Define Me as a Traitor

Imagine a game where you played a teacher to a girl. She is a child with the invincibility and pathfinding of the dog in Fable 2, composed of Sims-like meters and emotions. The story goes: a powerful and influential family has charged you with turning their daughter Natalie into an officer whose future, if the ancestral pattern continues, will play out from the commander’s chair.

As the distinguished veteran, you decide how the child should level up. Should her strength lie in physical prowess; should acuity be her definition? She gains experience by following you around, by you commanding her, by her watching you. Every one of your actions - direct or otherwise - is muscle memory, an impression on her mind. She is a sponge regardless of how you treat her. Will you be encouraging or will you never be satisfied and demand the impossible?

In combat, you can tell her what weapon and style she should use; if you use the same weapon and style she currently has equipped, she will watch your movements, gain more experience points. Or you can put her on point, observe her maneuvers and adjust accordingly. Do you want her to be more offensive or defensive?

The instances where you can temporarily remove her from your party - perhaps you want to complete a personal quest without her, perhaps you want her to be in “study book” mode - there could be a chance that she will disobey and shadow you, and whatever you do when you think you’re alone will give her experience points in the appropriate stats. Does she see you lying, indulging in excessive behavior?

It’s an adventure RPG that has a sense of time, a story that spans decades; gameplay without time limits. The game takes you through its seasons, and more importantly, every major and minor character has a wardrobe. Cosmetics since they have no gameplay consequence, though still important in creating a breathing world with characters that don’t feel like they are stage performers in a one act play.

Natalie is handed over to you when she is a teen. When she becomes an adult and the training ends, the relationship continues, mostly because of her - if you treated her like an animal, if you treated her like your daughter, she will have valid reasons; perhaps she feels she can still learn from you, perhaps she see you as a father-figure. Or perhaps it is something romantic. For you maybe; she marries and has a daughter.

Imagine a second act, some fifteen years later, of you and her against the neighboring country that has increased its attacks against your homeland. Your hair has streaks of gray; dark colors dominate Natalie’s wardrobe. You work well together - her attacks compliment yours, so seamless and elegant that it feels like you are controlling two characters at once. Depending on how you trained her, perhaps this time around you are the brute, the accurate cyclops who can smash heavy obstacles while she is the speed demon reckless with her attacks; in the time you two were apart, between the first and second acts, she taught herself a few tricks, like detecting traps.

The beats between the action set pieces are playful and intimate; if these moments felt forced, it would weaken the relationship, their motives. Their consequences.

Imagine the final act is the point where the world and your rhythms fall apart. Natalie questions the motives of both sides, re-evaluates the good guys and bad, and realizes that we have been fighting for the wrong side, that “in this moment, we are the villains in this story.” Yet you have no reason to believe today’s victories will lead to future genocide. You have no reason to doubt your allegiance. Your country has treated you well with treasure chests, and you know that you have helped secure your country’s place as the lone shining tower amid the plains. Natalie is just as passionate as you, but her affections are for the people you call the enemy.

“If you kill me, promise that you will take my daughter someplace far away from here, from what’s to come.”
“She will grow up to kill me.”
“I didn’t plan this. This wasn’t how things were supposed to turn out. We were supposed to be together.”
“I know, kiddo. I imagined the two of us ruling the world or something equally silly.”
“That’s not how I pictured us.”

Natalie is the final boss, her patterns based on the techniques you taught her in the first act. She knows your most frequently used attacks from the second and will counter them. But you know her strengths and weaknesses also. You know she isn’t as accurate as you, isn’t as strong as you. And with your high damage resistance, for the final blow you step into her fury and depending on your weapon of choice you either bring the hammer down on her with enough force that you break your arm or drive your blade through her attacks and into her neck.

Her death doesn’t end the war, does not even intimidate others to pick a side. A meaningless battle fought in a vacuum. But was it? You trained her to be the next-generation version of you. Whoever she fought for, they would win. Natalie chose to betray her homeland, the country your parents sent you to so that it could train you to become an officer whose future would play out from eye level but with the powers of a god.

Your country thanks you for sacrificing so much to ensure the war is won by the better half. You accept their rewards, continue to fight the enemy, but your motivation isn’t for love of country. You want to kill the people who brainwashed Natalie.

But as years pass, you begin to notice changes that Natalie spoke of; social and economic shifts that put future generations in danger of a genocide led by the system the people elected to ensure victory. Your equals - the ones responsible for winning the war - are being given too much power. If they demanded, you would have noticed. You now see this was all planned. Patience was their strength.

Perhaps you were blinded by your allegiance, by the treasure chests they offered you. Physically stronger you may have been, but Natalie was always good at detecting traps.

IM Conversation #1

12:28:34 PM Tai: You wake up in a room, on a bed, and find a $20 on the nightstand.

Mission Objectives:
Primary - find pants
Secondary - restore dignity
12:31:18 PM mike d: there should be more dignity meters in games
12:40:28 PM Tai: Yeah. Indigo Prophecy had a sanity meter, but that's just not good enough.
12:40:52 PM Tai: And no floating spinning turkey leg is going to restore dignity, it's going to take a different kind of pickup.
12:45:42 PM mike d: soap. or a spinning brunette caught in a bear trap.
12:46:44 PM Tai: A high school diploma.

