Moral concern for torture in World of Warcraft expansion

Richard Bartle, the father of multiplayer online gaming, had his alarm bells go off when playing the quest The Art of Persuasion in the new World of Warcraft Expansion. The quest requires that the player torture a non-player character in order to get information. The game text reads as follows:

Librarian Normantis on Amber Ledge wants you to use the [Neural Needler] on the Imprisoned Beryl Sorcerer until he reveals the location of Lady Evanor.

and

It is fortunate you’re here, <race>.

You see, the Kirin Tor code of conduct frowns upon our taking certain ‘extreme’ measures – even in desperate times such as these.

You, however, as an outsider, are not bound by such restrictions and could take any steps necessary in the retrieval of information.

Do what you must. We need to know where Lady Evanor is being held at once!

I’ll just busy myself organizing these shelves here. Oh, and here, perhaps you’ll find this old thing useful….

So, the quest asks the player to participate in extraordinary rendition, the act of performing torture on behalf of a people who regard such torture as illegal. The player is rewarded for doing so and never given another choice. Bartle highlights the quest’s lack of moral option:

Without some reward for saying no, this is a fiction-breaking quest of major proportions. I don’t mind having torture in an MMO — it’s the kind of thing a designer can use to give interesting choices that say things to the players. However, I do mind its being placed there casually as a run-of-the-mill quest with no regard for the fact that it would ring alarm bells: this means either that the designer can’t see anything wrong with it, or that they’re actually in favour of it and are forcing it on the player base to make a point. Neither case is satisfactory.

1. Bartle’s original post.
2. Summary of reactions to his post and his responses.

News came via BoingBoing, which has its own interesting comments. Cory Doctorow adds:

I don’t think that these posts are really responsive to the points that Richard raises, namely:

1. If “it’s just a game” then why not add rape quests and child mutilation quests too?

2. Not having a “torturer” class in the game means that it’s possible to play for years without encountering it or deciding whether it’s the kind of thing you want in your play. Adding torture to a game that never had it is noteworthy and, for some players, shocking.

I’ll admit that I find it hard to complain about simulated torture in the context of a game filled with simulated fantasy violence. At the same time, our culture typically finds simulated violence in our media only a mild moral problem. Films, television and music provide those images all the time, so we are not shocked to find it in an online game. Extraordinary rendition and torture, on the other hand, are controversial questions that we are more sensitive too. So, it’s not surprising that we find players being shocked at the quest’s requirements.

So how might this quest, undertaken by WoW’s over ten million players, shape our own views of torture? The TV show 24 and the recent James Bond films both portray torture as a necessary and effective route to obtain important information. Now we can join one more support to cultural support for torture. With hope our next presidential administration will set a tone against torture and again open up the moral question of its acceptability.

Weeds and Wheat: Jesus Christ and Marcus Yallow

One of today’s Bible readings is Matthew 13:24-30, the Parable of the Wheat and Weeds. In the ESV, it goes like this:

He put another parable before them, saying, “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a man who sowed good seed in his field, but while his men were sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat and went away. So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared also. And the servants of the master of the house came and said to him, ‘Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? How then does it have weeds?’ He said to them, ‘An enemy has done this.’ So the servants said to him, ‘Then do you want us to go and gather them?’ But he said, ‘No, lest in gathering the weeds you root up the wheat along with them. Let both grow together until the harvest, and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, Gather the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.’”

Today I was also reading Cory Doctorow’s new novel Little Brother. In chapter 8, the Department of Homeland Security seeks to root out terrorists by testing an individual persons’ behavior against some normative behavior. The test passes and the person is innocent (wheat); the test fails and the person is a terrorist (weed). Trouble is: statistical error makes this kind of discernment difficult. In the words of Cory:

If you ever decide to do something as stupid as build an automatic terrorism detector, here’s a math lesson you need to learn first. It’s called “the paradox of the false positive,” and it’s a doozy.

Say you have a new disease, called Super-AIDS. Only one in a million people gets Super-AIDS. You develop a test for Super-AIDS that’s 99 percent accurate. I mean, 99 percent of the time, it gives the correct result — true if the subject is infected, and false if the subject is healthy. You give the test to a million people.

One in a million people have Super-AIDS. One in a hundred people that you test will generate a “false positive” — the test will say he has Super-AIDS even though he doesn’t. That’s what “99 percent accurate” means: one percent wrong.

What’s one percent of one million?

1,000,000/100 = 10,000

One in a million people has Super-AIDS. If you test a million random people, you’ll probably only find one case of real Super-AIDS. But your test won’t identify one person as having Super-AIDS. It will identify 10,000 people as having it.

Your 99 percent accurate test will perform with 99.99 percent inaccuracy.

That’s the paradox of the false positive. When you try to find something really rare, your test’s accuracy has to match the rarity of the thing you’re looking for. If you’re trying to point at a single pixel on your screen, a sharp pencil is a good pointer: the pencil-tip is a lot smaller (more accurate) than the pixels. But a pencil-tip is no good at pointing at a single atom in your screen. For that, you need a pointer — a test — that’s one atom wide or less at the tip.

