Torture, Warcraft and Consequences

There is a quest in the new World of Warcraft expansion where you have to torture a prisoner for information. This has caused some consternation, specifically by Richard Bartle here and here.

It probably won't surprise you to know I think he's dead wrong.

See, any quest in Warcraft can be declined simply by clicking the 'decline' button when offered it. In practice, you rarely do this as you're in the mentality of doing all quests possible for the rewards. In this case, ignoring this quests will also mean you miss out on around ten other quests that follow on, and their rewards too. But bear in mind there are nearly 1000 quests in the expansion and that's not a big deal.

Bartle says "I was expecting for there to be some way to tell the guy who gave you the quest that no, actually I don't want to torture a prisoner, but there didn't seem to be any way to do that...without some reward for saying no, this is a fiction-breaking quest of major proportions."

It's an interesting point. Even though there's a mechanic for abandoning or declining the quest built into the game, Bartle feels this specific quest should have an additional option where you can tell the guy "No thanks" and then presumably get rewarded with the same amount of XP and the ability to progress in the quest chain by another character that commends you for your restraint.

It's the approach taken in most games where there is a good/evil dichotomy with your choices, most notably and recently in Bioshock, where you can choose either kill the little girls for the 'Adam' you need to get new powers, or save them. If you take the latter option you get around the same amount of Adam from another NPC as a reward later on. So there's no real tough decision there. It comes down to: are you a bastard or are you a nice guy? Most people take the nice guy route, because there are no consequences to doing so.

The quest in Warcraft works differently. It offers a genuine choice. The sort of choice Bioshock liked to pretend it was offering. You can opt not to take the quest, but if you do you don't benefit at all, no-one mentions it, the quest-giver stays there waiting for you to change your mind and you never discover the information that will lead you to the next part of the quest-chain.

Bartle thinks we should be rewarded for taking that option, for taking the high road. The quest designers at Blizzard clearly disagree. They take the more realistic option. Because in real life often you won't get rewarded and patted on the back for taking the nice-guy route. Most often it'll go entirely un-noticed, as it does here.

The reality in this case is that a lot of players will do the quest without thinking about it, a fair few more will do it while finding it a little unsettling, while only a minority will decide not to do it at all. Even Bartle himself, for all his posturing, admitted to going ahead and completing the quest.

And that's why this quest is a brilliant piece of design and far from flawed. If offers a genuine choice: torture and reap the rewards, or walk away and get nothing. Bartle's proposed changes to reward walking-away would destroy the whole point of it.