Mature games and "Hard" questions

[shadow skill]

This post is in part a reply to multiple threads and articles I have begun seeing here at the Escapist dealing with the subject of maturity in games. Most of these threads seem to miss the overall problem that games have right now, the reason they lack the maturity some (Probably many of us older or otherwise more intellectual gamers in reality.)of us want. That problem lies not in too much or too little TnA, or blood. The problem lies in the simple fact that developers and publishers are too afraid to ask the "hard" questions within their products. "Hard" questions are the meaning of events both as they relate to the characters on the screen and what the player is actually thinking. (Some of the best "hard" questions deal directly with our sense of morality.) These threads and articles I see here and in some other places that cry out for genuine intimacy and therefore complete sexuality in games are a symptom of this fear that grips those who actually make games. Even the few truly great attempts at intimacy are strangled by this fear because they seem to obsess in portraying that intimacy as almost entirely positive in nature. In effect the "hard" question is avoided by creating games that possess a purely one dimensional intimacy. In much the same way the subject of war falls flat due to avoidance of the "hard" question posed by the nature of war itself.

The only other art form that is capable of asking "hard" questions, writing, does not suffer from this problem in part because it is one of the oldest in existence and is required to even ask these kinds of questions. (I am including the concept of language in writing for the sake of simplicity I am well aware of the fact that language is what is required to ask any kind of question. Just thought I would get that out of the way before someone comes in to split hairs. ) Therefore there was never really a place for this fear to exist as a detriment to the art itself, attempts to quell asking the "hard" questions came not from a disrespect of the art and fear on the part of writers but rather from attempts by figures in power to control the flow of information. Routinely the way this is overcome by writers and other types of artists is not merely with time, it is with people willing to fight for the right to write about what they wish, or otherwise practice their art how they wish.

To return to my earlier point about TnA and blood not being the problem with respect to maturity in games, I believe it is important to understand that in order to properly ask "hard" questions one has to be prepared to show the TnA and blood as required.(This is where I agree with the articles and posts arguing that we should show the boobs etc.)consider the following point: Child birth is often depicted in popular culture as a joyous occasion for everyone; yet the most important person involved in the process, the baby, is most certainly not enjoying the whole thing since it's lungs are on fire due to the atmosphere burning it's immature lungs (this is one reason why babies cry when born.), and in the case of western medicine and culture you have a bunch of loud jerkoffs hooting and hollering to welcome the new life into the world with a room full of bright lights to go along with the burning sensation in it's lungs. Furthermore the baby is covered in blood and other organic matter during this time, in a word this child is filthy! In this sense one really cannot not understand the meaning of being born until one understands that being born is painful and messy by nature.

Just as the realization that being born is messy and painful is critical to understanding it's complete meaning, true maturity in games with respect to intimacy and games as an art form in general requires that some games do indeed show the messy bits of subjects like love and sex, war, politics, good and evil etc. It's only with the inclusion of the messy aspects of humanity that the "hard" questions can be framed properly and not get glossed over in the long run. This in turn is going to require that publishers and by extension development houses as well as gamers such as those of us here be brave and not only dispel media disinformation like what we saw with Mass Effect, but question the nature of the rating systems employed and how they are used effectively as ban hammers thus preventing any kind of real market for truly mature games from forming.

 

[Rooster Cogburn]

Apologies if your point eludes me, I thought your post wandered just a hair. But if you're suggesting that current "mature" titles which are really quite juvenile (Gears, love it or hate it) should be supplemented with actual mature titles that feature gritty realism in regards to the human condition and troubling real world questions: then I can't agree more. It's these relevant and hard-to-swallow philosophies and outlooks that make great literature great.

Macbeth, the videogame. Dune, the game. Brave New World. Neuromancer. Works that punch you in the face with what, moments before, seemed relatively safe preconceptions. Many big name games have got it all wrong: they include the boobs and swearing, which is fine, but forget to include the storytelling complexities they are supposed to be supplementing. This is my opinion, of course: I'm stating what I personally want from a game. The darker and more complex motifs a game can sport, the better.

Trying to contribute to the topic as I understood it; I get close? Heh.

PS- Earning "Good" and "Evil" paths of character development as seen in games like Mass Effect and Bioshock (the alternate endings) are very far from the kind of mature, complex storytelling I'd like in a game. Not that they aren't a great idea.

 

[LisaB1138]

I don't see it happening. Games are limited medium in that quite a bit of the "game" should be some sort of interaction that involves more than pressing the X button to advance the dialog. Combat, puzzles, etc.

