[Basic] Skill of the week: Brainwashing (and Brain Hacking)
 

Brainwashing (and Brain Hacking) are the skill of changing someone's motives and personality via mundane and technological means. Brain Hacking is doing this with computers, via some kind of direct brain-to-computer interface. The skill description doesn't mention virtual reality, but an immersive virtual reality, such as Transhuman Space VR, that you can't get out of, would seem to make Brainwashing much easier: that's definitely one area where Transhuman horror is justified. Changing Times and Transhuman Mysteries have some support for this. Brain Hacking in THS is only possible via a ghost editor program, although the skill also has legitimate uses in creating Ghosts.

Ultra-Tech has equipment for Brainwashing, but doesn't mention Brain Hacking. Madness Dossier, naturally , has a fair bit about both, and a character template where they're primary skills. It also has an unfortunate bit of phrasing that makes it look as if Empathy boosts Brainwashing: I've submitted errata. Social Engineering has extended rules for brainwashing and for healing its effects. Psis has benefits for using Telepathy powers with Brainwashing. Power-Ups 6: Quirks has a reminder that Brainwashing can give people new quirks, and the Residual Personality quirk.

Action, Banestorm, Horror, Reign of Steel, Space and Supers are alert to the plot possibilities of Brainwashing. Zombies covers zombies who are brainwashed rather than undead.

Brainwashing is generally considered villainous conduct, but I'd be curious to know of any cases where PCs have done it for good reasons. That's imaginable in reducing the effects of traumas, although the cases where I've seen that happen (not in GURPS) have been by making memories less immediate. What else has happened with Brainwashing in your games?

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Brainwashing (and Brain Hacking)
 

My character in Transhuman Space used Brain Hacking mostly for extraction of information from a ghosted omnihomicidal enemy astropus. Not really any edits, just info-extraction. Also to examine the Shadows of other PCs after exposure to some nasty memetic and other psychological warfare phenomena.

In the campaign I'm GMing, the party was seriously considering the option of using their defaults in Brain Hacking and Brainwashing to 'reeducate' a human-sacrificing cult leader instead of killing him (the most likely outcome would've been amnesia and other serious neurological trauma[s]). They eventually didn't go with this plan. (They also all but outright needed a field wetware kit - analogous to but weaker than the one from Madness Dossier - but the only one with the possibility of attaining one refused from the very beginning.)

Brainwashing shows up in the background of the campaign here and there, but isn't taken or rolled by or against any PCs so far except in the backstory.

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Brainwashing (and Brain Hacking)
 

Out of curiosity, did you just submit it?
I'm wondering if the text of Brainwashing there is meant to be setting specific.I've never used the skill in my games (I think I've mentioned that I shy away from mind control and related themes). Using it 'for good reasons' is a concept I have a hard time wrapping my head around. Wouldn't treatment like that just be done with Psychology or else move into dystopian territory?

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Brainwashing (and Brain Hacking)
 

I e-mailed it on the 13th. I tend to do most of the research for these posts straight after submitting the previous one, so that I have time to think about it before finalising the text. If Empathy is meant to boost Brainwashing in the Madness Dossier setting, then the text to say so seems to be missing.
If a setting had reliable technological means of, say, altering brain chemistry to fix depression, but they required skilled use of equipment, rather than prescribing medicines, then the process of using them might resemble brainwashing with good intentions. I don't think there's any analogy to this in the real world, but people create some weird settings.

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Brainwashing (and Brain Hacking)
 

It's manipulation of the brain/mind. It's only "evil" if done without consent or medical necessity just like nearly every other form of coercion.

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Brainwashing (and Brain Hacking)
 

Brain Hacking is handy for Alpha Centauri Probe Teams

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Brainwashing (and Brain Hacking)
 

Now... how do you prove consent or medical necessity?

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Brainwashing (and Brain Hacking)
 

Same way it's done in the real world I assume.

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Brainwashing (and Brain Hacking)
 

Bit different when you're doing a procedure that can literally change the patient's mind I think.

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Brainwashing (and Brain Hacking)
 

Stockholm syndrome does that if you believe in it.
Normal everyday social manipulation alters our beliefs and perceptions. None of us are immune to such minor forms of brainwashing.

