Jake

Idle Thumbs 119: You, Fisher

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I loved the first season of that show, with all of its cyberpunk aspirations, before just turning into Batman's highschool adventures.

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If you revisited it, you'd be surprised how rare the HS episodes are. The second season in particular has a jag of really great body-horror episodes, one of the principal obsessions of the series.

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Oh hey, I love the DCAU cartoons and even own Beyond on DVD.

 

The first season of that show is just really good, there's a strong serialized throughline and a lot of great character development.

It becomes much more typically episodic in season 2 and 3, and i feel like there's a lot of misfires in those two.

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I did like Batman Beyond when I was a smallchildboy. And yeah there are exceptions to my dumb rule above, but overall I just have a distaste for superheroes in comic book form. Oddly enough, don't much mind cartoons or movies.

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So, uh...

The Last of Us will be exploring new ground in patch 1.03, deploying now. The update brings a few balance changes and, more interestingly, a new multiplayer mode featuring two stages of strategy and skullduggery.

"Interrogation" mode pits two teams of four players against one another. Each team's objective is to steal the enemy team's valuable supplies from their lockbox, but said lockbox will be hidden at the start of the match. In order to learn the location of the lockbox, your team will have to interrogate five enemy players by way of a new, extra-long execution move. When five interrogations are completed without being interrupted, your team can begin attacking the objective - but the defending team will continue to interrogate you and your allies to find your supplies.

 

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Yeah I like that particular concession. "Well, torture's not a reliable means of gathering information, so you gotta torture five dudes just to be sure."

I dunno. i find it difficult to express why, but it kind of feels like that's even a little bit more terrible?

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Unlike what you ought to expect from a government operative, torture is probably the kind of intelligence gathering techniques desperate post-apocalyptic scavenger gangs would apply. After seeing how much care and attention they put into their sick execution moves, though, I'm not sure I would like to play a game based on trying to watching five of them in a row each round.

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Yeah I like that particular concession. "Well, torture's not a reliable means of gathering information, so you gotta torture five dudes just to be sure."

I dunno. i find it difficult to express why, but it kind of feels like that's even a little bit more terrible?

 

Because they're saying the solution to torturing one person not working is to torture more people?

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Yeah I like that particular concession. "Well, torture's not a reliable means of gathering information, so you gotta torture five dudes just to be sure."

I dunno. i find it difficult to express why, but it kind of feels like that's even a little bit more terrible?

Because it's more torture?

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Unlike what you ought to expect from a government operative, torture is probably the kind of intelligence gathering techniques desperate post-apocalyptic scavenger gangs would apply. After seeing how much care and attention they put into their sick execution moves, though, I'm not sure I would like to play a game based on trying to watching five of them in a row each round.

Well, it's one thing to say it fits in the setting (I agree), it's kind of another to premise a multi-player mode on its efficacy

 

 

Because they're saying the solution to torturing one person not working is to torture more people?

 

Because it's more torture?

Well maybe I shouldn't have found it difficult to express why. MAYBE I'm a big dummy. Maybe.

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Catching up on things after a long trip, so I apologize for bringing up a part of the discussion from way back in the thread, but if you want to try a Streetesque Fighter with simplified controls, there's always Capcom vs SNK 2: EO. The EO is for "Easy Operation," which is both a Guile victory bark and a mode of control which maps a bunch of stuff to pushing the right stick in various directions.

 

I never messed with it enough to get a feel for how things play out, but CvS2 is a radical as hell game that everyone should play anyway.

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Why does everyone forget the Path of Neo? That game was kinda good. Mostly.

totally, it was the matrix game i had been waiting for (it was a bit buggy and had some weird sections) it was about being Neo and that is awesome, plus the fighting styles were really fun to play, those other games sucked though

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Why does everyone forget the Path of Neo? That game was kinda good. Mostly.

 

Good is a strong word, but I had fun with it and it was certainly infinitely better than Enter the Matrix.

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Good is a strong word, but I had fun with it and it was certainly infinitely better than Enter the Matrix.

I will call most things that make me grin ear to ear good. That fucking ending is one of the most memorable and delightful things in all of my gaming history.

