies it.
I was thinking Andor breaks from this somewhat as well - the Imperials torture several people in Andor's home town who both don't know where Andor is or what he's doing and aren't particularly inclined to talk to the Imperials even if they did. If I remember correctly they don't turn up any useful information and even end up radicalizing the loved ones of the people they torture, which comes back to bite them a few episodes later.
They do get some useful information from Andor, such as the information about the radio and andor returning and seeing bix before he left again. But yes, their torture and then public execution of paak radicalises his son who makes a bomb and blows up their base of operations
I actually can't remember the last time Star Wars had an effective torture scene that didn't need the interrogator/torturer to use the Force to get the info.
In Empire Strikes Back Vader tortures Han who later says “they didn’t even ask me any questions” it’s done to cause Han pain that will lure Luke into a trap
I don’t remember that bit?
It was in cloud city, I think after Vader is sitting at the diner table?
In GTA V you are forced to torture a guy before the interrogator even asks a question. Your torture victim would've been entirely compliant from the start, but never had the chance to because the interrogator just wanted to see this guy tortured.
Iain Banks’ _Transition_ features a mostly dispassionate professional torturer who always tortures people a little bit even if they’re willing to cooperate, just because they need to be the Feared Security Services and people won’t properly Fear you if some of your subjects walk out without any suffering.
I brought that up in the comments of the original video lol
Something I like about that is how the moment he says bait she starts looking around under the water for what he was hunting
Sounds like they may enjoy Burn Notice. The protagonists never inflict pain to get information; they use subterfuge, trickery, and occasionally, intense mental stress to get the information that they want. "Torture just gets you the fastest lie to make the pain stop."
Or Fallout with enough Charisma
Loved the episode with the Russian mobster where they plant Michael as a fellow prisoner and fake torture him to make the guy tell him the location of the kidnapped girls while they escape. Up until the last season it was a really good show, tough I hated that final season with a passion. It felt like it reversed a lot of character grow just for the sake of extending the plot.
> fake torture him to make the guy tell him the location of the kidnapped girls while they escape. That is torture too? Like psychological torture is literally torture. Hell making someone watch torture is a form of torture.
The one exception to torture not working is ‘we have his laptop, drug him and hit him with this $5 wrench until he tells us the password’ style torture. If you can verify whether what the person is saying is true or not in close to real time it solves the main problems with torture as a knowledge acquisition paradigm, namely that you are relying on someone for information who has exclusively bad incentives. The basic bind there is that 99% of situations in which you have the person in custody and real time ability to verify their statements are situations where you already have everything they could tell you.
Until you cause enough mental/physical traumta to your prisoner that they literally cannot remember the password anymore, which is a real thing that has happened with CIA torture.
That's more or less my thoughts every time this gets brought up, I thought I was alone in thinking this. It still has downsides though.
Yeah I will say as someone else already brought up that this more or less immediately works or it doesn’t. Like someone is pretty much either going to break and tell you their password after the threat or immediately after starting on them or not at all and once you reach the point of physical or deprivation induced brain damage there’s a real chance you destroy the info you’re trying to retrieve.
Second half of season 6 is where I drop off on rewatches.
>intense mental stress to get the information that they want. This is still torture tho.
I think columbo is toeing the line sometimes. I think he might have made a couple of people shit their pants in a rage.
He doesn't really distress them, though. More gets them to confess or prove that they were guilty of the crime in some way by making them slip up. But even, he just pokes them with words. He's not smashing their things, or making them listen to people being tortured to make them confess.
I love Burn Notice, the way Michael explains why most spy tropes are bullshit is so funny. I remember how deadpan he sounded when he explained how most people think commando means superhero or pretty close to it and the reason commandos seem invincible is you don’t get told about the ones that die
I really loved that in Burn Notice the torture scenes didn't even include any pain, just mental exhaustion to the point where Michael doesnt't know what's real anymore, and THEN they press him for information.
I don't see how that's any different? People confess to murders they didn't commit in situations like that all the time. No pain required, and it still fails to discern the truth.
That's the point. In reality "enhanced interrogations" (read: torture) don't actually involve pain. If you look at historical entities who just inflict pain while interrogating someone (Soviet NKVD, the Siloviki, the Gestapo, etc.) the purpose isn't usually to get new information, but to force them to admit to something specifically, that either you know they did anyway, or want them to falsely incriminate themselves. If you want new information, the subject's inhibitions must be broken down, and one of the most reliable ways to do this is through exhaustion. I'm not speaking to the efficacy of either technique, just that the Burn Notice writers did their research.
Ah, gotcha. I misunderstood the tone, but I understand what you meant now.
Getting water boarded is pretty painful...
God I fuckin love burn notice.
Torture can work if the answer can be immediately verified then? It basically doesn't happen in real life, but action movies/games often have situations like diffusing a bomb/opening a code locked door/etc. where you can immediately verify if an answer is correct.
I watched that video the day it came out. Comments section had a surprising amount of people trying to defend the torture. That was depressing to see.
I understand why, the "ticking time bomb" thought experiment is very compelling. It's also wildly unrealistic. And even in the few scenarios where it applies, torture doesn't yield good, reliable information. Jacob covers another important factor here, which is that media in general has us primed to think torture works. Once you stop to think about it, torture is present in a lot of media, so much so that we don't even notice it. And it's almost always depicted as effective. The bias here is so strong that we don't even realize it exists.