The Empathic Torturer

“The thing is, I’m not going to kill you. I may kill someone close to you if that’s what it takes, but you will survive, and no matter how tightly you close your eyes or how lightly I trail this blade across your gum line, you will always remember being strapped to this chair. I will make you fear opening your mouth; to talk, to eat, to brush your teeth. Hell, you’ll fear sitting down when we’re done. And now it’s time to break your legs.”
_
What makes you feel uncomfortable? For me it’s 70’s movies, especially the foreign ones. There is something about that decade that makes me nauseated and terrified. The graininess, the colors; even the oranges and yellows, all dark and dirty. The image that sticks is of a living room; beige walls, brown ceilings, door frames of a darker shade, and a white fur rug underneath a glass coffee table. The owners - lying on the floor - dying. The woman’s right hand clutches the fur rug. It isn’t white anymore.

Imagine a game where you play a torturer for the government. The intro opens in a room with two chairs, one of which a man is strapped to. He is terrified, unable to take his eyes off the rust-colored hammers and pliers on your left side. On your right is a calfskin attache case, with brush metal instruments fit snug in their compartments.

Your goal is to get a confession. Use the construction tools to be brutal. Use the instruments for precision. Whatever style you choose - perhaps you choose both - the scenario will end the same way every time: Cassandra, a colleague, will ask you to step outside because she has to tell you something.

“We fucked up. This man is innocent.”

Your in-game character will walk back inside the room, will either apologize or close the attache case and leave. As the player, you have to look inward and answer one question: did you enjoy torturing your victim?

As the game progresses, you transition between work and home. You’re a family man; your wife Madeline and daughter Zoe know you work for the government and that you roll up your sleeves because sometimes your office can get a bit stuffy, not because you don’t want your cufflinks to catch on your victim’s open wounds.

When you’re not home, your bosses assign you bad guys, each one having a piece of information that, according to your superiors, will prevent the loss of innocent life while killing the ones that need killing.

You have various tools and objects you can use on your victim, employing a sub-targeting system for focused punishment. Deprivation is another option - perhaps one has a high tolerance for physical pain but loses the threshold when he’s being starved. Sometimes pulling up that second chair and asking questions in a calming voice will do the job. Offer a cold smile that says this is my cooldown period; if I don’t get what I want when this smile fades, you’re going to beg me to feed you a bullet. And if you do too much damage, well, that’s what medkits are for.

Perhaps you - the player - cannot tolerate this kind of violence. If that’s the case, there is always the option to dodge your responsibilities and ask your colleagues for help.

Perhaps there is an especially uncooperative case, a Mr. Moncrieff. He is high priority, but the only things coming out of his mouth besides teeth and blood are screams.

When you’re not putting the cursor over tools, you are home playing husband and father. It’s a change of pace and intensity, allowing the player to relax and not worry about health meters, time limits and such. Perhaps there is a scene where Zoe comes home way past curfew. Your wife demands an answer, to which Zoe responds with an unoriginal “just out with my friends, ok.” Zoe storms off. You step inside her room, pull up a chair, and in a calming voice ask her to tell you the truth.

“We were hanging out at my boyfriend’s place.”
“Who’s we?”
“Natalie, Emma, the usual gang.”
“The thing is, how come this is the first time I’m hearing about this boyfriend? Does daddy have to get his baseball bat?”
“Jesus, dad. Lighten up. Alex’s father and uncle were hanging out with us, so we didn’t drink or do any drugs, ok.”

At work, you begin to think of ways to break Moncrieff, which has the added headache of being an off-site assignment on the other side of the country; this also means you cannot ask your colleagues for help. They say he’s one tough turd. Medical reports say a good many of his bones have been broken at least once, and he has had numerous surgeries to prolong his existence. You begin like you always do - applying either charisma or bruises.

When both options fail, you investigate his personal life and come across a childhood friend he hasn’t spoken to in years. You put on your hat, flip your collar up and shadow this woman. You create a situation where an accidental bump turns into a friendly conversation which turns into a casual friendship by proximity - like having someone you regularly talk with while doing laundry but never see outside this routine. After you’re satisfied, you return to Moncrieff.

“Alma says she might go back to school. She also recalled for me her childhood ambitions, that she was going to grow up to be a famous painter while her best friend would become a famous violinist. I’d be surprised if you could still play after we’re done here. The thing is….”

The game will never judge you, will never take your decisions and place you on the appropriate binary path. You can make choices that affect how you complete cases, but only one story is being told. For the people who like torturing the bad guys, they may believe that every time flesh is split open secures our country’s safety. For those players who cannot stomach the atrocities, while you cannot go against your superiors, you can ask for help. Your colleagues are not heartless. They are your friends, and know you must be going through a difficult time.

After all, you did torture an innocent man.

For the players who feel uncomfortable, the Moncrieff assignment may have taken a lot out of you. You question the actions of your colleagues and your own. Perhaps you feel we have gone too far. You formed a friendship under false pretenses, and you ask yourself if you were ready to have a third chair in the room. Can you continue doing this? Have the punishments you’ve inflicted been a necessity or a pleasure? Are there better ways to get a confession? Does anyone truly deserve this kind of treatment?

The phone rings. It’s Madeline. You tell her to slow down, what’s wrong.

“Zoe said she was almost attacked by Alex’s father and uncle. She was walking home and they came up to her and they cornered her and she got away before they could…please come home.”

Hours later, Cassandra picks you up from the airport. Instead of taking you home, she takes you to work. Easy, babe. We have a surprise for you.

She takes you to the room from the opening scene. Inside you find two men strapped into chairs.

“I stopped by your house to drop off your air mattress,” Cassandra says. “Your wife told me everything. A couple of us did the legwork. Now all you have to do is roll up your sleeves.”

She closes the door, leaves you alone with the two men.

What do you do?