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

My issue with game’s themes is, besides very few exceptions, you can’t bring your bagage in. The player is hardly ever left in charge of thinking what she wants to think. It seems developers either don’t trust the player, or when they claim they do, have some agenda and end up patronizing the player, which is a trend I experience a lot lately in indie games (I guess the infamous walking simulators, whether they are games at all, also classifiy there) and is even worse than the former to me.
A lot was discussed about the combats as the mean to expression in games in this thread, and to me, the one game that managed to be both adult and factor that gameplay problem into not only what it was trying to say, but what it supposedly wanted me to think about is Dark Souls. The violence is omnipresent but also absent, if you choose so, from various parts of that game’s world. When (if) you do chose to bring the violence into those parts, it is a very considerate, impactful and strong choice, something which comes from a change of the player’s understanding about what is happening.
Interestingly, that game has a silent protagonist which I didn’t find a liability in the slightest.
Arguably, this could all be stuff that I brought in, which I think is also true to a lot of good work of fictions, whatever the media. A player can play Dark Souls just like any action games and not think about any of all this, which is also the mark of good fiction, I guess.
Anyway my point is that trying to go around the violence might not be the way to achieve maturity, like a lot of games try, and fail to, but absorbing it and using it to great effects through the choices, and more importantly, consequences, might be a good way to explore.

Why hasn’t @ArmandoPenblade posted yet? Or has he been piecing together a giant post since post 0 and has yet to finish?

Sadly, @ArmandoPenblade doesn’t play games in electronic form anymore. When he comes back to the hobby though, we’ll be ready for him and embrace our brother.

Huzzah.

In the meantime, I am doing adult things in Battletech like maintaining a balanced budget month-to-month, paying interest on my bank loans, negotiating disputes between my crew members, and Goomba-stomping giant robots.

@Rock8Man mostly nails it; I haven’t played what most folks would consider a proper videogame through to completion, or hardly at all, in ages and ages, and don’t see that changing in the near future.

That said, I do think my time in tabletop RPGs leaves me wondering why more of this stuff can’t be systematized into PC gaming. Systems like Fate and World of Darkness have explicit mechanics for “social combat” that can be just as engaging and “tactical,” in a sense, as physical combat, but plays out between the opinions and beliefs of two people rather than with swords and guns.

Part of it, I think, is the inability of computers to plan for the truly unexpected–we’re a long way off from PCs emulating a good human GM–and being forced to stick with giving the player whatever the programmers anticipated and the producers budgeted for. A few people have talked about that in here–feeling “locked in” by the choices the game offers in conversations or even methods to progress through a mission.

In a more combat-heavy, power-fantasy-styled traditional videogame, that matters less. In the end, whether Shepherd hugs or kicks the puppy, we’re gonna get right back to blasting away Geths and Collectors in short order, right? The moral course of the game only runs so far, so lacking for complicated, branching, responsive paths in the plot and interpersonal interactions isn’t as wince-inducing as it might be in a more thoughtful, contemplative game.

Only moderately on-topic anecdote about a scifi comedy RPG session that went totally off the rails and turned a galactic battle to the death into something far more hilarious and interesting

I remember in a Fate session I ran a long time ago in my scifi comedy homebrew, Spaceward, Ho!. The players had been working toward freeing one of the main species in the setting (wherein, in a Star Control 2-esque twist, the legendary alliance of sapient species had disastrously lost a war and gotten locked onto their homeworlds by supershields, apart from straggling survivors in hidden colonies, starbases, and even fleets). The last thing standing between them and victory was the “Guardian Force,” an elite division of the evil Space Patrol run by nasty giant cockroaches called the Zuulgoes. The Guardian Force had been guarding this system, containing one of the most powerful species from the old Accord, the robotic Vandrosses, for centuries, and had taken to extreme contests of strength and bravery within the fleet to prove themselves and keep themselves entertained. They were, in short, the buffest goddamn giant space cockroaches in the galaxy.