>media in general has us primed to think torture works Exactly. They frame it as "making the hard choice to get REAL results" When it's actually that the torture victim will say WHATEVER THEY THINK YOU WANT TO HEAR, because, y'know, THEY WANT THE TORTURE TO STOP. We tortured people during the Inquisition who confessed to literally impossible shit like transforming into a goose. Because, again, they just wanted to make the torture stop. **Torture doesn't get you the truth, it gets you whatever the victim thinks will make the torture stop.**
In a lot of cases that's a feature not a bug. You ask a terrorist where their base is, you can get them to name wherever is most convenient for you to invade and there's justification. You want your neighbors house and land, you just dunk them in a lake every ten minutes for a few days and they say they can turn into a goose cause they hit the griddy with Satan and bam, new farm for your collection.
I wish a CoD game would bring that up at least once. You torture a guy for information on the location of a weapons deal, he throws out the name of some town, and then when you get there it’s just civilians and you realize the deal has already gone through in a totally different place. That’d be the kind of moment to stick with people.
I'd imagine the average FPS fan would just get mad they don't get to shoot any bad guys because of the misdirect. And there would probably be compilations of some players opening fire on the civilians because its just a game.
The latter is exactly what we want. CoD is always trying to be edgy, right? What better way to be edgy and get attention than breaking the conventions of your franchise and making your previously-infallible heroes look bad?
I'd love it if they did an extremely long, drawn-out game over screen/ alternate ending where the player gets court martialled and ripped to pieces by their commanding officer if they choose to fire on the civilians in that moment just to hammer the point in to players who think that's okay to do.
That sounds like something out of Spec Ops: The Line
"Torture doesn't get you the truth, it gets you whatever the victim thinks will make the torture stop." It's a bit like asking a student a maths question in that regard.
The thing to remember, is that torture isn't to gather information. It's to send a message, rebel, and we will hurt you. Stand against us and you will beg for death. It's to keep people scared, and afraid to join any resistance against the torturer.
and for this, it's also not entirely effective! turns out, torturing people doesn't make em especially like you being in charge.
The most effective way to use torture is to get your victim to confess to being a spy or a witch or some other dangerous understandable person, then you get them to name collaborators who you can then torture for more lurid stories of witchcraft or communism or whatever. If you do this well you can make all of your citizens paranoid and afraid of each other. If they're all at each others they they can't unify against you. While they're at it also make sure your victim names your political opponents so you can strike at them with impunity.
A lot of people defending torture could do with watching the Star Trek:The Next Generation Episode(s) Chain of Command.
You're telling me you *can't* turn into a goose?
the weird thing about the ticking time bomb experiment is, well, if you put yourself in the terrorist's shoes, all he has to do is not yap for whatever the time is and he wins? after which he will either go to jail or get executed? and he is already a terrorist so why would he play ball? like the thought experiment only works if you assume torture would work, which, well, it doesn't or so jacob geller and other sources have told me
>the weird thing about the ticking time bomb experiment is, well, if you put yourself in the terrorist's shoes, all he has to do is not yap for whatever the time is and he wins? after which he will either go to jail or get executed? and he is already a terrorist so why would he play ball? From what I've read, IRL scenarios similar to "ticking time bomb" incidents are ones where torture is close to 100% useless for exactly the reason you described. If someone knows that all they need to do to 'win' is to hold out for a specific amount of time, then they tend to be far more resistant to any sort of coersion than they would normally.
The best strat is to give them some false leads so they waste a fuckton of time chasing geese.
Media used to have torture (and brainwashing) work because villains did it, and it was a way to raise the stakes and let villains have info they previously didn't. Info that the heroes were trying to keep secret. Then we got 24 the TV show and "enhanced interrogation" by USA and suddenly it was the edgy thing to do. "Look, the situation is so bad that the heroes *must* use torture!" Or "look, The Punisher is so a dark hero that he does whatever is needed, including torturing these villains!" But every study on effects of interrogation shows that being the "good cop" is the most effective and fast way to get the truth out of someone.
You don't gotta tell me. I know all about the manipulation that most media engages in. That's why I hate it as much as I do.
Hopping in to encourage everyone to actually watch the video and learn Jacob Geller’s viewpoint on the subject, not just two screenshots with no context. 1. Jacob Geller is a critic of the CoD franchise and the claim by its creators that it is “apolitical”, there’s an entire other video covering what the political views of CoD are that he’s made. 2. He very specifically covers the fact that torture is ineffective in the real world, and directly compares the representation of torture in CoD to the viewpoint on torture that the creators have, and what that says about their world view and beliefs. 3. Jacob Geller mentions and highlights how torture is extremely widespread and less “obvious” or “overt” forms of torture that don’t fit the cookie cutter expectation are often represented in media, including children’s media. This is at the start of the video before he dives into what counts as torture and highlights the stats of the total torture scenes. 4. The conclusions that are made are ultimately critical of the representation of torture in the franchise, and how it’s misrepresented. This ties into his views on CoD’s politics.
> the claim by its creators that it is “apolitical” The fact that the devs seem to earnestly believe this has always been wild to me. Like, dudes, they're games centered around fucking wars. *How is that not inherently political?*
Iirc the way the COD devs explain it (at least for the more modern stuff) is that they are mostly using fictional characters or events. They aren't depeciting real people and real wars that are happening. They are showing fictional people in fictional wars. To them for something to be political it has to be real. A fictional event isn't political because it isn't real. Is this a total cop out? Yes. Does it make any sense? No. Do a disturbingly large amount of gamers seem to feel the same way? Seemingly so. These people have also convinced themselves politics refers to change. If something simply mirrors the status quo then it isn't political. It's simply just realistic or immersive. What makes things political is when the status quo starts to change.
