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

[Awor Szurkrarz]

Call of Duty 3 is going to be much more mature.

 

[Wyrmlord]

ps. Another area where game's lack mature treatment - war. How many games where it is treated as anything but a shooting gallery (goes for sims too)?

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. No, not the one where you shoot up the russian airport.

I'm dead serious.

CoD4 was a shooting gallery entertainment, and I liked it for being that, and you are going over the top by alleging it was something more than that Jerry Mannister.

 

[Tycn]

Simulations mitigate or don't show the boring stuff because it's boring. ArmA has increased timescale to get through marching for hours - and what is it people say about hiking simulators? Silent Hunter 4 allows you to traverse the world in real time if you want, but also has timescale 8000 for those of us that want more than staring at ocean for days.

CoD 4 campaign is pretty terrible too. Unless you're referring to your character dying, but it's pretty stupid for a terrorist to nuke his own city to kill a few thousand Americans. MW2 takes it to the extreme with every character you play dying (and there's like 4).

 

[Black Cat]

@ Topic

I don't really think there are mature thingies and stuffies, just mature users that interpret the thingies and stuffies in, like, mature ways, and mature peeps who make thingies and stuffies to which a bit of their maturity kind of, like, gets to by contagion. It's not conscious, just the interpretation of thingies of mature people is mature and thus the thingies and stuffies they make is mature by nature. Most game developers try so bad to be mature that only show how totally not mature they are, though.

Oh, and in before [emovamp]you are (random lower than eighteen amount) years old so stop talking of maturity.[/emovamp]

 

[hiver]

Max Payne 1 and 2, definitely.
Though 1 had a stronger story.

 

[SCO]

Conquests of the Longbow.
The Last Express.

Many adventure games basically.
Remove combat and the designers must focus on something else, that something being story and lore.

 

[Azrael the cat]

Another area where game's lack mature treatment - war. How many games where it is treated as anything but a shooting gallery (goes for sims too)?

While you are at it - show me a single military sim that is a shooting gallery. The single main point of all simulations is to show how it really is. Yet even simulation games have to compromise because nobody will play the game that is mature about war.

Mainly because of "OMG it shows the terrorists shooting civilians!! BAN IT" - of course in CoD6 the context in which it was used was idiotic but do you believe a game that shows terrorists for what they are, soldiers torturing captives and also gore even if all of it is used in a proper context would survive the ESRB?

So all that what we can have is hero american soldiers saving the world from Hitler in various BiA, CoDs, MoHs with their bravery and heroism being over-the-top etc. etc.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. No, not the one where you shoot up the russian airport.

I'm dead serious.

Oh yes - COD4 is so mature. When you run inside that building and see enemies spawning right out of the thin air or encounter those man-eating dogs in Chernobyl - and your first thought must be "this is so dark and gritty!" and especially when RPG rocket blows up near you and you come out without a scratch after sitting for just 2 seconds behind the box and all of it is being covered in a very cliche story with lots and lots of summer-hollywood-action over-the-top moments.
Mature and silly don't come in pairs.

Thing is, I think - that with the right writer - you could make a very very good 'realistic' war shooter along the lines of 'The Thin Red Line'. Make it squad based with lots of character interaction, except always controlling one character ala a FPS. Except that the character you're controlling just keeps getting killed off at regular intervals. Not the guys around him, but the character himself. So you're playing as character 'A' for the 1st 15 min, then bam, he steps on a landmine, and you're playing character B, til he gets gassed 15 min later, then character C, until you work your way through the squad. Would work in terms of having gameplay variety and seeing the different squad roles, from calling the artillery strikes, to being the squad medic, to being the driver and so on, while rubbing in the reality of war - that you all die. It wouldn't need to be 'emo' - that theme could be anything from tragedy to 'noble sacrifice'. In any event, it whether or not it works, it would be an experiment worth trying - something different from the invulnerable Gordon Freemans and Soaps of standard gaming (though I am thinking of plot-point driven lead character deaths and swap-overs, rather than every time you get shot - just keeping it far more regular than most games).

 

[Gragt]

It's interesting but character's death mostly matters if you get to know the character before he dies, and so you'd need a bit of time to achieve that.

Before trying to achieve something like The Thin Red Line, which isn't exactly your average movie, I think that trying to achieve something like the camaraderie of The Big Red One would be a bit easier, though not that easy to pull off given how few movies managed to successfully do it — Saving Private Ryan tried but simply failed. The ties between the squad of TBRO is also effective because each character evolves over the course of the movie, the most important being Mark Hamill's character who leaves the last of his childhood remnants behind to fully enter adulthood. And then there is the conclusion at the end that the only glory you can hope to achieve in war is to survive it; not exactly the typical glorious ride to victory you get in WW2 rail shooters.

