Every time I see what seems like an interesting RPG or tactical turn-based whatever it’s called, I run into the “dragon-hunting little kids” motif. Or the coming-of-age “I’m destined to save the world” stuff. Heck, even a game about bombing Germany in WWII and killing hundreds of thousands of people represents the killers as nine-year-olds.
I was reading this article and thinking how like a good filmmaker, a good game designer could take the personal, geographical, and nationalist elements here and employ them in the service of a good story.
Is that expecting too much from an “immature genre” or can games no longer be called “immature” and we can expect adult (not sexually adult, but thematically adult) content from games that also have more traditional gameplay (so I’m excluding things like Firewatch)? Or are the mechanisms of “traditional” gaming the things that are preventing the evolution of stuff that I’m looking for?
I feel like we discuss stuff like this tangentially a lot but not explicitly (there’s that word again) as its own topic.
I’m not a big fantasy guy, but this has always been a big draw of the Witcher games for me. Geralt gives off this dry, too-old-for-this-shit vibe with everything he does that really amuses me.
Yeah, the books are great! (in Polish.) What do you think is the obstacle to moving things out of the magical fantasy times? Or medieval Europe? Or Nobunaga’s Ambition?
I feel much the same way, and I don’t hold much hope for better storytelling in games, especially RPGs.
I think the reason is there’s already so much to be done with artwork, the engine, game design, music, etc. that story is not much of a priority, so the classic themes are a more surefire way of getting sales.
It’s kind of a vicious circles too… many game designers seem to have no other point of reference except for anime, cartoons and video games, so that’s what they recreate.
I guess it is odd that the average gamer is now a thirtysomething dude, but everything is still created with teenage sensibilities in mind. Maybe that doesn’t say good things about the average gamer’s culture level.
I dunno, inertia maybe? I feel like fantasy is still kind of the default setting when most people hear “RPG.” Not that there aren’t exceptions, with stuff like the Mass Effect and Fallout games. Come to think of it, those are pretty much all older characters too.
This is one problem I have with JRPGs, I don’t feel like they’ve aged with me, and even if they have lots of depth of gameplay they just seem so twee. I know somebody is going to jump in and tell me that’s not fair, and I’m sure that there are exceptions. But I think they do prove the rule.
I am not sure if you are talking about videogames or tabletop here. Videogame-wise it’s definitely a shallower field but you might find the wonky French Flash RPG Winter Voices interesting. It deals with themes like loss, grief, depression and internal demons, and manifests them in the mechanics as well.
In the tabletop space there is a ton of stuff. Dog Eat Dog confronts the distorting influence of colonization on both sides. Grey Ranks is about being child soldiers in the Polish resistance during WWII. My Life With Master is about abusive relationships. And there are so many more.
I can play a super-high-fidelity VR version of that with haptic feedback like bloody knuckles and oil-stained t-shirts and be productive at the same time, although granted it usually costs a lot more than $20 per session.
Many of the examples being given here of “mature” RPGs only seem to be “mature” by way of, uh, having lots of people dying or having romance options and creepy clothes-on sex. We could do far better than that, but the issue is that there really isn’t a meaningful target audience for truly “mature” games, so incredibly few actually get made.
I think it would be a bit more accurate to say that we tolerate the “adult” aspects like weird avatar sex and exploding gibs in order to hopefully get to more interesting actual adult content. Doesn’t always work out, but you play the hand your dealt.
Market trends do not seem to point toward “adult” role playing. Anyone who tries to pioneer such a genre is taking a big financial risk. I am not so wise that I can see all ends, nor can I foresee whether a vessel launched across this particular Blue Ocean might find purchase, but I do know this: if I’m financing your role playing endeavor I’d feel much safer if it included anime body pillow futures.
I don’t want to make this a culture war, but if these things are true, are they connected? Is the reason that we don’t see games that have a less fantasy-fied or anime-like appearance (with stunted themes) that the creators are making games for an audience that is very much a reflection of them? Or do the game mechanics themselves get in the way?
I just don’t understand the degree of difference in sophistication between good books and films and good games.
Bruce, have you tried 80 Days, the gamebook on iOS? It might be a good example of what you’re looking for.
Edit: I think gamebooks are the best hope for this kind of role playing for a number of reasons, one being the ability to focus on text rather than having to animate all possible role playing choices and their subsequent scenarios.
Really would like to know. Since games like The Witcher or Fallout or any Bioware game is going to cost a bunch of money, I have to assume someone has put a lot of thought into figuring out how best to earn that back. Maybe the logic is, the kind of people who really dig avatar boinking will not buy a game without it, but the folks who don’t care for it won’t mind its inclusion too much, or at least kind of tune it out. That’s basically what I do.
Why is avatar boinking bad? Sex is part of life. It makes sense that it is part of game like Witcher. And that’s not the only adult thing it has, it also deals with substance and domestic abuse, raising a kid, religious fundamentalism…one quest is about a guy trying to cheer up his wife suffering from alzheimer’s…