I mean, books are always better than the movies for a reason. Movies are limited by time and money. I'm old enough to remember attending the opening of David Lynch's Dune: they handed out printed glossaries so you could follow the story. The TV miniseries did much better, but I'd rather see someone reading Dune or Macbeth for the complex ideas than see someone dumb it down for a video game.

I agree the inclusion of T&A and swearing only give the illusion of maturity. They just to fool the kiddies into thinking they're grown up. In the end though, they're games. I'm not sure that asking "will you kill the king?" or "will you kill destroy the spice?" is going to make them more "mature." Marshall McCluen was right: the medium is the message.

Don't get me wrong: I love a game with a good story, but I want a game with a good story, not the other way around. I have books for that, even movies.

Or maybe I'm misunderstanding what you are asking for.

 

[L.B. Jeffries]

For the record, I enjoyed Lynch's interpretation of 'Dune'. Liked the book too, but I thought he did some really cool stuff with it.

I don't think it'd be too big of a reach for a game to just have the guts to take itself seriously. Maybe it could start in the mod community or something. Once the indie scene gets it out of the way, which it is already starting to do with games like 'Immortal Defense' or the experimental games, it can spread to the mainstream.

How about a realistic take on FF7's plot? Cloud gets Aeris pregnant during their carnival date. Because he's too conflicted and dealing with other crap, he refuses to acknowledge the child. He even calls her a slut and abandons her. I'm ripping this off 'Hamlet', by the by. So Aeris has no choice but to get an abortion. Cloud is so enraged and heartbroken at himself and her that he refuses to come to her aid in the Crystal Ruins (whatever that place is called). Sephiroth kills her as a result.

There, I just made that whole sequence ten times more traumatic and realistic.

 

[tendo82]

Games aren't ready for mature content or hard questions because the audience isn't there to buy them. If a company made a game about getting an illegal abortion in Romania during the Communist regime would anybody buy it? Probably not; games are synonymous with fun and when we sit down to play a game we expect as much.

 

[L.B. Jeffries]

And then fox news sparks another fucking bonfire on the "Games are bad" train. It's the media that's stopping the developers from being different
"here's Mass Effect a game with intricate relationships that go all the way with no hold backs" "OH NO it has FULL NUDITY," Even though Mass Effect lacked any kind of nudity worth mentioning the news still went all-for-balls on it. What would they do to a game that involved abortion and sex?

Hopefully cry and moan about it while the developers laughed themselves all the way to the bank. I seem to recall controversy still being handy for selling games and pissing off Fox News is worth doing in of itself.

 

[L.B. Jeffries]

Controversy might sell, but it definetly doesn't raise games status as an art form amid the public eye.

Whose eye? The sensationalist mob that watches Fox News? You could make a game that turned Van Gogh paintings into 3-D levels and they'd still sneer at it. If someone actually made a game that took itself seriously and addressed mature topics in a convincing manner, the rest will follow.

 

[000Ronald]

The inherent problem with what you're saying is that you are turning a game into something it isn't. Games primary purpose is to be enjoyed; more accurately, to be enjoyed in a way different from a book or a movie. A game should tell a story, but it shouldn't cut back on the game itself to tell that story.

Let me give you an example; I didn't really like Splinter Cell. It was an OK game but that's all it was; OK. One of the major problems I had with it was that it took itself way too seriously. It was trying too hard to be real, and that really bugged me, becase I don't want my games to be real. A couple months later, though, my friend Zeb gave me Metal Gear Solid; the Twin Snakes. And ya know what? I loved it! While being a serious game, it still maintained that air of fantastic unrealism that I've come to love about certain games. It especially got wild when you fought Psycho Mantis! I loved that!

Another thing; before you say that the "hard questions" aren't being answered, you should ask yourself what the "hard questions" are. Here let me start...

Is seeking power for the sake of having power evil?

Apologies for my long winded speech. I just had a lot to say...

 

[shadow skill]

It seems that most of the replies have missed something important about games, the one thing that sets it apart from every other art form...Games are interactive by nature therefore they do not nessecarily require that the player be told how to feel about anything that might be going on in a game. This is not the same as simply making a character have no voice and having non player characters simply talk around the player avatar. Let me give an example of what I mean: Say I want to create a horror game, and I wanted to do it in a way that did not require me to effectively tell the player to be afraid. The first thing I would do is design the game without a musical track, it is a crutch used by movies to generate various emotions that games do not need because unlike a passive art, games can illicit emotion through interaction with the environment alone. Another important thing people seem to have missed is the fact that games have only come to the point where they can tell stories effectively, however this ability pales to that of movies and books because of the interactive nature of games. Not only have games largely failed to ask "hard" questions, they don't seem to understand that they can make players feel emotions in an entirely new fashion.