This is the paradox of the false positive, and here’s how it applies to terrorism:

Terrorists are really rare. In a city of twenty million like New York, there might be one or two terrorists. Maybe ten of them at the outside. 10/20,000,000 = 0.00005 percent. One twenty-thousandth of a percent.

That’s pretty rare all right. Now, say you’ve got some software that can sift through all the bank-records, or toll-pass records, or public transit records, or phone-call records in the city and catch terrorists 99 percent of the time.

In a pool of twenty million people, a 99 percent accurate test will identify two hundred thousand people as being terrorists. But only ten of them are terrorists. To catch ten bad guys, you have to haul in and investigate two hundred thousand innocent people.

Guess what? Terrorism tests aren’t anywhere close to 99 percent accurate. More like 60 percent accurate. Even 40 percent accurate, sometimes.

What this all meant was that the Department of Homeland Security had set itself up to fail badly. They were trying to spot incredibly rare events — a person is a terrorist — with inaccurate systems.

Is it any wonder we were able to make such a mess?

Telling the difference between actual wheat and a weed is pretty easy. That test has just about no chance of error. But for someone without a green thumb, telling the difference between the good plants and the weeds isn’t as easy. Just the same way, you can’t tell the difference between a terrorist and an innocent person very easily. Cory estimates that 40-60% accuracy is about right, but I’m not as optimistic.

It’s an interesting collision of two readings today. Saint Matthew and Cory Doctorow both put the same paradox of false positive into the mouths of Jesus and Marcus. Be careful when trying to root out the weeds (you probably aren’t as good at it as you think)! For now, the wheat and the weeds will just have to live together.

Two-track copyright policy

Yesterday, the Guardian ran Cory Doctorow’s article, “Copyright law should distinguish between commercial and cultural uses.” He distinguishes between business-copyright and folk-copyright. The former is what happens when, for example, a record label negotiates the rights to a song for a particular TV advertisement. One lawyer calls another, writes a contract, money changes hands and the song “Baba O’Reilly” can get used to sell me auto insurance or something.

The idea of folk-copyright pertains to cultural use. The sort of pedestrian usage of a babysitter bringing DVDs to keep her charge occupied, making mix tapes, covering songs in a garage or a bar, or photocopying a comic strip for your cubicle wall.

Nobody calls the lawyers at United Feature Syndicate to ask if they can duplicate yesterday’s Dilbert for hanging the office fridge. What Doctorow advocates is a more descriptive rather than prescriptive copyright law. To describe the situation: on a folk/person-to-person scale, people are sharing copyright material freely. This use is often a cultural exchange (e.g. teenagers learning guitar by playing copyrighted riffs). Cultural exchange simply isn’t going to stop.

Also coming in yesterday is William Patry’s blog post on copyrighted jokes. It’s a thought-provoking angle on Doctorow’s article. It’s one thing to personally compile David Letterman’s Top Ten Lists and publish, distribute and sell them, making oneself a tidy profit. It seems to be another thing to imitate Robin Williams’s jokes on stage. And it’s a third thing to quote Family Guy to my girlfriend.

Among preachers, the practice of a folk-copyright (“cultural exchange”) is routine. In such an oral medium, I do not find offense at someone using an analogy that they lifted out of my preaching. Once a story, an illustration, a sermon is out into the oral sphere, it is free for the taking. Attribution is only a courtesy. This type of folk-copyright has been known in Christian preaching for centuries and serves as a helpful guide for contemporary policy.

Cory Doctorow’s alchemy metaphor and bad history

Cory Doctorow’s talks typically include a metaphor on alchemy. He contrasts alchemy and the Dark Ages to science and the Enlightenment and compares them to the difference between DRM culture and free culture. His metaphor is based on some bad history but making the metaphor more accurate improves his metaphor by paying more attention to our present location in history.

One version of this metaphor was the speech at the Singularity Summit, “Singularity or Dark Age?” At about 3:05 into the speech he says,

For five hundred years the dominant mechanism for doing science was to do it in secret and not share what you’d learned. We call that alchemy and we call the five-hundred-year period the Dark Ages. Every alchemist discovered for himself that drinking mercury was a bad idea and not much technological progress occurred.

One day, an alchemist got the bright idea of publishing his outcomes and sharing his knowledge and that begat the practice that we called the Enlightenment and the technological progress that has flowed from it, and we are today creatures of that decision to publish instead of hoarding knowledge.

The distinction of dark versus light is an attractive rhetorical device. From a historical perspective, however, there is no moment when the Dark Ages easily gave way to the Enlightenment. There simply is no support for referring to two adjacent periods of history in this way.