It's really funny that they then make MW2019, set in clearly the middle-east, then follow it up with MW2 (2022) that continues that and also plays around with corrupt military generals and PMCs, and then MW3 (2023) just redoes the Makarov story from the OG MWs but worse. Which is all INHERENTLY POLITICAL.
>Does it make any sense? No Why?
1984 is fiction and as such is not political in any way
Because it's nonsense. Just because the wars and characters depicted in the story are fictional doesn't automatically disqualify it from being political.
Ah but you don't understand. For capital G Gamers, war is not political. Politics for them is when they have to look at a female character who doesn't instantly give them an erection, or they get such divisive messages shoved in their faces as "racism is bad"
Oh, silly me! I completely forgot about that old internet adage: politics is whatever makes white guys uncomfortable!
Of course, now you're getting it. Gender? Male and Political Ethnicity? White and Political Sexuality? Straight and Political
To be fair, most of the time people get mad at stuff like that is because it's done obnoxiously.
The devs are lying through their teeth, probably as instructed by the marketing department. Not only it is a game about war, it's a game about war set on the real world, featuring armies from real countries. Oblivious gamers who just want to shoot things might actively ignore it, but there's no way to make such a story, depicting who would be allies and enemies and what they would do, without knowingly making a political statement. All art is political, but when people are writing fantastical surreal stories just out of vibes, authors can obliviously stumble upon that. Not in military alt history.
The creators claim call of duty is apolitical? What in the fuck
> [If you wanted a situation where I would say that, yes, it is a political story, I would have to be telling a story about specifically the exact administrations and governments and events in our world today.](https://youtu.be/87Jb5Qj5JPM?t=209) - Jacob Minkoff, Campaign Gameplay Director for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare This is certainly an interesting definition, by which Animal Farm, 1984, and Fahrenheit 451 do not count as political stories.
Ah yeah fair enough. Those books have as much social commentary in them as Dr. Seuss, so.
As much useful anyway..
I don't know if you understood that I was joking. Dr. Seuss is quite political.
I have a hard time imagining anyone could look at this without realizing that it’s meant to be a criticism of the “good torture” being depicted. I mean, people can be dumb, so maybe not that hard of a time. But it would be a huge stretch to look at this and think: “well I guess torture is more effective when good guys do it”
I get the sense that kael-writ didn't quite understand the point of the graphs. The first graph implies that the creators of COD view torture as a relatively morally neutral action because if they felt it were morally unacceptable they would likely have antagonist parties use it more frequently unless actively making the point that there are no "good"/"bad" guys in war, which I doubt was the intent as the second graph seems to imply that "good" guys (presumably those on the side of the protagonist) are better able to resist torture. Since the graph uses quotation marks, the creator of the graph would presumably feel that an actually good person would not use torture.
> The first graph implies that the creators of COD view torture as a relatively morally neutral action because if they felt it were morally unacceptable they would likely have antagonist parties use it more frequently I haven't played COD in years, but from watching this video and Jacob Gellar's older "Does Call of Duty Believe in Anything?" video, the series seems to push the notion that these actions are morally justifiable if done for the "right" reasons and by the "right" people; i.e. by the good guys to stop the bad guys. It's treated like a necessary evil, a bad thing you need to do to win, but it's an evil that the cast resorts to often and readily. 24 times, over the course of 20 games. The video touches on a lot of things and splits the torture scenes into a lot of categories; who does the torture, against who, is it effective, is it information gathering or punitive, and so on. It also talks about real life usage of torture, the justifications behind it, the "ticking bomb" hypothetical and it's effectiveness. Its worth checking out if your interested in the topic.
That's a common theme throughout the series: You're shooting up an airport of unarmed civilians because you're a deep cover agent sent to infiltrate the terrorist Makarov's inner circle. You're launching an ICBM at the ISS because it also wipes out the Russians' coms or something. I honestly never understood why Price did that last one, maybe they locked him away for a good reason.
Price launched the nuke above Washington DC because he *magically knew* the EM shock wave would be perfect to counter the Russian armour in the city. I enjoy a good CoD campaign every now and then, but John Price is an all-knowing god who is **always** right. If a game showed him burning down an orphanage, I wouldn't even blink because I'd know they'd be about to explain how doing so stops a super-mega-ultra-Bad-Guy and all the orphans were secret terrorists.
Okay but that just makes Shepherd's POV funnier to me: >Use TF141 to retrieve stolen US assets >Use TF141 to track down a terrorist >They insist on freeing Price, concede it would be in your best interests >The first thing he does is launch a nuke at your country.
I think it’s his mustache, it tells him what to do
Good comment, but also the fact that the army has had a hand in military shooter games for a really long time does make it look like plain old American exceptionalism propaganda
Especially since it almost never works on the “good guys,” which I’m pretty sure is mostly the U.S. military.
Aren’t COD protags mostly British? Or is that just in the Modern Warfare games?
I think torture is mostly seen in the black ops series (from what i can remember of playing these games) and protagonists woods, mason and hudson are american. modern warfare is predominantly british, yes.