The players initially infiltrated the system by pretending to be there to interview the Guardian Force for a popular men’s health publication about their workout regimen and rolling spectacularly well. Okay, haha, yes, funny, maybe not super adult (sorry, @Brooski, this is going somewhere, I promise), but also an entirely player generated idea, and hey, it worked. They got close to the Vandrossian homeworld, initiated their ridiculous plan to throw a moon at the planetary shielding system, and freed. . . what wound up being a giant death fleet of Vandrosses, who’d broken their homeworld down on a molecular level and converted it into a fleet. Which only was what had happened because one of our players had been expressing in-character fears that her species were nothing but the death-bots everyone was so afraid they were. . .

So, now we’re set for this cataclysmic showdown of fleets: the infamous, highly trained Guardian Force, versus the largest death fleet (technically three, but who’s counting?) ever assembled in galactic history. The players are running point, chasing down the GF flagship, ready to corner them in the asteroid fields and begin the final battle. . .

. . . except rather than initiating (probably justified) genocide against the muscle-bound bug-mutants, they instead argued them down–using social combat no less–from fighting for their lives to get them to agree to terms of a complicated, galaxy-wide surrender. . . if the players could best them in a contest of their choosing.

Which was, of course, because it’s a comedy game, a rocket-powered super-mutant-featuring rock-soundtracked arm-wrestling match between the PCs’ security officer and the admiral of the Guardian Force, but okay, still:

That was a long course of action more or less entirely player driven, by their fears, their proficiencies, their morals, and their choices. I had genuinely gone into the session with a dozen or more enemy ships statted up, ready for Galaxy War Part 1, and they surprised me time and again over the course of four hours, both with their wit and their determination to make this a bloodless transfer of power. Everything from the Vandrossian death fleets to the moon attack to the weightlifting interview to the chase scene to the arm-wrestling match derived purely from them, in a responsive and organic manner.

Predicting, much less coding, for that kind of nuance and creativity–much less in moods far more serious and thoughtful like love and fear and loss and regrets and dreams and pain and anger and depression and joy and topics far more sophisticated and complex like disease and adulthood and parenthood and work and diplomacy and subterfuge and realistic war and genocide and politics and religion. . .

. . . I think that must be enormously difficult to do, and if you can’t provide those moods and topics the kind of sophistication and reactivity and possibility that such grey areas necessarily warrant, then your game is going to come across as unpalatable to whatever limited niche of an audience might have wanted to purchase it in the first place. If you want to tackle truly adult thoughts and concepts and situations, you want to give them the respect they deserve, the emotional health, the realism, the room for introspection and concern and striving that they call for. Doing that in a game, for all the awesome technical reasons outlined above, is hard when compared to tweaking Unity’s built-in gibbing physics engine for MAXIMUM CARNAGE.

To do it in something as immersive and broad and complicated as an RPG, rather than the far more pared down walking simulators that usually strive for these areas, would be a huge task. If the audience doesn’t seem to require that, and the systems of modern videogame creation don’t do much to enable it easily. . . who is going to take the risk to do it right and proper, all the way through, giving conversation and thinking equal or even greater focus than Swording?

That sounds a lot like a managerial job around here.

A managerial job game would fit the definition of an “adult” game perfectly as defined by @Juan_Raigada above, where it’s a game that you would not be able to fully understand as a teenager/young adult, but really appreciate fully only as an adult.

A middle management sim?

What next, Shopping for a Mortgage Loan Simulator 2018?

@AntediluvianArk was ahead of us, he already pointed out Car Mechanic Simulator 2018 near the beginning of the thread.

If Car Mechanic Simulator doesn’t have a mode where you can sit in the stands and watch someone else drive the car you worked on in a race, then they’re missing a big opportunity.

In order to have a complex relationships among a few people, we’ll need more than just the way we do branching dialogue in RPGs now.

Look at how much Fallout: New Vegas relies on limiting the scope of each character’s interactions. There are lots of NPCs, but the vast majority of the interaction is among the NPCs in one site. You go to a site, you spend a half hour going through their quest, and they might give you a couple leads to other quests in other sites. You run along and forget about them. Each NPC in the game only needs to know what maybe 2% of the other NPCs are doing. Despite that, it still took years to debug.

What if you try using the same dialogue system with only a few characters, but they all interact with each other? Now everything that happens in the entire game is relevant to all of them. It would be a nightmare to deal with all the possibilities.