 

[Paula Tormeson IV]

A game that tries to be a movie or book is immature as a game. Fuck such false games.

 

[GarfunkeL]

The one bright spot in the "story" of MW1 was the nuke. You have just rescued the female chopper pilot and managed to get away with your squad, feeling heroic and everything - then the nuke goes off, your chopper plummets to the ground. As the lone survivor, you crawl out out of the chopper, mortally wounded, just to see the mushroom cloud before blood loss / radiation / shock finally kills you.

From purely gameplay view, it was boring, long cut-scene where you had to keep pressing W but story-wise it was great, imho.

Some of the scenarios in the three The Operational Art of War games had good news bulletins illustrating the consequences of your actions, like the amounts of civilian refugees or catastrophes in neighbour theatres because you used your prestige and re-routed their reinforcements to your theatre.

Also, one more vote for Dreamweb. Damn that was one awesome game.

 

[Twinkle]

From purely gameplay view, it was boring, long cut-scene where you had to keep pressing W but story-wise it was great, imho.

You mean blowing a nuke in a center of a populated city potentially leaving millions of bad guy's fellow countrymen to die (thus provoking people's hate = bye-bye potential supporters) just to kill several thousands of xxxtreme marines is a great story? Hurr hurr, I'm evil terrorist I liek to blow stuff LOL :twisted: :evil:

 

[Raghar]

[...] and some themes are not watchable when they are done in "mature" way.

For example?

Excel saga. Imagine they would done Excel saga in a mature way. (Actually original was satirical work about problems in the society written in a humorous way.) It's a series about terrorists who ultimately win, and government officials who blows up theirs supervisors and replace them with theirs own, just to get more money to fight theirs (completely harmless) unknown target. (Excel was killed 4x in first episode, that's hard to do in mature way.)

A lot of government officials hate when terrorists, killers, and others are shown in non humiliating/reasonable way. Look at what happened to Noir. Author had the courage to show main characters as a calm "reasonable" persons, then critics jumped at him: "Soldiers are often ending in mental hospitals after that, and soldiers are nice guys. How did he dare to show them without an emotional distress when they were killing people left and right." "That's glorification of criminals."

Then there are themes which are hard to make in an interesting (playable) way, and themes which are forbidden in democratic societies. Live in the slums drugs left and right. Prisoner's mutilation. Rape. Game about character which needs to take narcotics, or die. Policemen hunting game. (Do you remember that slogan, during elections in Africa? A lot of people lost their hands because of that slogan. It would be interesting game. It would be also highly illegal game.)


The trouble is a brain bug "games are for children" which is prevalent in certain circles. Germany basically forbids blood in games, Australia didn't have certification system for mature games and tried to solve this problem by criminalization of its society. A game developer would risk theirs hide/lose certain markets when they would make mature games. In addition, there is also a problem called producer willing to take risks.

 

[Irleman]

The problem with this discussion is that pretty much everyone has his own defition of what "mature" means. This thread should have started by agreeing on what the word means rather than have all say "for me, mature is ...".

I think you nailed it. And I don't think "sex", "violence", "racism", "death" or anything are mature themes. Or that mature themes exist. It's how you present them.

In Republic, for instance, you're in charge of a party and the actions you and your allies make will define its ideology. There are three kinds of actions and one beats the other, like in rocks, scissor and paper. So to gain influence and defeat other parties, you have to do things that are opposite to your beliefs and be careful not to let your party be swayed by them or - even worse - piss allies so much they leave you.

I consider it mature because it doesn't just throw a belief into your lap and expect you to clap your hands in joy and acceptance - it forces you to define your beliefs through gameplay. Unlike some JRPGs with long monologues about how war is horrible and death sad, yet consists of endless monster-slaying. A mature game, in my opinion, is one that makes you question yourself through gameplay AND story without resorting to extremes - excessive drama, pretentiousness, shock, etc.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

Edmund.

 

[Emotional Vampire]

[...] and some themes are not watchable when they are done in "mature" way.

For example?

Excel saga.

Excel Saga would be unwatchable in every way imaginable.

Unless you are easily amused, like Marcello.

 

[boynextdoor]

MGS 2 was pretty mature, in a way... The plot and the general message of the game was more complex and compelling then almost all of the games I have ever played. The answer depends on the definition of the term "mature".