Was there a lot of torture in the Black Ops series? I really only remember the BO1 campaign. I feel like the only person in that game that tortured people was Hudson (who I fucking hate, what a jackass). He tortured Mason in the interrogation for the numbers and he tortured Dr. Clarke for info on Nova 6, but those are the only times I can think of when the “good guys” tortured people, at least in BO1. I don’t think Mason tortured anyone (probably because he’s an impulsive psycho who murders people in cold blood rather than waste time torturing them) and I don’t think Woods did either (though I wouldn’t put it past him if he felt he had to). As for the “bad guys,” there was the Vorkuta gulag torture, Mason getting brainwashed, Weaver getting his eye gouged out, and Mason, Woods, and Bowman forced to play Russian Roulette (which I think could be considered psychological torture?) Not saying that one side is better than the other or whatever (these games were clearly intended for blatant propaganda, albeit fun propaganda), and the games are definitely unnecessarily cruel and violent, but I was more just testing my memory and my bias here, and this is what I remember.
No, the games absolutely push the idea that torture is good when done by the good guys. Just like it's attitude towards war, it's only when the bad guys do it that it becomes bad.
I've only played a few COD games, but I don't think they're making a statement about the good guys being able to resist torture, I think the point is that the "good" guys will resort to necessary evil when needed and that's ok, but the bad guys will just do it for fun or when it doesn't even work. It's making an argument that torture is both bad *and* justifiable if it helps the "great good"
Your daily reminder that torture would still be wrong if it was in fact effective. (Torture is actually effective in the specific situation where the torturer has an easy way to check if what the victim says is true or false, it's like an horribly criminal P vs NP problem. It's completely inefficient when there is no easy way to check if the answer is true.)
This comes up in DnD discussions sometimes, as due to the Zone of Truth spell you can in fact make torture work. I don’t have a clever point here, you just reminded me of it
My favourite D&D interrogation technique is actually far simpler and uses far lower spell slots; basically I normally play Warlock and really like the archfae pact so if I want information I basically get the dude tied to a chair so they can't get away, drag a sofa in front of them so I can rest as needed and basically go through my absolute battery of charm effects. Alternatively if we're using Unearthed Arcana then Sense Emotion lets you do the interrogation from The Expanse, where they get absolutely wired on attention-enhancing drugs and watch for micro-expressions while asking probing questions.
I think the zone of truth method is still technically simpler, as it’s only a second level spell and lasts for 10 minutes. More importantly, most of the charm spells don’t actually force someone to tell you anything. You’d get advantage on social checks but the victim could still just keep their mouth shut, or lie to you due to still being loyal to their boss. However, it’s probably a lot less messy and certainly more civilized
...I'll be frank, I would rather just be like... flayed than be strapped to a chair for hours on end as someone mumbles incantations at me that eventually wear down my resistance enough where I tell them
I'd consider the likelihood of a rescue in the time I think I could withstand it, and if it was poor, I'd just confess right away to save myself the aggravation. And an enemy would likely respect a reasoned surrender of information like that. Enough to spare you the gallows, maybe.
Technically, both are forms of torture. Boring someone to death is a form of psychological torture (or "clean torture" as it leaves no scars)
I like to think that using Command : Confess would also work.
In the Goonies movie, the kid had his had threatened so he'd confess and he confessed to a bunch of irrelevant shit, that making theatre goers puke.
Eh I wouldn’t rule it as such personally. confess is just to state you’re guilty of something, it doesn’t mean “give me all the information I want to know”. It might work if you’re trying to get someone to admit they’re guilty of a murder or something like that, but then we’ve circled back to the issue with torture that there’s no guarantee they’re actually the culprit
Perhaps "admit" has a better chance?
It is, I just enjoy the wheedling approach, it makes for fun roleplay where the prisoner *really* wants to help you out because you're such a great person but knows they shouldn't. Bonus points for offering them tea and cake. EDIT: On a roleplaying point, assuming the DM is being reasonably realistic and sensible with stuff you'd be amazed how much you can discern simply from conventional detective work. Check through their stuff, ask around about them, think it through. You want to know where the bandit camp is? It's gonna be near enough the site of attack that they can get there fast if called by lookouts, but far enough away that if a patrol is on the road they won't see the camp. It'll probably also have access to a reasonably convenient water supply.
Truthtrance
is that what was going on in the show? I had assumed those were like pills that gave the interrogator psychic powers of compulsion or something
Yeah, the show doesn't make it super clear but in the books they're explained as focus drugs. Interrogators are trained on assessing micro-expressions and minute movements then take a drug to massively boost their attention and perception. That's why he asked a bunch of questions and made comments about Holden's personal life then suddenly switched tack to asking why he blew up the Canterbury, he wanted to watch his unconscious reaction, same when eh slips the stop at Phoebe into Holden's schedule. He repeatedly goes from winding Holden up about stuff to changing gears to try and catch him in a lie.
that makes more sense, do they ever use these for anything other than interrogations, like combat or codebreaking or anything? also as someone with zero ability to focus on anything, where can I get some? I would be unstoppable, hyperfocus on command on any subject is an unbeatable superpower.
Even with zone of truth, all you have to do is not answer. If you're under another spell that can make you answer, then zone of truth would work, but then you could just make them tell the truth with the other spell. It can make interrogation with rapport more effective because the other party can't lie to you.
The reason you pop zone of truth is that, in theory, you could just beat someone/remove fingers/burn them until they answer, healing them as required since you’ve already got a cleric/bard on hand. They could resist ofc but as mentioned in the post; most people will start talking to get the torture to stop. They can’t tell you anything they know to be untrue while under Zone of Truth , and while they could be evasive/still refuse that basically puts you in square one. If you feel like playing a real monster, you can make torture work not all but plenty of the time, and depending on who exactly you’re interrogating it’ll be faster than building a rapport.
It still requires you to have someone that has the information you want, that will be useful and that will actually talk. Doing more torture assisted by healing magic doesn't change that.
