10 Video Game Moments You've Always Misunderstood
8. It's A Mockery Of "Enhanced Interrogation" (Not An Endorsement) - Grand Theft Auto V
Perhaps the single most controversial mission in any Grand Theft Auto game is GTA V's "By the Book," where Trevor is instructed to torture a man, Ferdinand Kerimov, to learn the whereabouts of Tahir Javan, an Azerbaijani man who the FIB claims has terrorist links.
Players are forced to brutalise Kerimov in order to discover Javan's location - choosing from methods such as waterboarding, electrocution and ripping his teeth out with pliers - and then take control of Michael to fire a bullet through Javan's head.
The mission was massively divisive with critics and players alike, many of whom felt it was a step too far into "torture porn" territory, and that the successful execution of an apparent terrorist sympathiser implied an endorsement of "enhanced interrogation" techniques.
But if you pay much attention to the mission and its fallout, you'll realise it's really the opposite. A Weazel News radio broadcast reveals that Javan was an innocent philanthropist, and a newspaper confirms he was a genuine credit to the community.
Clearly, Rockstar were ripping to shreds the very idea of using torture to gain actionable intelligence, but if you were still stewing in your righteous rage at the end of the mission, it was easily missed.
Granted, the complaints about the torture sequence's extreme violence and its placement as a mandatory gameplay element are completely valid, but to deem Rockstar sympathetic to the U.S. Army's fondness for illegal interrogation techniques is straight-up wrong.