That torture game
Posted: Tuesday, June 24, 2008 5:28 PM by Will Femia
Filed Under:
Games
I'm trying to figure out why I'm not bothered in the least by the torture game Winda Benedetti wrote about today
in her Citizen Gamer column. (
version 1 and the new
version 2)
I think the bottom line is that it's just not realistic enough to be very disturbing. It takes more than a vaguely human form and the occasional pained sigh to trigger the visceral revulsion of witnessing the mistreatment of a human being. It reminds me more of one of those
time waster games that's more about exploring the properties of the program than the specific subject matter.
I don't want to get into a game of "what's grosser than this" but the floppiness of the torture doll reminds me a little of the
falling bikini woman that was popular a while ago. And what's odd is that I find that somehow less real but more disturbing.
And then there's the obvious thing that makes this torture game not seem like torture - the fact that we've seen torture and it didn't look like this at all. The Abu Ghraib photos were more disturbing than this. The Daniel Perl video and the Nick Berg videos were positively scarring. Just the audio of those things was terrifying and soul-darkening. Splashing a little cartoon man with blood from a mouse-click chainsaw isn't even close.
I'm not insensitive to human suffering. The photo of
that woman giving birth on the subway platform bothered me. Hell, anyone who made it all the way through 2 Girls 1 Cup should have the fortitude to endure the Torture Game 2.
Maybe it ultimately comes down to that relativity. I notice the things that bothered Winda the most are the things that made the game not bother me at all. I don't think the motion is real. The audio isn't real. The skin tone isn't real. The rendering isn't real. The "idea" of the game might be torture but you're not actually torturing anyone so it's really just a human figure abstraction.
