“I was only following orders…”

As a stark contrast to the hilarious murloc quest in my previous post, I have to tell you about the most nauseating quest I have ever encountered in this game.

No, I am not talking about the quest where you feed the wolves in the Scalding Pools some not-too-healthy-meat to make them sit and shit and then you have to look through their droppings to collect the microfilms they have apparently been eating.

I am talking about a quest chain that the Dalaran people in Amber Ledge gives you. You have to capture a Beryl Sorcerer and drag him in chains back to the mages in the tower. For the next part, you talk to Librarian Normantis, hiding inside the tower with the captured mage chained to a chair next to him.

You know, there is a famous psychology experiment from the 1960’s, led by psychologist Stanley Milgram, followed up in many subsequent studies around the world, all with the same result.

In the experiment, volunteers were helping Milgram with a study of memory and learning in different situations

The experiment paired people and one of the volunteers, “the teacher” was asking the other, “the learner”, questions. Failure to respond properly resulted in a electric shock delivered to the learner by the teacher. For every wrong answer the voltage was increased. As the learner experienced more and more painful shocks they started asking for the experiment to stop and to be released, sometimes even saying they had a heart condition, or crying and screaming for the teacher to stop asking questions and stop administering shocks.

If the volunteer teacher asked the psychologist experiment leader that they be allowed to stop hurting the learner they were invariably told to go on and increase the shock voltage for every wrong answer, no matter how much the learner was begging for release.

I know what you think now, you think most people chucked the shocker at the psychologist and went to check on the learner, especially after they heard the screaming or learned about the heart conditions.

Well, think again.

65 % of experiment participants administered the experiment's final 450-volt shock. 65 % of all the learners were going ahead with the painful treatment of another human on no more solid ground than “the psychologist told me to keep going. Many were uncomfortable doing it, even crying, and begging the psychologist to let them stop, but they kept going at the psychologist’s urging.

Now, there was a trick to this experiment. There were no electric shocks and “the learner” was in reality a paid actor. The experiment was not about memory and learning, it was about people’s willingness to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts that conflicted with their personal conscience.

It’s a interesting and rather discomforting read, read more about if you are interested.

Anyways, back to WoW and the quest I was telling you about.

Apparently, the mage you just captured hold some very valuable information as to where Lady Evanor, some Kirin Tor bigshot wizard, is being held but he won’t tell this to Normantis, the quest NPC and some other Kirin Tor bigshot. Normantis scornfully says that “Kirin Tor code of conduct frowns upon our taking certain 'extreme' measures - even in desperate times such as these” but me, Paynne, an outsider is not bound by such restrictions and can take any steps necessary in the retrieval of information”, so he hands me a Neural Needler and tells me to do what I must while he sorts out the bookshelves.

Eh, use a Neural Needler to force someone to talk? Sounds an awful lot like torture to me.

And torture it is.

I was actually pretty reluctant to do this quest, but I told myself it’s a game, it’s pixels, and I want to do all the quests here! I want to level!

So I use the Neural Needler on the mage. Not once, not twice, but it takes four times before the interrogation is complete and he tells me what I want to know. He is cocky at first but at the end he begs for mercy and pleads with me to stop.

Zap Needler – Aaargh! Do your worst, warlock! I’ll tell you NOTHING!

And zap again – Aahhhh! Release me! I am of no use to you, I swear it!

And again – Stop! I beg you, please stop! Please...

And again – Alright! And he spills the beans to me and tells me where the lady wizard is.

So I go rescue the Kirin Tor mage from her arcane prison with a very foul taste in my mouth and images of Abu Ghraib and My Lai flashing through my head – I was only doing a quest! I was only following orders! I was only obeying the authorities and not following my own gut feeling as to what is right and what is wrong!

Yes, I know it’s a game and not “for real”, I know it’s only pixels, I know I have no qualms about killing off a whole camp of defias thugs or ogres or murlocs or whatever to complete a quest. Their shouts of “You no take mushroom” or mrlrlrlllgglglglg does not affect me the way this captured mage’s pleas does.

And why is that? Killing stuff in this game is fun, it’s fun being evil (muahahaha!) and destroy things and wreak havoc on the enemies! But torture, even torture of pixels, is NOT fun. The peon whacking and booterang throwingare pretty fun, but this one is nauseating.

As a side note, why has Blizzard put a quest like this in the game? They have made it impossible to kill the children in the game, which seems to indicate that they have some kind of reservations about what is right and wrong in this game of wholesale violence and abundant killing sprees. So why put in a torture quest like this? Is this maybe part of an experiment like Milgram’s? Is Blizz (or someone else) interested in the completion rate of this quest too see how many of the players are willing to go through with something like this in a virtual world.

Maybe I’m silly, or maybe I am overreacting, but that is one quest I am not gonna do again on any of my girls. Even having done it once was too much actually and I feel pretty disgusted about it.