Generally speaking, the concept of the Dark Ages come from Petrarch, who died in 1374. Since then, this period spans the period from the fall of Rome (ca. 500) up through the Crusades (ca. 1100). Starting and stopping points are debated by scholars, but these brackets are approximate to a century or so.

The Dark Ages are said to end with the beginning of the Middle Ages, marked with the Crusades. When the Crusades began, Europe encountered the Middle East. Usually the sensational violence of this period is highlighted and the intercourse with Islamic thought is neglected. The Crusades offered Europeans access to Greek thought (e.g. Aristotle) preserved through Arabic commentators (e.g. Averroes).

By learning what Islam had known for so long, logic and science came to Europe to usher in not the Enlightenment, but the Middle Ages. Gothic architecture becomes possible and the the University system rises. The Middle Ages is a period of the first universities and hospitals in Europe, providing scholastic thought, humanism and scientific inquiry.

Over time, the cumulative effect of this contact with Islamic thought, joined with the freedom of printing and near-limitless copying, gives rise to the Enlightenment.

The gap between the Dark Ages and the Enlightenment spans about five hundred years, rather than the instantaneous movement that Cory suggests. This is not to say that his metaphor is wrong or broken, but it can actually be made better with a fuller look at history.

Could we consider ourselves a part of a Middle Ages, spanning the gap between the alchemical Dark Ages and a knowledgeable Enlightenment? Might we turn to global perspectives as the medievals did in appropriating Islamic thought? Might we seek academic integrity and scientific integrity as they did when establishing universities? Might we be the ones to frame a new world view, relentlessly questioning, as the scholastics did (e.g. Thomas Aquinas)?

Thinking of ourselves as in a Middle Age opens up fruitful metaphors for the work we are doing. Cory’s metaphor for understanding copyright history is a powerful one; only when we understand our moment in that history can we best play our role in it.

Cory Doctorow on the Bible

In 2004 Cory Doctorow spoke to Microsoft on the topic of Digital Rights Management. If you don’t know Cory, run his name through Google Video and watch something of his. Or read bOING bOING. Please do. I’m a superfan and have been catching up on all of his talks lately.

In that talk (video here or transcript here), Cory spun out his excellent talking points in the EFFing lion’s den, Microsoft. This is the oldest talk of his that I’ve seen and it’s always fun to see someone’s presentation skills evolve and his talks get better over time.

There is one analogy that he used that I haven’t heard repeated in his talks since (at least, as far as I know). Cory brought in the Bible. Not using verses as prooftext to make a point, he specifically talks about the changes in thinking about

At 27:25 minutes into the talk, he says,

This is the overweening characteristic of every single successful
new medium: it is true to itself. The Luther Bible didn’t
succeed on the axes that made a hand-copied monk Bible valuable:
they were ugly, they weren’t in Church Latin, they weren’t read
aloud by someone who could interpret it for his lay audience,
they didn’t represent years of devoted-with-a-capital-D labor by
someone who had given his life over to God. The thing that made
the Luther Bible a success was its scalability: it was more
popular because it was more proliferate: all success factors for
a new medium pale beside its profligacy.

He returns to the analogy at 30:27 minutes:

Today we hear ebook publishers tell each other and anyone who’ll
listen that the barrier to ebooks is screen resolution. It’s
bollocks, and so is the whole sermonette about how nice a book
looks on your bookcase and how nice it smells and how easy it is
to slip into the tub. These are obvious and untrue things, like
the idea that radio will catch on once they figure out how to
sell you hotdogs during the intermission, or that movies will
really hit their stride when we can figure out how to bring the
actors out for an encore when the film’s run out. Or that what
the Protestant Reformation really needs is Luther Bibles with
facsimile illumination in the margin and a rent-a-priest to read
aloud from your personal Word of God.

At 42 minutes or so, a question comes from the audience pointing out that the Luther Bible (in German) and the Gutenberg Bible (in ecclesiastical Latin) are different documents. Cory stands corrected, but his point isn’t finished at all. The language isn’t the issue; the access to the text itself is.

The printing press technology made automatic, cheap and fast what was once manual, expensive and slow. Even more importantly, the technology took away the intermediary of the scribe and the verbal interpreter. In the same way, digital technology is taking away the intermediary of the printer and the footnote commentary.

As Cory says, the technology created something that “didn’t succeed on the axes” that the previous technology depended on. The technology created a new axis and offers a new dimension. For the Reformation, that meant the proliferation of the Word of God. For the Internet, it means the proliferation of words in the computational sense.

For Christians, and especially for Reformed Christians, the propagation of the Word is our prime directive (Matthew 28:18-20). Theologically, the Word of God is Jesus Christ himself (John 1:1-18) and we are called to be agents of his spreading grace. We are also called to spread the Word, which gives us the many, many translations from many, many publishers in many, many languages.

To be true to our theology and to our history, Christians should be interested in the free and unencumbered transmission of words in the literal, computational and theological sense. These principles entail our involvement with free software and looser copyright restrictions.