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Brainwashing (and Brain Hacking)
 

There are real treatments that can literally change the patient's mind.

The most startling treatment of Brain Hacking I've seen is the one in the Moon of the Three Rings where that before going out on a restricted planet, their version of the Prime Directive mandates that every crew member be mentally reprogrammed to be incapable of selling or giving more advanced technology to the natives. The startling part is that the protagonist regards that as an inconvenience.

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Brainwashing (and Brain Hacking)
 

Yeah that is weirdly phrased. I think it means that the bonus applies to Pyschology to determine if it passes the 12+ threshold for the bonus to Brainwashing, but I'm not sure.

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Brainwashing (and Brain Hacking)
 

I think that's what it's meant to say, but some confusion crept in somewhere.

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Brainwashing (and Brain Hacking)
 

I had to re-read it to get what you were talking about, but now I see it. I think that's actually the intention, explaining why it would pass editorial muster. Assuming that, it's not introducing a new modifier to Brainwashing, but just reminding of the existing ones for Psychology.

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Brainwashing (and Brain Hacking)
 

So following the conversation... would it be good, evil or something else to force such "treatments" on those that don't consent, and if it is what happens when someone does it anyone but the end result is a "patient" that now no longer cares or realizes he was "treated"? What about when a government can mandate such treatment regardless of consent? Yes, some people ethically may warrant compulsion for treatment; they really are ill and need it. The problem is that having the power to do something is not the same as having the legitimate moral authority.

Also, for the sake of discussion, I'm going to treat brainwashing as... brainwashing. Not a matter of persuasion or peer pressure or the many common things that can one might claim are lesser forms of brainwashing.

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Brainwashing (and Brain Hacking)
 

Come to think of it, my character did voluntarily undergo some extensive mind-editing. Totally voluntarily. And is planning to undergo more. He also knows the process, so he was pretty informed.

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Brainwashing (and Brain Hacking)
 

And you know this because you're not your character; you know that he wanted his mind altered and so he underwent the process, and that the end results were what he wanted.

In real life with fantastic elements (as opposed to the "mundane" real world brainwashing)... could you know? That message you left yourself to remind yourself that you did indeed volunteer for the process... did you really leave it or is it a forgery. The memory of leaving it could be faked (assuming there is one) and if you can jack with someone's brain by altering memories, you could force someone to write such a note, record such a video, etc. before then wiping/replacing that memory as well.

Other people? Could be in on it. The good news is that eventually it does become improbable to downright ridiculous if "the entire world" has to be in on it. Still, for the PCs in a campaign, this sounds like quite the trap (or adventure starter).

Player: "The mysterious stranger tells you that he is your brother."

GM: "He tells you that your memory has been wiped and replaced. They also did some cosmetic work to avoid you resembling your former appearance."

Player: "Yeah but I know what actually happened."

GM: "Do you?"

In all seriousness, there are times when the GM must provide incomplete or faulty information to the PCs. That is why sometimes the GM rolls for you; if you fail a Perception check then the player knows the character missed something (barring "fake" checks that exist just to keep players guessing). If you get caught, for example, in an Illusion (or hallucination or virtual world etc.) the GM should be giving you some clues, but in accordance with the plot. This could mean gaming out events that aren't happening at all.

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Brainwashing (and Brain Hacking)
 

Note that I'm looking at it not from the post-edit PoV, but from a pre-edit one. I.e. it's not a question of 'do I trust that I agreed to being edited'; it's a question of 'here is the specialist who can do changes X and Y to me; do I go with it?'. And the answer is yes. (As a player I also know that it 'was' yes, but this is beside the point.)

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Brainwashing (and Brain Hacking)
 

The most recent episode of Doctor Who touched on this concept.

Spoiler of the beginning only:

(I'm sorry. I can't remember how to hide text.) I see someone was kind enough to fix it for me. Someone also PM-ed me on how to do it for next time.

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Brainwashing (and Brain Hacking)
 

Well, our attitude toward such things is shaped to some extent by the fact that all such treatments will handicap the subject to some extent, whether it's a anti-psychotic drug regimen, or a prefrontal lobotomy. Our attitudes might change somewhat if we could really edit people to be fully functional instead of differently handicapped. Even so it would normally only be acceptable for people convicted of such serious crimes that execution or very long prison terms would be the modern recourse.

