Role-playing games with adult (as opposed to Young Adult) themes

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.

In the semi-AAA sphere, these RPGs deal with some heavy themes and are decidedly not for kids

Fallout New Vegas
Witcher 1/2/3
Kingdom Come Deliverance
Vampire Bloodlines
Deus Ex/Human Revolution/Mankind Divided

Not a coincidence that I love all of these.

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.

Yeah but why are w dealt this hand? Why are we stuck with weird avatar sex? What is going on?

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.

Yep. Nice writing, but not what I’m looking for.

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.

I think it might be helpful if you broke down what you mean by role playing game.

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…

@Brooski, this might not be what you’re looking for, but I made a thread a while back for a game called The Council:

The Council, an episodic RPG without combat

I’ll tell you that one thing I am always looking out for is a game that pursued conflict options that don’t involve combat or killing. It’s kind of my thing. Now, as mentioned in that thread, the game is episodic and only one episode is released so far, but there hasn’t been any weird sex or killing yet! Some fisticuffs though.

This is a lot of it, and was mentioned in the same post you quoted:

The emphasis in most games on combat is also relevant here. When your primary verb to interact with the world is some variant on “attack,” and so many of your dev resources are spent ensuring everything associated with that verb is fun and unique (or neither of the above, as is so often the case, but still), it’s very difficult to justify spending time and money on anything except a horribly cliché sci-fi/fantasy world.

A man after my own heart! I think I have a business proposition for you. Anyway, your latest order has arrived. We’ve made the upper parts extra large as per your specifications.

This. It’s like a drinking game. You do one shot if a war is declared at the beginning of the story and two shots if the game world is in a permanent state of stalemate war. “For in the grim dark future there is only Oceania, Eastasia and Eurasia.”

It also works on a smaller scale. It’s kinda hard to take The Last of Us’ story of sacrifice and survival seriously when you rack up a body count of like 150 humans. Resident Evil 4 didn’t have a “Serious Story™” and zombies only, so it felt less egregious.

I mean the usual stuff we accept to be an RPG, like Fallout, and have stats, and do stuff, but I guess also like Deus Ex sort of I guess.

Using the toilet is a part of life as well. And could be an interesting game mechanic if you have a survival game where the water supply is polluted! But the point is that just because something is addressed in a game doesn’t mean it is done so in a sophisticated way that serves a larger narrative or philosophical point. There are some important sex scenes in William Styron’s fiction, for example, but the most powerful ones are essential to the novels. Collecting playing cards of sexual conquests isn’t adult: it’s incredibly juvenile, in fact. And none of those other examples are necessarily “adult” in the sense that I was using it. Maybe that’s my problem - I should have said more adult and sophisticated. But then that sounds elitist, which this isn’t meant to be at all. I’m not trying to start a culture war. I just want to know what is preventing talented designers from telling real stories in games.

I suspect it’s partly the interactivity, partly the audience, partly the cultural influences of the creators. I mean, how many people really read Orhan Pamuk, anyway?

@Mark_L, while 80 Days is very good game writing, it isn’t good writing in a different sense because it is all setting. It doesn’t say anything.