Yeah, in order to have complex relationships you need to model and process the relationships rather than hard-coding them (there’s just too many possibilities that can come up if (if the player has any freedom) to handle with hard coding). So you need something more along the lines of how Crusader Kings 2 models people and their relationships. In a similar vein, there’s a neat little game called Black Closet. It has purely social stats and combat and strategy, and you use them to investigate a series of procedurally generated mysteries and scandals. I really enjoyed the game and I’d recommend it to Brooski if he wants a serious, mature game.

So, Darkest Dungeon? Once you strip away the Cthulhu and dungeon crawling trappings, it’s basically Corporate Middle Management simulator: The Game.

A previously productive employee gets a debilitating illness? It’s a ruthless calculus as to whether their other skills warrant an investment in treatment or they should be tossed aside.

Actually Juan’s and the automechanic simulator are both important points as to why you don’t see more “adult” themed games.

For one adult lives are boring. The bread and butter of the supermarket romance genre are dashing man sweeps woman off her feet. That’s the kind of adult fiction that writes itself but whose audience is painfully limited; it is interesting though that women consist of something like 80% of contemporary fiction readers today, which makes me wonder when i hear “role playing adult game” i’m actually hearing “historically themed adult RPG” since it seems like the fiction genres that interest men most are historical and sci fi. So men are stuck with matters of state - James Bond, Tom Clancy ect. Is this the kind of thing we’re thinking we want adult RPGs to be about? Or even deeper reflections of the paradoxical natures of maturity and life?

There are already lots of mechanical games - Farm Simulator, Truck Simulator, abstract puzzle games, ect - but they aren’t much of an RPG. And maybe they’re boring because they’re on some level about doing work, and you already do work every day?

The other issue is that many of the films Juan quoted are already somewhat art-house films. Are we thinking about an adult themed AAA RPG? What would that even look like?

Another problem is that game development is a young persons’ job. You can make films until you’re pushing up daisies, but there are not many game developers over 40. The kinds of maturity you’re looking for in gaming probably won’t pan out because everyone mature enough to be interested in those themes has already burned out on game development and moved on.

I do think we’re kind of in the salad days of game development, and it’s quite possible games with mature themes will pop out. But they’re going to bit 16-bit, low budget affairs, with a smaller reach. I can’t remember the name of it, it was something like Celeste, but searching for Celeste today brings up another game, but there was a game a few years ago about a young woman looking for love in an MMO, and the game was split between film version of her getting undressed for her lunk of a boyfriend and playing in the pretend MMO itself. That’a a mature themed game, but i still think it would be not mature enough and too female for what you had in mind.

Don’t forget that audiences typically respond quite poorly to games we’d consider “mature” - look at That Dragon, Cancer, which gave us a lot of discussion and handwringing about whether games are required to be fun and enjoyable or not, but ultimately sold quite poorly despite a relatively large amount of press. (This was also attributed at the time to the ease of simply watching someone else’s playthrough of the game, but that’s another discussion…or is it? Since a properly “adult” game is more likely to resemble interactive fiction or Dear Esther than a shooter or a BioWare RPG, there’s also a huge vulnerability to streaming and YouTube playthroughs, which makes it an even harder sell for developers.)

I doubt that’s unique to video games though. I would imagine, without having done any research, that books and movies about kids dying of cancer don’t pull in nearly as much cash as your average superhero project.

I believe the game you are referring to is Cibele.

I would just like to interject that ‘adult’ need not mean ‘quitodian.’ An adult RPG wouldn’t have to be about someone doing their laundry, etc. Mature art can be set in fantastical settings (see: Dante, Homer, Milton, a good chunk of Shakespeare).

Also, if adult lives were intrinsically boring, then Middlemarch and Anna Karenina would be boring books. The problem IMO has more to do with the fact that game mechanics can’t do what Middlemarch and Anna Karenina do, unless they just become non-interactive walls of text. Maybe that’s solvable and maybe it isn’t.

This topic almost seems like a restatement of the ‘are games/can games be/ art?’ question, which I think is in many cases a red herring. Tennis isn’t art, but it’s still worth doing – ditto chess and Civilization II (actually, Civ II may or may not qualify as ‘art’ depending on the definition of the word, but fixating on that label misses the point of what makes it such an astonishing experience). But anyhoo!

I was with you until Middlemarch.

Read it again. Or substitute a book you like in which adults do adult things.