Like the James Bond books.
Setting aside all myriad objections but on some level games need choice (imo) rather than narrative. And choice requires systems. And systems often mean winning and losing.
A non-interactive version of War and Peace, a version where you can’t make decisions but are simply pushing forward experiencing the narrative, really is probably better made as a film or read as a book. To be a game (to me) is about either making choices and decision that change the narrative, or experiencing a linear narrative where the act of engaging with it is participatory and could not otherwise be recreated in a more conventional format.
That’s not a fair comparison, though - by that logic, no one should be making anything, in any medium, except superhero movies.
Movies about people with tragic conditions (and the books they’re often based on) do tend to do quite well - look at The Fault In Our Stars or Wonder. Video games are the medium with this problem, not everyone else.
Another way to look at this: look at all the video game companies that do April Fools’ Day jokes about dating sim spinoffs of their games every year, and how more and more people keep calling them out each year for spreading the idea that games about emotions other than “anger focused into shooting and/or slicing bad guys” are to be treated as a joke.
Yep, that’s it, thanks!
“quotidian”.
What’s your standard for “quite well”? They don’t match up to action blockbusters.
First person shooters against faceless monsters/aliens/nazis are perennials. They keep making them because they sell. That’s not an argument against stretching and making something more, for lack of a better word, “mature”. But there’s nothing unique about video games in this regard.
The difference is that major movie studios do, regularly, produce movies that aren’t monster-budget action blockbusters, while game companies, not content to simply not do that, actively make fun of the idea that anyone would like to play a video game that involves something other than endless slaughter.
I have no idea who is making fun of what. But large video game studios will help publish small budget games just like movie studios do. EA published Unravel a couple years back, just to pick one off the top of my head. Independent studios push out little games like That Dragon, Cancer all the time. They have to, they don’t have the resources to make a Call of Duty competitor, just like an indie movie studio isn’t going to be making a Star Wars competitor any time soon. Even though I’m sure they’d love to take in that kind of money.
I don’t disagree that there is a vocal contingent that expects every game to be about having a good time and another, often overlapping contingent that disagrees with the very concept of having narratives in gaming. But I don’t think That Dragon Cancer is a great example of a game that didn’t sell for that reason. The reviews I saw were largely in the vein “I feel bad about panning this because it’s a very personal game about the developers’ loss of their child, but it’s not very good.” And I suspect it not being very good is more of a reason for low sales than the subject matter.
Now that I think about it, it does annoy me that lots of gamers consider Persona 5 to be the best JRPG ever or even the bestest video game story ever told… and it has a very typically Young Adult story. I mean, who thinks Twilight is the best novel/movie ever?
It doesn’t help that the game shits its pants during the ending by committing the cardinal sin of Young Adult (or perhaps children’s) fiction : the game literally goes and tell you that the moral of its own story is that positive thinking is the solution to any and all problems.
I mean, it’s a good enough message for children. You don’t want to overwhelm them with heavy stuff. But what kind of self-respecting mature fiction says that with a straight face?
Millions and millions of teenage girls and young women.
But also Twilight is towards the nadir of what young adult has to offer. There’s waaaay better stories in that context. For example, Patrick Ness’s Chaos Walking trilogy.
So does the main interest need to be the RPG genre of games?
If we are limiting to that then the original premise just won’t be satisfied since RPGs (as much as I love some) have been stunted and frozen in time for quite a while now despite gamers wanting to believe otherwise. They handle relationships and sex very poorly, repeat the hero’s journey monomyth too often, cannot seem to break away from the Gygax roots and template, and love to represent everything numerically and mathematically.
Outside of RPGs (especially the AA to AAA space) I think one would find a lot of great examples of adult theming, emotional gravitas, and philosophical reflection in gaming.
In that infamous Chris Avellone thread on RPG Codex, he talked briefly about how romantic relationships are expensive to implement.
I hadn’t considered the animation aspect (although if you were doing a ME game, you would have to invest in that, too - I’ve rarely worked on a game with relationships that needed cinematics except for Alpha Protocol, and you’re right, those were still an additional time sink to be sure), but adding a relationship arc can be as tough as adding another companion quest. You can sometimes unite the two, or share design and dialogue elements to make it easier, but it can be a lot more work to do properly.
Also, even when the romance is consummated, you’d still need appropriate reactivity to that (maybe not just in the core game, but in future games that save scripting states). It’s likely why companion relationships were a stretch goal in PoE2: They’re expensive to do.
So until someone comes up with a dramatically different way to make RPGs, I don’t think it will be practical to have an adult relationship.
I don’t care so much if themes are mature, as I do if themes are cerebral. (Inb4 someone mentions Civilization, which is not an RPG! Or chess.)