A minor rewrite of someone's memory is an assault. Like an assault, it becomes socially acceptable if the person is genuinely permitting it. One can not complain about being punched if one enters a boxing match. It also becomes acceptable if for example it somehow keeps your victim from killing you because they've forgotten why they wanted to. A nearly complete rewrite of someone's basic personality traits lies in the territory rape and murder in terms of intrusiveness even if the rewrite produces someone who is much happier and easier for everyone to else to live with. But if you'd allow someone to commit suicide, there not reason not to allow someone to walk into a personality improvement parlour.

However, if you are a spy, you are to some extent released from normal constraints of law and custom provided that what you are doing serves your government's interests. Thus you can steal, lie, commit assault and murder provided that it serves a legitimate national security end. And that's where you end up with the Alpha Centauri Probe Teams brainhacking base officials to facilitate bloodless takeovers.

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Brainwashing (and Brain Hacking)
 

It's almost trivially easy to alter people's memories right now for minor things. I don't think it's a crime anywhere though.
Eyewitness testimony is the least reliable of all, for example.

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Brainwashing (and Brain Hacking)
 

I was not talking about suggesting a conflicting version of events.

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Brainwashing (and Brain Hacking)
 

If you don't mean altering memories, then what do you mean?

Sorry if I seem dense. I'm still recovering from a bad cough/cold, so am denser than usual.

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Brainwashing (and Brain Hacking)
 

I do mean altering memories. But there is a significant difference between confusing a witnesses recollection of a briefly seen perpetrator and removing said witnesses memory that a violent event event even occurred.

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Brainwashing (and Brain Hacking)
 

There is always the Madness Dossier "lesser evil" option. If brainwashing can prevent something else really bad happening, you have at the least an ethical dilemma. That could involve, say, subverting a terrorist faction who've acquired nukes. However, that also throws up out-of-game dubious implications, as people start contorting possibility to propose all sorts of highly unlikely and artificial bad situations which might somehow demand and justify use of brainwashing, thereby excusing study of the skill -- which is then sitting there in the toolbox, being tempting...

In The Madness Dossier itself, it's used to prevent something really, really, really bad, at explicitly fantastical levels -- though even then, using such techniques explicitly and implicitly corrupts the character.

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Brainwashing (and Brain Hacking)
 

I'm talking about slightly more extreme alteration. Like making people remember seeing Bugs Bunny at Disney Land.
Human memory is very poor. Right now such manipulation is haphazard and depends on numerous hard to determine variables. But it wouldn't take super science to boost its effectiveness.

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Brainwashing (and Brain Hacking)
 

How is that more extreme than "You never saw a shooting"?

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Brainwashing (and Brain Hacking)
 

Aren't cult deprogramming, addiction rehab and military training examples of "good" brainwashing?

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Brainwashing (and Brain Hacking)
 

I'm surprised that Mental Surgery from psionic powers didn't make the list. I assume it ought to, as its basically a specialization of the option to use brainwashing as the controlling skill for the conditioning enhancement of mind control. My oldest active gurps character was built around this skill (actually, my first gurps character to play with other players as well).

I kind of side stepped the ethics of it through a combination of making a ruthless and amoral character that happens to work for the good guys and through the campaign stakes being really high (the destruction or survival of a world or each chapter).

The ability hasn't actually seen much use. The style of play has been too fast paced for much mental surgery, and he's mostly used his secondary telepathic abilities, which are ideally suited for the foes he's faced. So I have a skill of 20 that's never really been used, at least not in anything related to the central plot. Its been a nice trick to have in the bag though.

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Brainwashing (and Brain Hacking)
 

Military training isn't. But yes, cult deprogramming and addiction rehab are things you could use Brainwashing skill for.

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Brainwashing (and Brain Hacking)
 

It's been done in experiments on real people, for one thing.

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Brainwashing (and Brain Hacking)
 

Or even all forms of mandatory schooling and childhood education. Indoctrination is merely teaching you don't agree with.

If my father had forced me to continue to attend Sunday School after I came out as atheist at age 6 would have been an attempt at deprogramming or good brainwashing in many people's minds.