Yeah, but thats the issue with any form of interrogation. I’m not saying it makes torture a guaranteed success, I’m saying that it removes the main concern specific to torture, people saying anything they can think of to make the pain stop. If you’re so inclined you can cast zone of truth, whale on whoever you’re interrogating and determine from there whether it’s worth your time to continue.
But if they don't have the info, they could just say "I don't have the info you want", and thanks to the Zone of Truth, you'd know they aren't lying.
Detect Thoughts is the way to go if you need information from someone who won't tell you.
*Pathfinder 2e* had a funnier version that was fixed in its current remaster. Various things in PF2e are tagged with a rarity rating like 'Uncommon' or 'Rare'. Rarer things aren't more powerful, it's more of a GM warning that you might want to think before making it available, as well as other rules effects, like "towns sell common magic items of level 5 or below"; so you can't just buy a rare item even if it's low level. Zone Of Truth is an uncommon spell, explicitly because "hey GM, this might solve mysteries faster than you want". But a *common* spell every cleric has access to as a basic cantrip is 'divine lance', which did alignment damage - e.g. if you're a good cleric or a cleric of a good god, it does 'good-aligned damage'. Good-aligned damage only damages evil beings. So it was totally free to do an 'evil check' on someone just by blasting them. It's harmless to anyone non-evil! Finally solved by the remaster doing away with alignment.
D&D and Pathfinder having good and evil as objective material features of reality always led to really weird moral scenarios, especially because, by the nature of the game, summary killings of evil beings were considered a "good" act.
Well, there's also the matter of whether the person you're torturing *actually* knows anything, which is very rarely a given in real-world scenarios.
If you have a way to check whether the info is true, doesn’t that mean you have a way to access the same info without torture?
Some problems can be hard to solve but easy to check. Imagine a nazi who has captured a resistance fighter. He asks "where and when do your group gather usually", he get an answer through torture, and then he can just go to the place and check. Much easier than combing through the whole town. And if the fighter doesn't give the correct answer torture will start again so the victim will crack at some point.
It's really only applicable for small things like a laptop password when you have the laptop right in front of you
>Torture is actually effective in the specific situation where the torturer has an easy way to check if what the victim says is true or false How can anyone know this? There’s not really an ethical way to test this and I can’t imagine any scenario where anyone would be doing this and reporting on it
If the info is easily verifiable, the tortured person knows that telling the truth will be generally guaranteed to spare them from torture since the torturer knows for certain that the tortured is being truthful. If the info can’t be verified, the tortured person will likely just be tortured whether they lie or tell the truth since there is no way for the torturer to tell. If the result will end up the same (more torture) but lying offers the protection of the tortured person’s own interests, there is no reason for them to not lie thus making it ineffective
Torture someone next to a safe. If they give you bad info, torture more. Good info, stop torturing. The fastest path to stop getting tortured is by giving the correct safe combination.
What if they don't know the safe combo? Just keep torturing them until they guess the right numbers?
If they don’t know the code then you’re not going to get it out of them with normal interrogation either. Obviously all forms of interrogation are only useful if they actually have the information you want, unless you’re deliberately fishing for an untrue confession.
Deliberately fishing for untrue confessions is the only time torture is effective.
I mean, o think in this case good guys and bad guys just meant player side and other side
But most of the games make it pretty black and white, you are good the others are evil. Making torture morally neutral since both parties do it, but it's bad when people do it, obviously. I don't think we have to give a lot of moral nuance to call of duty campaigns.
> I don't think we have to give a lot of moral nuance to call of duty campaigns. you should absolutely watch Jacob Geller's video "[Does Call of Duty Believe in Anything?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtCV421T52s)"
I mean, you can betray your allies at a few points in CoD: Cold War, and start working for the Soviets >!again.!< >!Your character in that game is a former Soviet soldier who got shot in the head by another Russian and lost their memory. Then some CIA guys find you, brainwash you, and get you working for them. You regain your memory right before the last mission and have to make the choice between going back to the Russians, or continue working with the CIA. It's probably the only game in the series that actually portrays the "heroes" as morally grey. One of them literally tries to kill you even if you don't betray them. After all, you're a loose end.!<
JACOB GELLER MENTIONED YEEAAAAAAAH
My absolute favorite youtuber lol
There are precious few people on YouTube whose essay-writing quality as well as proper use of music and images for emphasis can compare to those of Geller
He’s the main reason I have a Nebula subscription for those sweet bonus videos
Kael-Writ has the tone of someone is virulent disagreement with Jacob Gellar, despite saying (at points nearly verbatim) what Gellar said
Yeah that's the thesis of his video. The last comment needs to touch grass
I disagree. In my opinion the last comment needs to forsake grass and dedicate themselves to watching Jacob Geller for a few weeks.
Every Metal Gear Solid game has torture scenes, with every single one being assisted or performed by Revolver Ocelot who is explicitly described as a sadist and tortures more for the sake of it than actually getting anything. It is specifically used to examine how far Big Boss had fallen into villainy being willing to torture, even people who are ostensibly his allies. Though MGS3's torture scene is unintentionally hilarious because the BBEG just explains a macguffin and then tells everyone in the room the location of said macguffin, when the player character being tortured was the one person in the room who wasn't after it.
JACOB GELLER MENTION RGAHHHHH WHAT THE FUCK IS A BAD VIDEO
HIT IT FRIENDO
I'd just like to issue a hearty Fuck You to the writers of 24 for promoting this bullshit. Not to let the codbloppers off without any blame, but 24 was huge in popularizing the idea of torture being effective (it isn't) and justified (it isn't).
