A Question is Worth a Thousand Waterboards: Civic Engagement Made Virtual

Matthew Haselton · David Phelps

Wed., June 10, 3:30–4:30, Browsing Library (2nd floor, West Central)

In recent years, the American public has been forced to engage with the civic and ethical issue of interrogation abuses such as physical torture and psychological duress as portrayed through news broadcasts and commercial television series. These news reports and television shows have come under scrutiny for portraying interrogation abuses as overly-sensationalized, narrow-sighted, and unnecessarily imbalanced. Worse, the passive nature of these mediums do not allow for the audience to correct the misconceptions and stereotypes of interrogation abuses they encounter. Recently, a columnist for Wired magazine called for interactive videogames to give citizens as game players sophisticated treatment of the civic and ethical issues inherent in interrogation practices, prompted by an interrogation played out in World of Warcraft (WoW), a popular multiuser virtual environment. In particular, the WoW quest was critiqued for over-simplifying and ethically-sanitizing the incredibly complex and delicate practice of interrogation abuses. Our focus was to identify what aspects of interrogation could be best experienced in a game to both provide a sophisticated treatment of the practice and to educate the broader public of the tradeoffs inherent to interrogation practices.

With this goal in mind, and informed by the theory of transformative play (Barab, Gresafli, & Ingram-Goble, in press), we designed a commercially-appealing interactive videogame that (a) positions players as interrogators, (b) legitimizes player choice between interrogation practices based on fear-and-control oriented techniques or respect-and-trust-building techniques, as well as (c) provides experiential consequentiality for said choices through numerous feedback mechanisms that are narratively integrated into game play. The experiential consequentiality operates at multiple levels such that the player’s choices and interrogation decisions influence the reliability of received information, the moral tenor of co-interrogation officers, public perception of what is considered reasonable, international perception of the cruelty of America’s interrogators, and ultimately the long-term psyche of individual detainees. To realistically represent this multi-level understanding of interrogation techniques, our interactive game draws from current research efforts assessing prisoner interrogations (Smith et al., 2007), criminal interrogations (Kassim, 1997), as well as personal memoirs detailing contending interrogation practices during the war on terror (Bruning, 2008), all conveyed via an allegorical narrative based upon the motifs and imagery of 1960s espionage films.

In-game assessments along with pre- and post-interviews will be given to gauge the player’s knowledge of and attitudes toward the civic and ethical relevance of interrogation techniques. Additionally, we will interview a subset of participants who use the game solo, as well as conducting focus groups with subjects who are co-present in-game and during the experiment, and who are in competition with each other. Our presentation will include a discussion of the design challenges in deciding on the game content, in designing the game, as well as an informal pilot session of our study.