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Brainwashing (and Brain Hacking)
 

Boot camp alters personality through involuntary means. If that doesn't count as indoctrination / brainwashing/ deprogramming, then nothing does.
It's often necessary to keep soldiers alive in the field, but that doesn't change how and what it does.

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Brainwashing (and Brain Hacking)
 

Well, I've never been deprogrammed from a cult or been to rehab, but I did graduate from MCRD San Diego and the Infantry Training Battalion at the School of Infantry, and what I've seen of rehab in documentaries and the like, makes it seem very similar (except that rehab looks easier (although I guess the withdrawal makes it harder)). Certainly some of the goals of military basic and MOS training are "brainwashy" - resocialization in particular seems like a "brainwash" kind of technique.

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Brainwashing (and Brain Hacking)
 

More real is not the same thing as more extreme. In fact it's pretty much the opposite.

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Brainwashing (and Brain Hacking)
 

The problem with personal examples is that they are just that (personal) and as such tend to have a significant emotional component. One of the reasons I wished to steer the conversation away from the unfortunately blurry line between persuasion and brainwashing.

Indoctrination expects you not to question. Unfortunately many things that are supposed to be education, with at least some back and forth are indeed just indoctrination. Unfortunately most people I know don't distinguish between the two, on either the giving or the receiving end. In the United States of America I tend to attribute this to the government education system, which seems to favor indoctrination over actual education (and whose model seems to have been followed in all walks of life). Of course, that model seems to have been taken from elsewhere in the first place...

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Brainwashing (and Brain Hacking)
 

Stepping back for a moment, I will risk turning this into a matter of semantics, for better or worse. We have discussed the realm of physical violence earlier and it got me thinking; there is no such thing as a "good" murder.

I am not a pacifist. I certainly believe there are times when ending the life of another human being is justified and even required. If you have the authority to end the life of another when killing that other is indeed justified and required, it is not murder. I realize that can sound rather legalistic as well, but while I believe in absolutes, I don't believe the world is simple. At the risk of sounding like an ignorant child trying to sound how he believes an educated adult might, while I view the world as black and white it is not a matter of two endless planes, or the taijitu or even a checkerboard. Rather I see life as a complex mosaic often consisting of incredibly fine pieces, that often appear grey because it requires intense, scrutiny to distinguish one element from the other... and depending on the exact nature of something, its "position" within the mosaic, the same "shape" can be either evil or good, black or white.

TL;DR: Otaku has thoughts and opinions on this matter, but wonders if a lack of common understanding means he has been regrettably wasting others' time in trying to flesh out the discussion and by speaking in the third person.

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Brainwashing (and Brain Hacking)
 

I think that's the core here. 'Brainwashing' or 'murder' don't describe value-neutral actions, they already come pre-loaded with a value-judgment that puts the action firmly in 'bad' territory.

The most moral action in a given situation can be to cause the death of someone or to modify his state of mind, but in that case, it's not appropriate to label the action with a value-loaded term that carries with it disapproval. If the action was not evil, it should probably not be described with a loaded term that implies it was.

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Brainwashing (and Brain Hacking)
 

Real is real, and fictional is fictional. Extremeness is unrelated entirely.

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Brainwashing (and Brain Hacking)
 

It's the skill of granting or removing mental traits, either through non-intrusive methods (Brainwashing) or intrusive ones (Brain Hacking). It seems to match the GURPS principle of 'look at the effect, not at the dictionary definition of the word used in the name of the skill or advantage'. Karate isn't just one specific style, Honesty is not Truthfulness, and Zeroed isn't about multiplication.

Hmm. This does make it for a curious hidden default: Brainwashing might default to Teaching-6.

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Brainwashing (and Brain Hacking)
 

Not entirely. Fictional allows infinitely more extreme things than real does.

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Brainwashing (and Brain Hacking)
 

I think that the point here would be that if we were discussing GURPS rules for military training, we wouldn't usually say that Brainwashing skill was involved. If we were going to talk about rules for cult deprogramming, we might. However, the two may be similar enough in practice that this is a category error.

I guess that the general image of "brainwashing" is that it's a very quick and very dirty version of the same sort of thing that is covered by Teaching skill, built on detailed knowledge of psychological science rather than any sort of small-e empathy. But that suggests that the borderline between Brainwashing and Teaching skill may be fuzzy. Well, so it goes; the borderlines between Karate and Brawling, or Diplomacy and Streetwise, can get fuzzy at times too.