 

[L.B. Jeffries]

How do you ask a hard question if the player just hits reset when they get an answer they don't like?

 

[Stalington]

Um, would Bioshock, Deus Ex and other relevently "serious" games like that count as examples of the game we are talking about? (minus the Mister Bubbles reference in Bioshock). As in hard questions like "if I press this button thousands of people may die, but I might see my family again."?

 

[shadow skill]

The answer that the player gives to the question being asked whether it be expressed through the game itself or simply something they do within their own mind simply is not relevant. What is important is that the question has been asked, if a game is structured in a way that allows the player to choose an answer to the question it does not matter that they choose an answer that they favor over one that they do not.

Stalington I would say such a question would count, I can't really speak on Deus Ex but I felt that Bioshock's narrative was completely worthless because it was entirely possible to miss the diaries of various people. I put that game down because after three hours of playing the game I felt absolutely nothing at all for the game or any of the characters involved. I am planning on giving it another go once the PS3 version comes out though. (The PC version played hell with my computer at the time.)

 

[ReverseEngineered]

I agree that, unlike most other mediums, games are meant to be fun, and asking many of the hard-hitting questions would work against the fun aspect at times. However, games are also about exploration -- something that you can't do in static media like film and literature. A game that gives you tough moral choices with no obvious right-or-wrong answer allows you to explore what those choices might be like.

The problem with good vs. evil questions in video games is that they explicitly make them good or evil. Take Black and White as an example. If you do things for your worshippers, you are taken as good and everything is hunky-dorey. But if you punish them for doing wrong, you are automatically evil and everything goes to hell (literally). Add to that the fact that evil leadership is harder than good leadership because evil leadership results in unhappy people and lower scores, and it's obvious that there's only one "correct" way to playing. There are never any benefits to being evil, other than curiousity at what happens.

This is where games get it wrong and where they have the opportunity to explore moral decisions. Any truly moral decision is a tradeoff -- there is no clear right or wrong. Using the FF7 sexual promiscuity example (perhaps a poor example), there may be some clear benefits to sleeping with the hot chick, or for that matter everyone you can get your hands on, but there are also the potential drawbacks -- STDs, pregnancy, other people's perceptions. Surely these can work their way into the game without ruining it.

As a less moralistic example, consider something like dating in GTA4. I'm not fully familiar with this game mechanic, but consider this as a possibility. There are multiple people who may be interested in you. Some wild and edgy, others relaxed and modest. Perhaps you can even play the field, dating many in a short time span or even many at a time. This would obviously change their perception of you. Few dates would be interested in the guy that kept multiple partners, yet doing so would be quite the challenge (and perhaps bragging rights). Getting with the wild and crazies may be easy, but they may be just as likely to dump you for someone else, or have hidden agendas that they are using you for. On the other hand, the reserved ones would be harder to get and take more work, but would be more helpful and faithful down the road. Neither of these is clearly a better take -- some easy fun and friendship only for a short time vs. a long term relationship that takes more effort to foster -- and because there is no clear advantage, the player is free to choose the style he wishes to play, or to explore avenues that he may not otherwise take in real life. It still leaves plenty of room for entertainment, exploration, and (for those worried about "America's moral fibre") the association of consequences with their actions.

Video games won't be a mature entertainment form (let alone art form) until they allow players to explore alternatives without placing a "good vs. bad" bias on them and forcing dogmatic norms of normality on them. On the other hand, they also won't mature until they make player's actions result in consequences, good or bad as they player may interpret them.

 

[Stinking Kevin]

At a very basic level, a story is a series of related events in a time and place. Usually, there are characters who take part in these events, and a setting in which the events occur. This is an oversimplification, I know, but I think there's enough truth in it to serve the point I'd like to try and make.

Books and movies are great for telling character-centric stories, because they are linear. They show how one thing happens to a character, and then the next thing, and so on, but seldom do they say much directly about the other things that could have happened in the given setting, with different characters or different events.

I think the best game narratives focus on setting instead of character. Good games often do have interesting characters, but it is the way that these characters can (and cannot) interact in the world around them that is narratively interesting. I find that good story-telling in a game is more about the character's environment, and all the interdependence and causality in that environment, more than it is ever about one player's particular plot progression with one particular character.