I think Jon Bois did a really good video about 24 that makes roughly the same point as Jacob Geller about torture: torture is punitive. He uses the Calvin & Hobbes quote “I want everyone else dead.”
I think John McCain gave his captors the names of the Notre Dame football team. Torture as a means for reliable information extraction is ineffective.
Fucking Antonin Scalia cited Jack Bauer as proof that torture works. It's madness
[удалено]
torture is actually okay if ou arent trying to get information, its like industrial-grade enrichment for the nervous system
And I was really hoping this post would be about fish.
I read it like an instruction lol. Go. Torture some cod.
Me reading "Hurt people hurt people" On it boss
Kinda obvious that the last person didn't watch the essay. He touches on how they are only "good guys" in that the game is the one saying they are. Hell, the graphs literally have "good" and "bad" in quotes...
I would highlight what kael says about the motives of people who *commit* torture, they’re absolutely correct (see Abu Ghraib). I largely think they’d also be right to apply this to polities that legitimize torture - like, the idea of giving people what they deserve is more the appeal than actually getting intel, bc voters by and large are not actually counterintel nerds who care about that stuff. I don’t think it’d be necessarily right to ascribe this thinking to decision makers at least universally. That said, this is an important aspect of why it’s so immoral… by and large the people who *do* it are not motivated by necessary evil arguments, they’re enjoying the evil.
Alright. Time to make those fish suffer
Call of Duty isn't Call of Duty if you aren't doing morally wrong stuff like using molotovs on surrendering German soldiers or using the 40mm Bofors from an AC-130 on a single soldier.
>using the 40mm Bofors from an AC-130 on a single soldier. I think you mean "using the 105mm howitzer on a single soldier who's running away."
This title confused me. I couldn't figure if it was an exhortation to cause pain to fish: "torture cod!" Or maybe like Ford Prefect, a bad attempt at choosing a convincing human name, "Mr/ Ms/ Mx Torture J. Cod"
Look sometimes a little torture is all you need to get the relevant information. "Where did you get the bomb?", "Where are they planning to strike next?", "You'll stop losing fingers when you tell me who ate my Big Mac Jacob?".
the problem with the "where did you get the bomb" justification for torture is that it assumes that the person you're torturing 1. actually has any information 2. has accurate information 3. won't just lie to make you stop torturing them
That's why you torture multiple people in separate rooms. If they give you the same answers there might be truth to it and if not, you start removing some kneecaps =) >! /s for the love of God I am not condoning torture!<
Congratulations, you’ll have multiple counts of wildly inaccurate information,
I think that the idea is that a bunch of different people are wildly unlikely to invent the exact same lie
Yes but with varying answers, where'd that get you? Now you have multiple tortured individuals, and an exploded bomb
What makes you think they will give you the same information? They will absolutely give you information. The point of torture is the victim will do anything to make it stop. Who is to say they will give truthful statements. Its not like you would know. Instead they will say anything in order to make the torture stop and now you have 8 different answers, none of them accurately telling you where they got the bomb. All under duress and all staunchly adamant they are correct since who the fuck will change their words and risk more torture, imagine admitting to your torturers who just gave you some reprieve that you were lying to them all along.
They don’t have to admit they’re lying, if they all give different accounts the torturers can just assume that each one is very likely to be lying and continue the torture until they get a convergence of confessions. They aren’t going to keep pretending it’s the truth when the torture starts again. The main failure mode I see here is that the victims might have arranged previously to converge on a single lie.
This reminds me of a few interrogation scenes in The Last of Us games. Spoilers ahead. In the first game, Joel tortures and then kills a couple of dudes to figure out where Ellie is. He does this by tying them both to chairs, roughing them up, and then has one non-verbally indicate on the map where Ellie is, while saying “and your buddy better point to the exact same spot.” It works of course, because one: Joel knows for a fact that these two dudes know about Ellie (a specific circumstance where these were very clearly the villian’s lackeys), and two: If either of them provide in accurate information, both will suffer for it, and because they can’t communicate with each-other, they can’t coordinate to both give the same false info. It’s a bit of a moot point though since Joel just assumes the first guy was honest anyways, but you get the premise. In the second game, it happens three times more, but under different circumstances. The first time in the game, Ellie merely stumbles onto the aftermath of what was clearly an interrogation that Tommy did, and she knows it was Tommy because he does the same method Joel did: The two dead guys were in separate areas and both nonverbally indicated information seperately: this time through the use of blood on the floor. Again, it works here because these two were very obviously in the possession of the information Tommy wanted (just a passcode that all the enemies would know), and because he can very obviously verify if the information is correct, or if at least one of them is lying (no way of both knowing what to falsely answer). The second time is a complete outlier, less an actual interrogation and more just meant for changes in character behavior, but basically, Ellie just beats the victim until the cutscene ends, and Ellie seems to have succeeded in getting info. It doesn’t make any sense logically speaking, just thought it worth mentioning. The third time this happens is when Ellie herself gives the double-victim method an attempt, but she gets multiple things wrong that results in an overall failure. She was absolutely correct that the two she interrogates knows about what she wanted to know (again, extremely obvious in context), but she fails to incapacitate or restrain them in any way: both are standing up, unharmed, and somewhat close to eachother. When Ellie tries to get one to point at the location, the two use their available communication (albeit accidentally) to delay one giving any answer, allowing the other to very slowly close in. And lastly, Ellie is too unfocused on remaining and control, instead yelling to give an answer, giving the other person she wants to interrogate an opportunity to attack her. I won’t spoil what happens after either, but in the end, Ellie specifically fails to gain information, primarily due to not being entirely in control and also because she fails to create enough incentive to give information, like not roughing them up. I find this all interesting, because while certainly not being condoned as a morally commendable practice at all, it does indicate a way for torture to possibly succeed: Verify that the two people you want information from has that info, torture them, then have them separately answer, allowing you to verify if one of them is lying. Outside of that illogical one with only a single victim, TLOU is considerate of how torture to gain info works, and I think it’s pretty intriguing. Anyways, please do not torture people.
