Which games (if any) successfully managed to be mature?

[Big Nose George]

there's literally no chance the thread will go anywhere interesting so just freestyle.

You are so mature.

 

[Zomg]

Ah, a mature person wouldn't have had the naive hope to post at all.

 

[Rhett Butler]

Fallout 1, Deus Ex 1 and of course Duke Nukem.

 

[Good Ol' Drog]

You guys are silly. Entertainment isn't supposed to be mature.

 

[bhlaab]

You guys are silly. Entertainment isn't supposed to be mature.

good point ninja turtles is my fav. movie oif all time

 

[mahdi]

I knew from the first post that I would answer with "Dreamweb" but Jasede beat me to it. Seriously though, if you haven't checked this game out it is available for free at abandonia.com.

 

[Emotional Vampire]

OH GOD ABANDONWARE IS NOT FREE OH GOD OHCHRIST YOU THIEF I WILL NOT PLAY IT TILL IT'S TEN EURO ON STEAM BECAUSE I PAY FOR MY GAMES YOU POOR FUCKING THIRDWORLDER SCUM LOL IF 10 EURO MATTERS FOR YOU GO EAT POTATO

 

[Jaime Lannister]

IF 10 EURO MATTERS FOR YOU GO EAT POTATO

unironically agreed

 

[Azrael the cat]

I consider mature games to be the games that stay true to their setting, with believable, well written dialog and themes that can be fully appreciated by ... adults ? ( - define adults...) Of course this definition -as all definitions- is bullshit deep down, but whatever.


Fallout
Torment
Arcanum
Bloodlines
Deus Ex
System Shock 2
I have no mouth and I must scream
Sanitarium
Grim Fandago (yeah humor can be mature)
Shadow Of The Comet
Gabriel Knight
The Last Express
Silent Hill
Mafia
No One Lives For Ever
Thief
Half Life
Jedi Knight 2
Betrayal At Krondor
Anachronox (did I mention that humor can be mature?)


Also nudity does not define maturity or immaturity.

I'd agree with this list, and add Silent Hill 2, Vampire:Bloodlines (yes it has all the gratuitous teen-pleasing physics-defying cleavage and all that stuff, but it also handles mood, political machinanations at both inter-factional, intra-factional and personal levels, characterisation and dialogue very very wel). Even its moments of humour were relatively mature (or, in other cases - Romero's zombie-killing, the lets-make-the-player-think-for-2-seconds-that-the-'anarch's last great leader'-is-the-ultra-annoying-tryhard-trotskyite if you choose the anarch ending - gloriously and self-knowingly immature), maybe Azrael's Tear and Under a Killing Moon.

And maybe, despite the fantasy aspects, TLJ and Dreamfall, though neither really traded on, or made any particular effort to be, 'mature'. It's more just the presentation of their social and personal lives in Stark, with the old 'spend lots of time at the start showing all these character relationships....so we can really screw with them in Dreamfall when folk start dying or turning into mind-snatched zombies.

 

[Annie Mitsoda]

I'd actually say both learned helplessness AND a sense of agency exist in every game... well, at least the former. We're limited by our controls and what the game world itself will allow. Meta, sure, but still an element of it. Even games reinforce powerful abilities with downsides and costs - if not, it strikes the thinking types as poorly-balanced, and the feeling types as simply not fun. In that same meta sense, it's not as much as teaching the lack of agency from a base degree but making people aware precisely WHAT it is that they might be missing.

I'd also counter that learned helplessness isn't necessarily "mature" - perhaps in a sort of "help me to learn how to deal with the things I cannot change" idiom, sure, but part of immaturity is requiring help and imagining you're powerless. Although the flipside, that you cannot be beaten, is also immature (and probably why every Superman game ever hasn't been any fun). So maturity - if we really wanted to define it by such narrow schema - is less about one or the other and more about the balance of both. Which is how good game design should run, anyway.

...anyhow, I'll have to dig up Dreamweb, it sounds fascinating. Man... I wish for old titles like that, instead of paying the publisher (who's likely defunct, if it's truly abandonware) you could track down and pay the people who actually made the game. That would be a nice little surprise in your PayPal inbox, even if it was a grand total of like $5 a year. It would still make me smile as a dev knowing someone gave a shit enough to try and give something back.

ALSO as a completely crazy comment that someone mentioned Taxi Driver made me wince, because my first game in the industry was an ill-fated and never released (and let us thank god for that) Taxi Driver VIDEO GAME. That was basically a muddled GTA3 clone. Whose story was originally written by "Hollywood writers" who had maybe heard of video games before but certainly never played them, and I had to rewrite the dialogue, then they said "wait try it as NOT Taxi Driver but we can't change any assets" so THAT was fun, then it was back to being Taxi Driver again, and oh my is this blood coming out of my nose? Ooops... rage stroke... /thud.

