Bay 12 Games Forum
Other Projects => Curses => Topic started by: praguepride on March 15, 2010, 02:50:57 pm
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You should check out the show Solitary. People are put into isolation and forced to abuse themselves for the promise of treats and prize money at the end.
Could be a useful source for LCS interrogation improvements. It's also an interesting quasi-look at stockholm syndrome. They end up wanting to "win" so bad even though "winning" involves even more pain and discomfort.
http://www.hulu.com/solitary
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This is so unethical.
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I watched the first season of Solitary. It is very similar to Survivor and Big Brother, but removing the social component. For all three of these, the compelling nature of the shows is because they're examinations of human behavior under stress, which is a subject EVERYONE finds interesting, whether they enjoy these shows or not. Solitary is just humans under stress without other humans around to interact with.
The situations in Solitary are so contrived, however, that it has a sense of cruelty and abuse to it, while Survivor and Big Brother both couch their fantasies in wilderness survival and modern roommates respectively. These are nominally real world situations, so even though both Survivor and Big Brother are pretty abusive and just as contrived, they don't feel so hollow.
I liked Solitary a bit for its honesty about the genre, but ultimately found it too distasteful to continue watching past the first season. Instead of forcing people out based on social defeat, the show's mechanics rely on abusing their contestants until they voluntarily walk off the show. Part of the problem for me was also that many of my favorite people dropped out quickly, because they were normal enough to not want to deal with the show's abuse.
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I'm not sure what can be derived from it, but especially in the final episodes, you can imagine how stockholm syndrome would work.
Sure it's a fantasy game show, but imagine a situation where it wasn't. You were locked in isolation, completely disoriented. No idea how long you're there. Your captors control when you sleep, when you eat, and how comfortable you are. You obey them, you get a reward. You get to sleep, eat, etc. You disobey them, you get punished. Alarms buzz for hours, temperature extremes cause severe discomfort.Eventually, the mind would snap and pleasing the captor would be the only driving concern. You'd want to obey even when you couldn't, even in the absence of punishment....
Anyway, I think isolation should have more impact on interrogations, and I think conversion overall should be a much quicker process, when done right.
First, I think you should be able to invest in an interrogation chamber. Standard improvement prices, 2-3k but it would dramatically improve your control over the prisoner. Without it, your prisoners are just tied to a chair. I think they should have a high chance of escape, especially if nobody is left at the base. Not just taking care of the prisoner but at the base in general. Interrogations would be slow, human contact would not be able to be controlled (because there's no soundproofing so they know there's people out there etc.).
Investing in the interrogation chamber allows you to control social interaction. You can communicate to the prisoner and use a reward/punish system to break them down. Using remote controls you can control food, water, sleep (alarms vs. no alarms), temperature, oxygen, basically their whole environment all without them ever seeing or knowing their captors.
It should have a minimum time to complete, even with master interrogators (and I think that time should be right around the normal "reported missing" time, so it's never guaranteed to convert them). However, this would be the most efficient and most effective. It wouldn't damage health, it would be a pretty continuous process chipping away at their wisdom. Heart would suffer as well, but again it should be a much more controlled process.
I envision this as taking some of the randomness out of interrogations. If you need the guaranteed quick flipover, or if you need high heart then you'll have to go through the regular methods, but if it's not vital and you just need conversion, and/or the target is weak willed, this would be the most efficient and gauranteed way to convert. Prisoner would have no chance of suicide, no chance of escape, that kind of thing. It would also be a good way to train new interrogators before getting "personal". Finally, I think the interrogator would be able to interrogate multiple people at a time. I'd like 9 in honor of solitary but that might be too broken. Maybe the chambers can hold 5 people that can all be interrogated by a single person in the control room.
So in summary, regular interrogations would be more difficult, especially for rookie interogators. Prisoners would have higher chances of suicide/escape, even when physically bound. The time period it would take woudl be highly variable. Skilled interrogators would reduce those random elements.
The new "interrogation chamber" would eliminate a lot of variables. You would be able to predict "given target's Intelligence + Wisdom, I can convert in X days". No risk of suicide, no risk of escape, no risk of interrogator gaining wisdom etc. No need for multiple options on how to treat, the chamber would just continually erode wisdom and heart at a 2:1 ratio or something like that. Interrogators would gain psychology (mainly through observation and playing with the controls) but it wouldn't be as quick a gain as psychology through personal interrogation. Finally, one interrogator can interrogate multiple people at a time.