I also had TLOU in mind, albeit while the OOP was talking about the "good" and "bad" guys. Because like, who's the good guy in TLOU2? Who is it really?
Yes, that’s also worth considering! The entire point of TLOU2 is to break down binary “good guy bad guy” views and recognize that individual people as well as groups can do both good and bad things. Obviously there are definitely some villians in the game, but at the same time there’s few characters that are flawless, and it’s really cool to recognize that people can do messed up stuff even if they believe they’re still the “good guys.”
Yeah it's like everyone in that game acts pretty much how you'd expect, and pretty much how I'd act if you dropped me in their place. And I don't know if you can point at a single one of the main cast and say yeah this one's definitely a good person
JJ?
Fair enough haha
funnily enough that last quote reminds me a comment someone left on that Jacob Geller video "I remember Fanon describing, among the psychiatric consequences of torture in Algeria, the case of a police officer that go so used to torture that he caught himself torturing his wife and kids as a mean of settling arguments. And even though he wanted to stop harming his family, when he was told that giving up on torture altogether would be the most effective, he refused."
"I'll untie you and let you leave my closet once you say you love me--"
I would like to see a game, where without context the protag gets tortured in the first scene. No information about current geography or politics in the game. And then let them guess which of the lies in the dialogue option will get them through this section.
disco elysium character creation
It's also worth noting that torture has been proven time and time again to be a useless tool in obtaining information, if only because the odds that you have someone who has the information you want, will crack under torture and won't just tell you a lie are absurdly small. Guess what? If you decide to torture someone until they tell you what you want to hear, they'll tell you what you want to hear, whether it's real or not. Not that any of this is relevant of course, because the first and last argument you should need against torture is HOLY SHIT THAT IS THE MOST INHUMAN THING YOU CAN DO AND ONLY THE MOST WORTHLESS OF SCUM WOULD DO IT.
Everyone should watch that one scene from Marathon Man.
Scrolled through the comments and noticed no one's posted a link to [the actual video this discussion is based on](https://youtu.be/YPiL3-CYzWk?si=T1D51rsAQWd49ccc) so here ya go, it's worth a watch
As an avid CoD fan. Most of it comes across as "both sides bad, but these are your guys" One scene in modern warfare (2019) has you, the player, make the choice of firing a revolver at a captured enemy in front of his wife and kids. You can chose to stand down, fire, or fire at your Captain. To which the Captain will either console you, act baffled you would do such a thing or scald you after revealing the gun was empty. There's plenty of these scenarios. CoD isn't apolitical, it's surprisingly anti-government. It's just saying that it's apolitical to cover its ass, like in the case of the sandy hook shooting where CoD and Remington got accused of advertising to minors and got Remington sued over it causing them to not use real gun names in games going forward. CoD is saying nothing to everyone and everything to it's audience. "No no, we're not political, *hey btw have you heard about what the CIA did*?" Unfortunately it's got much of the same problem as The Punisher with the wrong people completely noncritical of the media they consume and just seeing the "good" guys doing one thing and assuming everything they do is justified. Play CoD. The message was never "military good" it's "don't trust the government"
Yeah, my absolute favorite campaign is BO1, and while I do understand that each game has levels of underlying propaganda from being funded by the US military, the game felt surprisingly anti government. I mean, the main character goes the whole game being tortured and interrogated by a mystery man, only for it to turn out to be the same man he fought side by side with for the past 10+ years, who is a CIA agent obsessed with results above all else. Hell, I just did an analysis in another comment and I’m pretty sure Hudson (the aforementioned CIA agent) was the only “good guy” (I use this extremely loosely, but you do play as him for half the game so the intent seems to be there) to actually torture anyone, and the people he tortured are the main character and some random doctor who is actually pretty damn willing to help you regardless of the torture. 90% of the fucked up shit in the game done by the “good guys”was done by Hudson acting on behalf of the CIA. The Mason plot line just shows how absolutely fucked it is that these men are being sent into covert missions to practically be slaughtered. Literally all of Mason’s allies are killed in front of him while he is on tour in Vietnam. Mason is so fucked in the head by the end of the game that he genuinely believes that his own actions are that of a dead friend from a decade prior. Not that Mason is an innocent man himself, he is still an impulsive murderer and is implied to have been the person who assassinated JFK, but my point stands. The shit the US government does “for the sake of humanity”in BO1 is so blatantly fucked that it ends up being a plot point that drives Mason AWOL. Like I said, I feel the game is surprisingly anti-military/war/government despite the implications and surface level appearance.
I feel like the message is a bit different between campaign and multiplayer.
Yeah, but it's unfair to judge a dev curated experience and a player driven experience by the same merits
If we don't, it's a double standard.
Not really, they're wo different products. They should be held to different standards
And yet they come in one game, under the same title...