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I only played the some of the first Splinter Cell and then Chaos Theory (number three). In the original Splinter Cell, Fisher's tendency to torture was implied to be part of his loose-cannon Navy SEAL attitude: it wasn't Third Echelon policy to torture or necessarily allow for torture on the field, but it was tolerated as part of the slack on the leash that Third Echelon kept on Fisher. It also eased into the notion of torture as part of Fisher's approach: I think it was the third or fourth mission before Fisher actually snatched someone (a chauffeur, I believe) from out of the shadows and interrogated him while applying pain, and again, the implication was that Fisher was crossing into Third Echelon policy gray zone in doing so. Note that this was in 2002, so after 9/11, but before Abu Graib and the illegal combatants controversy

 

By Chaos Theory, Fisher was routinely strangleholding people (goodguys and badguys), during which the player could press info out of one and then choose whether to sleeper choke him unconscious or break his neck. (Now that I think about it, I don't remember a single female target of this process).

 

The normalization of enhanced interrogation of bystanders in Splinter Cell reminds me of the time when Nick was told by Todd Howard that in Skyrim, looting barrels took a higher priority to escaping the rageful rampage of fire-spitting flying dragons, not because it made sense but because it was an accepted convention in games like Skyrim.

 

(I tried to find the original bit, but it's not labeled in the episode indexes as Nick's Skyrim Story. But that same anecdote is referenced here.)

 

It could easily be that the grab-and-interrogate process became regarded as common practice by the Splinter Cell developers, only instead of just being stupid video game shit, it presented even less fortunate implications. I wonder if the US didn't develop a robust program for enhanced interrogation (including the numerous legal whitepapers justifying enhanced interrogation) if Conviction and Blacklist players wouldn't be twisting their knives into hapless victims today.

 

Also, Splinter Cell early on was about Fisher doing his day job. Somewhere around Double Agent I understand the series turns more political and melodramatic even introducing moral dilemmas and trust as a game mechanic. It's generally always a bad idea for an espionage field agent to get invested in his or her work, and Fisher needs to properly end his career as a burnt out drunk living the rest of his days in a special town for dangerous ex-spies.

 

Ironically, Third Echelon is a secret military branch of the NSA, who were regarded as the good guys until we discovered they're spying on all of us, treating us as suspects of terrorism (and handing evidence of other crimes over to the DoJ). And Fisher has worked over Americans before.

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Although Splinter Cell had the NSA pegged as bad guys (in Conviction) years before we knew they were doing terrible things.

 

Conviction? That was in 2010, and the cell-phone tap thing was already suspected and hinted at in Congress, which started in 2003 around the time of Iraqi Freedom. Even before that, we had the illegal wiretaps controversy which was centered around the NSA and the FBI.

 

That's one of the deals of the Tom Clancy name is that the technology and protocols within these titles are supposed to be at least currently in development Fisher's stealth suit exists, at least on the drawing board. I'm pretty sure Third Echelon is fictional, as if the NSA ever needed something like that they'd just tap some SEALs.

 

Third Echelon

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I only played the some of the first Splinter Cell and then Chaos Theory (number three). In the original Splinter Cell, Fisher's tendency to torture was implied to be part of his loose-cannon Navy SEAL attitude: it wasn't Third Echelon policy to torture or necessarily allow for torture on the field, but it was tolerated as part of the slack on the leash that Third Echelon kept on Fisher. It also eased into the notion of torture as part of Fisher's approach: I think it was the third or fourth mission before Fisher actually snatched someone (a chauffeur, I believe) from out of the shadows and interrogated him while applying pain, and again, the implication was that Fisher was crossing into Third Echelon policy gray zone in doing so. Note that this was in 2002, so after 9/11, but before Abu Graib and the illegal combatants controversy

 

By Chaos Theory, Fisher was routinely strangleholding people (goodguys and badguys), during which the player could press info out of one and then choose whether to sleeper choke him unconscious or break his neck. (Now that I think about it, I don't remember a single female target of this process).

