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Games need more...torture?

by rawmeatcowboy
15 December 2008
GN 1.0 / 2.0

…our mass culture is filled with wildly misleading ideas about how torture works… Which is why we need more torture in videogames.

Games are excellent vehicles for helping people inhabit complex, difficult situations… What’s more, gamers love this stuff. Several of the biggest recent games were praised precisely because the moral acts inside them had long-term consequences. In BioShock, you could either save or exploit the Little Sisters… In Fable, decisions made in the first 15 minutes of play… change the moral tenor of your home town 15 years later…

I’d like to see games that had more torture — and better torture — in them. In this alarming chapter of American history, they might wind up fueling the best public debate yet. - Wired’s Clive Thompson

Well…for one thing, TV shows definitely have a lot more torture in them than games. No one seems to mind when that happens. If games start to feature more torture, you can be sure to see an uproar from certain sections of the public. I’m not too sure that the game industry really needs that sort of attention right now.

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