And yes, "brainwashing" is generally seen as a dirty word, if only because the classic techniques seem to have been very brutal and unpleasant (though they might be considered crude and embarrassing bodge-jobs by less crass future psych-experts, who won't have to hurt you or stick you in front of spinning spiral patterns to turn your mind inside out). Also, it usually involves treating the human mind as a thing to be manipulated, broken or rebuilt to taste, which sounds a bit psychopathic. Cult deprogramming may actually be as nice as brainwashing can get and still qualify for the term; the line there would be "someone else has already treated this mind as a thing to be rebuilt; we're just trying to restore it".

Because it's a dirty word, people may not want to see it on their good-guy character sheets. But in settings where cult deprogramming is an important thing for the heroes, or where teams of psych-war probe teams are sent out to make enemy bases surrender bloodlessly (the alternative being frontal assaults and hundreds of deaths on both sides), well, you're going to have to call the skill something, and PCs shouldn't be any more embarrassed to have this one on their character sheets than to have Guns or Intimidation.

(Or we could rename other skills for similar honesty. "Stick Sharp Things In Soft Things Which Scream And Bleed", perhaps?)

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Brainwashing (and Brain Hacking)
 

That may be my problem with it. If Brainwashing is also its own counter-skill, then having it for the purpose of deprogramming is less distasteful. It still seems to me that Psychology would be the go-to skill for cases like that.

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Brainwashing (and Brain Hacking)
 

Psychology is clearly the underlying scientific skill, but that leaves room for a "doing things" practical skill, that doesn't require lots of knowledge of the science, like the relationship between Engineer and Mechanic.

Counsellors, NLP practioners, and so on might well be using "Psychology mechanic" skill. This might be a familiarity of Brainwashing, or might be a separate skill: the GRUPS skills model is somewhat arbitrary.

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Brainwashing (and Brain Hacking)
 

I'd say more like Physics and Engineering. But that may be me thinking of "Psychology" as an academic skill rather than what GURPS usually means by the word.

And those hypothetical deprogrammers might have to know enough about Brainwashing that they could use the skill as such quite effectively, even if they're too ethical to do so and the rule mechanics in use have them rolling against Psychology.

But there's also scope for, say, the benevolent Galactic Federation's whatever-works psych ops teams being PCs who go into border worlds and brainwash the local leaderships into not fighting thermonuclear wars. Because, you know, idiots with nukes, predicted megadeaths, screw the ethical semantics. Could be an interesting campaign.

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Brainwashing (and Brain Hacking)
 

First, it's reasonable to assume that Brainwashing is a specialisation so distinct from general Psychology as to be its own skill, with probably a -6 default (the recommended value in the book, IIRC). Second, cult deprogramming is a subset of Brainwashing if done through this skill so . . . Buy A Technique!

Noncombat Techniques don't get enough love. Look at the number of kick techniques alone, or better yet the number of Techniques for the whole skill of Karate. Now see if you can find as many for Psychology or Brainwashing. Spread teh Tekno-luv!

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Brainwashing (and Brain Hacking)
 

I've been thinking about something...

I'm kinda hesitant to do things like that in a game because I'm a bit squeamish on the subject, and I'll have to talk to my players about it before ever doing that as a GM, but what would be your thought about an evil organization where most rank and file members have been brainwashed?

Say, the organization sets up specific victim support groups to find vulnerable people among them, and turns their pain into hatred for a specific group of people whom they say are part of a vast conspiracy against them and are responsible for a trauma, and then giving them some basic training (and the Fanatical and Intolerance disadvantages) before sending them out to die for the cause? Kinda like the Brotherhood of Nod cultivating hatred for GDI in citizens living in the yellow/red zones (zones highly contaminated by tiberium, a toxic living material poisoning and killing people, with the side effect of disrupting infrastructures like power plants and the like due to death of skilled personnel) before recruiting them in militia squad and using them as canon fodder or even suicide bombers (from C&C 3 Tiberium Wars)?

It would be a touchy subject requiring discussion with the players before implementation, but how would such a scenario work in-game?