So, once I accept that a good story can be about a setting instead of about a character, I can find excellent story-telling in completely unscripted games, like Sid Meier's Civilization for example. Here, the characters are peripheral and the particular plotline is completely player-driven, but the interrelated rules of the game world create a setting that tells a remarkably deep and enriching story about the nature of human development throughout history. And it tells its same story again, in a slightly different way, each time you play the game.

Is that taking it a bit too far? Perhaps the Grand Theft Auto games make for an easier example of what I am trying to say: These games are known for their interesting characters, and even for their semi-scripted storylines, but the real enjoyment for most GTA players comes from the setting, not the plot. In the series' breakthrough release, the main character doesn't even have a name.

Having dragged GTA into the discussion, perhaps I can try to get back to topic. I agree that blood and boobs don't make a game mature, and also that a mature game should not shy away from featuring blood and boobs where warranted. But more importantly, I think to be a viable medium for mature narrative, games must focus on allowing the player to explore and interact in a mature setting, and not on telling a particular story concerning a particular string of mature events.

When the narrative focus is on a particular character's linear progression through a particular plotline, games will always appear second-best to books and movies as a story-telling medium, and usually to an extent that they will be written off as immature by the mainstream.

 

[L.B. Jeffries]

The answer that the player gives to the question being asked whether it be expressed through the game itself or simply something they do within their own mind simply is not relevant. What is important is that the question has been asked, if a game is structured in a way that allows the player to choose an answer to the question it does not matter that they choose an answer that they favor over one that they do not.

Then what's the point of the question? If the answer is meaningless, whether it be in terms of the game or what the player chooses, then why bother asking? The player is going to know that, the person formulating the question is going to know that, and neither are going to assign much weight to the 'hard' question.

I think ReverseEngineered hits on the traditional solution: have one be rewarding and the other punishing. Which gets back to the reset problem. They're not making a choice based on what they think, they're making a choice on the reward and are going to base their response on that.

So...what? Take away the reward? That works fine for morally gray situations like the little sisters, but what about your birth example? Having a gory childbirth section is all fine and dandy, but technically a kid is an immense liability and huge expense. Particularly if the game makes it a point to have it be realistic. So the abortion question is going to come up. The problem is...how do you make having the abortion have any kind of affect on the player except they have more cash and are able to adventure more?

The player's answer is important because it has to matter which one they pick for the question to have any weight at all.

 

[ReverseEngineered]

How do you ask a hard question if the player just hits reset when they get an answer they don't like?

I don't think that's a limitation of games -- in fact, it's quite a feature. The hard questions in life are the hardest because we can't see their consequences until it is too late to take them back. The advantage of a virtual experience (such as a video game) is not only that we can explore possibilities without real-world repercussions, but that we can always start over from the beginning or from any point previous. How wonderous it would be if we could take back the mistakes we have made in real life, yet we have such an option in video games.

Perhaps there is a point to be made in whether or not the player should be allowed to take back their mistakes. As I said, hard questions are hard because we don't know the answers until it's too late. If the game really did want to make a question hard, it would have to find a way to make it such that the player couldn't take back his decision -- at least not without starting from the beginning.

Could it be done? Absolutely. Any game which doesn't offer multiple saves per character could easily save the player's decision as soon as they make it before they have a chance to see its effects. This could be worked around (copying memory cards, for example), but as an unsupported operation it would amount to cheating (which I believe should always be an option for persistent players).

The beauty of this is that it's up to the game designer whether they want an atmosphere of harmless experimentation through allowing the player to take back his mistake or whether they want to apply a challenging realism by forcing players to live by their decisions. Both have their places as entertainment.

 

[shadow skill]

it's more important that the player is made to think about the question being asked rather than the game reflect what the player may decide. Your premise implies that players need to be given the power to answer a "hard" question within the game itself. This is of course false, one could quite easily make a game that deals with a "hard" question that progreses in an entirely linear fashion with a single outcome. Your premise is alot like the one sorrounding the idea that mute characters help to immerse the player because they allow the player to project his or her own thoughts onto the avatar on their screen. The fallacy here is that the player could not do this if the avatar had a voice of it's own. Players always project their thoughts onto avatars in games so destroying character interaction by making the player avatar a mute with no control over the dialog for the sake of immersion is really nothing more than a cop out.

What you are thinking when confronted with the "hard" question is the issue here not what happens with respect to the game world based on your answer to the "hard" question as the avatar on screen. The weight of the question itself is not nessecarily determined by the consequences or lack thereof inside a game. Therefore there is no reason to force the player to accept anything in order for a game to ask a "hard" question.