This is the opposite of my read on the Splinter Cell series. Fisher has no tendency to torture in either 1 or 3. What he does is grab a dude, hold a gun or a knife to him, and say he might kill the guy if he doesn't cooperate (give Fisher information). In 1, you also don't have the option of pulling the trigger on the guy, you can only knock him out. Maybe I just have a different definition of torture to you but I wouldn't consider pointing a gun at a guy and asking for a door code to be torture. In Conviction, where you hold a guy's face in a fire for 5 seconds, that's torture.

 

In Chaos Theory (which is pretty much the game where Sam starts having a personality) he's shown to be disgusted by torture and torturers. The first mission has a scene where you witness a guy hanging over a bath being tortured to death with some electrical device or other. If you "interrogate" (this is the hold-knife-to-throat-and-ask-questions routine) the torturer, Fisher angrily wants to know why he tortured the victim, and when the guy doesn't even know, says something like "You're just the stupid guy who likes to hurt people? Can you think of any reason the world wouldn't be a better place without you?" (whether you kill him or not is, as always, optional). 

Also, though Lambert orders Fisher to leave the torture victim's body where it is (hanging, bleeding into a bath), the player has the option to cut the rope and lie the guy down in the bath, saying "Just because he's dead doesn't mean I need to leave him here hanging like a piece of meat". Lambert tells him to stay rational, and Fisher says "You can spare 30 seconds for some simple dignity". 

Stuff like this is why it seemed like such a bizarre turnaround in Conviction and to a lesser extent Blacklist when Sam just tortures and kills everybody he meets (I'm pretty sure there's only maybe 3 guys you need to kill in the entirety of Chaos Theory). 

 

Semi-related: one of my favourite things in Chaos Theory is the scripted sequences it has which can play out differently, including different voice acting, if you try to go off-script, and it's never signposted. Like the time you're ordered to call in an airstrike on some crashed US planes whose pilots are still alive in the wreckage (I guess in order to destroy some data they were carrying before the enemy can get it). There's no hud pop-up to tell you it's a Moral Choice Moment or anything, but you can sprint off down the street and get the pilots out of danger before you call it in if you're quick, with the short term repercussion that your boss yells at you about it. 

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This is the opposite of my read on the Splinter Cell series. Fisher has no tendency to torture in either 1 or 3. What he does is grab a dude, hold a gun or a knife to him, and say he might kill the guy if he doesn't cooperate (give Fisher information). In 1, you also don't have the option of pulling the trigger on the guy, you can only knock him out. Maybe I just have a different definition of torture to you but I wouldn't consider pointing a gun at a guy and asking for a door code to be torture. In Conviction, where you hold a guy's face in a fire for 5 seconds, that's torture.

 

From Wikiquotes

[sam interrogating Grinko's driver, Hamlet]

    Hamlet: What the hell!?

    Fisher: I'm going to ask you some questions. When I think you're lying, I'll do this.

    [Hamlet groans]

 

I'm afraid that counts as torture, so even then Sam Fisher thinks its a. justified, and b. works. Now, granted, he also says

 

    Fisher: ...I'm tired and I hate making people scream - it gets me down.

 

But just because he doesn't like to do it means he's not against it if he thinks it'll get him fast results.

 

In Chaos Theory (which is pretty much the game where Sam starts having a personality) he's shown to be disgusted by torture and torturers....

 

Just because one is disgusted by people who do evil shit doesn't make them incapable of doing it themselves when they feel it's justified (say, by dehumanizing the victims). Even pacifists might kill someone when the choice is that or to lose a loved one. And throughout Chaos Theory Fisher was snatching people up and shaking them down for intel. One of the dangers of the (I assume vetoed) knife-twirling participatory torture in Conviction is that it implies he was twisting knives all along in the earlier games to get information, and that the participatory knife-work just hadn't yet been implemented.

 

Knife-twisting or no, when it comes to real-world field agents sneaking through enemy compounds (which, yes, happens on occasion) I'm positive it's against policy to grab people and interrogate them on site. There are just too many contingencies with that scenario. Most likely, such missions are conducted so as to eliminate all contact with non-essential targets, except to neutralize (collaterally murder) them. And we don't proceed with a mission unless all the intel and espionage infrastructure (colloquially called installing the plumbing) is in place.

 

In a Tom Clancy game, which is supposed to be emulating real-world protocols, it's a wonder to me why interrogation is part of the game at all.

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