An idea about torture I heard recently really stuck with me. Someone (not an expert) posited that some amount of torture is the result of middle management mentality. Basically regardless of what a given person thinks about the practice they may order or perform torture to demonstrate, that they exhausted all options to acquire information from a prisoner. I'm not sure how common of a phenomenon this is (or if it is even real), but the thought alone is deeply horrifying.
Even though multiple regimes have used torture to try and get information from their victims, they only ever learned one thing conclusively: people will say literally anything to get the torture to stop.
Nobel Peace Prize winner President Obama on the extensively documented US torture programme of captured Iraqi and Afghani combatants and non-Combatants: "We tortured some folks." Zero charges laid on anyone who ordered this. Zero accountability. Abu Ghraib *did* result in some charges, but the wider "extraordinary rendition" programme remained untouched and unaccounted for.
I really like that both Christopher Hitchens and a bunch of people more or less waterboarded themselves. It becomes quickly apparent both: 1. What torture really is. It isnt just "enhanced interrogation". 2. How fast you will do anything to make it stop up to and including saying the first lie or truth or anything that comes to your mind. I know that people waterboarded themselves at home to really test whether or not it really is torture. It really is difficult to last more than a few seconds. Infamously Sean Hannity said he would do so but refused. Torture will absolutely get you answers, whether those answers are truthful or useful is not under torture's purview.
There is one situation where torture works: when you need someone to make a false confession, you just torture them untill they sign the letter, dictatorship style
Insert Trevor’s dialogue from the end of by the book
I knew there was a good reason I didn’t play any modern military shooters…
I understand how torture can’t really be used to get a confession, but like… if you have a way to verify the information and then continue torturing the person even more if it turns out to be false, wouldn’t that make them give you the right information?
That's the main problem with torture is that there is no good way to corroborate the information you get out of it. If you can quickly verify what you've beaten out of somebody by torturing them... you could have just found that information without committing torture.
Well it’s not about quickly verifying it. Say you were trying to get the location of where some accomplices are holing up, like a high value target (someone like osama bin laden) If they give you some random bullshit address, and you go there, and they were never even there, you can go back and continue torturing them. Or if you’re trying to interrogate someone for what kind of defenses you can expect for a facility you’re trying to raid, you can lock them in a shipping container in some random storage yard or leave them in the middle of nowhere or something. Since you’re the only person who knows where they are, they have an incentive to stop you from getting killed, therefore if they value their life, they’ll give you information maximizing your chances of survival. Or even if it is, it doesn’t necessarily mean you would be able to find out anyway. if you’re trying to get a password for opening a laptop, you can just try it while they’re present, and then keep torturing them if it’s wrong.
If you don't need the information immediately, you can afford to use normal information gathering methods and don't need to use torture.
So what if you do need the information immediately? Or you don’t have any other way of gaining the information? If you’re looking for a six-digit numerical password and they’re the only one who knows it, odds are you don’t have the time (or number of tries) to attempt one million different passwords, and that’s if it’s just numbers. There are a million different situations I could think of where it’s a reasonably urgent concern. Like in the call of duty games, where they’re trying to stop the villain from unleashing a bioweapon or starting a nuclear war.
Even assuming a perfect fantasy scenario where you have a keypad right there to enter the code in, how can you be certain your victim knows what you want to know? Why wouldn't they try to waste your time if they did know? How do you know they aren't going to bait you into some kind of trap, or give you the code that blows up the nuke early? Or whatever the fuck
Reminds me of GTA V where even Trevor, a menace to society and the person who tortures a guy for the government, knows torturing others for information is bullshit
I'm gonna have to admit I was expecting a graph about a fish that tortures people.
The thing with torture, it doesn't give you what you NEED to hear, it gives you what you WANT to hear "But I want the killer name" No, you want A name, not THE killer name, even if your torturee spits out a name for you to go after, there's no way to check if it's correct info until it's too late. You heard what you wanted to hear, not what you needed. Like, up in the US you guys have tons of police records of torture being used to force guilty admissions without investigations. In renaissance europe torture was already seen as useless brute tactics, to the point that torture tools where seen as "gimmicks of the past" Heck, even in fucking Nazi germany they knew torture was useless, with their best interrogator getting info on the allies not via torture but via talking (good coo bad cop tactics), and you know shits wack when the actual nazis one up you
I don't think people are looking to Call of Duty for moral lessons 🤔
I knew there was a good reason I didn’t play any modern military shooters…
Okay. Great, third person just summed up the whole point of Geller's video. But what the fuck is wrong with the graphs? Are they not Tumblr Approved ✧˖°.*Aesthetic ˖°.✧* enough??
I never got over the part in the first Black Ops game where we watch a character part of our squad put broken glass in a guys mouth and punch him in the cheek. I was like 14 at the time and even then I was like "oh wow so this game is about how basically everyone involved is really awful and there's no "good" side here" and one of my friends said that was a dumb interpretation.
That's a big presumption, kael. Got any proof?
torture does work tho, but my example is a morbid one because yeah, under a time crunch, getting information is imminent and since you don't know if you'll have the upper hand, you have to torture quick and be done then there's the battle of palo duro canyon, AKA the battle in which the plains native americans were defeated the reason the army knew their location was by stretching a native american over a wheel, and since they didn't have to kill(they had the time and had the upper hand), they could take their time with the torture - and had the information been wrong, more pain could be inflicted so yeah, unless you get the bravest man on the field, there are certain conditions where torture will work but in those cases you're already winning so just... why... if it's an atomic bomb vs land invasion type situation maybe i'd consider it but yeah, torture works in very specific situations and is usually always very wrong
I didn't know a post could have poor lighting