List more games. I'd even like to hear if anyone played one of those so-called "artsy" titles and still thought it was interesting/moving/actually fun to play. I liked Braid quite a bit myself.

 

[Lesifoere]

Have you tried The Void, Annie? Because:

I'd even like to hear if anyone played one of those so-called "artsy" titles and still thought it was interesting/moving/actually fun to play.

Fits it more or less well, esp "artsy" (because hurr the poetry). Interesting and moving, anyway, but "fun" is subjective. (I thought it was fun. Many people didn't.)

I'd agree with this list, and add Silent Hill 2

How about SH3? I mean sure, it wasn't half as good as the first two, but I'd still argue that there're bits of it that are up there.

Speaking of defining "mature" games, if we're moving away from the rather silly "okay it deals with boobs and violence in a MASHURE manner", I'd like to define it as games that can be enjoyed on more than one level. So at a minimum, you can say that the game is well-designed/fun to play and has enjoyable writing: but what else? Does it hold up to scrutiny and thought beyond this and not fall apart in a shower of rip-off residues and illogic? Does it make you think and/or doubt the characters' (or better yet your own) actions in the game? As wanky a definition as any, I'll admit, but it works for me.

 

[Elwro]

Mature games must include rape.

LASH includes rape.

 

[Trash]

Seriously? I'm sure there have been a number of projects to which the term game only applies very loosely that one could call mature. Alter Ego in which you life the live of a person from birth to death springs to mind. Also I believe that especially in the 80's there have been a few text adventures that tried to go beyond the usual by incorporating all sorts of ethical and spiritual content. The indie scene as well might have some stuff.

 

[ghostdog]

Dreamweb reaches the mature'n'awesome state in combination with the "Diary of a madman" journal that was included in the game box. Annie, if you play the game be sure to read that too, it floats around in the net in pdf form.

 

[Jasede]

It was, in fact, linked on page 2.

By the way, those who agree with me on Dreamweb, I would suggest for you to play the Text Adventures (Interactive Fiction) games. I am sure you can argue this point, but a lot of them were clearly intended for (patient) adults, like Trinity and A Mind Forever Voyaging. There are also many good freeware ones, such as Shades and Anchorhead.

 

[Luzur]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Softporn_Adventure

 

[ghostdog]

Also for those that like Sanitarium and similar games let me propose Mind's Eye, an excellent freeware adventure.

 

[racofer]

You guys are silly. Entertainment isn't supposed to be mature.

Uuhhg. Kill that thing or at least castrate him and preserve the gene pool.

 

[Gragt]

Given his face, he'd need to use the brick to spread his genes.

 

[Wyrmlord]

He looks amazingly similar to the guy who punched holes in his walls after playing CoDW2.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

I think all games might be fundamentally immature by nature. Most aspects of maturity are variations on learned helplessness and compromise to which games and gameplay are antithetical.

It depends on how one plays.
Fallout and Fallout 2 in iron man can require some learned helplessness and compromise if PC wants to survive.

Doing some do-gooder quests may pit PC against numerically superior foes than can easily kill him/her. So, sometimes one just has to let it go.
A lot of my Fallout characters have died when they got too heroic.

 

[Zomg]

Just thought of one: Missile Command

 

[Azrael the cat]

It was, in fact, linked on page 2.

By the way, those who agree with me on Dreamweb, I would suggest for you to play the Text Adventures (Interactive Fiction) games. I am sure you can argue this point, but a lot of them were clearly intended for (patient) adults, like Trinity and A Mind Forever Voyaging. There are also many good freeware ones, such as Shades and Anchorhead.

Double on the 'Mind Forever Voyaging'. It's one of the few text adventures that would have benefited from being a (well-designed) graphical adventure, but it is truly brilliant. Many many people rate it as the absolute high-point of text adventures, and that taking era and genre into account, one of the great games of all time.

 

[Zomg]

I liked it too but it's juuuuust a little bit politically didactic eh? I guess that's not immature. I suppose propaganda is mature because it's trying to effect change by shaping minds; that's one way a thing can be "mature" without being generically good.

 

[Paula Tormeson IV]

I liked it too but it's juuuuust a little bit politically didactic eh? I guess that's not immature. I suppose propaganda is mature because it's trying to effect change by shaping minds; that's one way a thing can be "mature" without being generically good.

You can make a mature game (e.g. Super Mario World), but peope will appreciate it according to their own capacity for appreciation, which means as a light adventure platformer. Or you can take the opposite route and write the kind of flimsy bullshit everyone else has been writing for fifty years and that confirms and reinforces people's dearest prejudices, and they'll think it "deep" and "one of the best games ever". That's why I keep pointing out that people are stupid.