Jamie Antonisse

Hey RJ,

While I differ with some of the individual points made ( for instance, I agree with Cynthia's assessment of the consoles, and I don't agree with your dismissal of the PC flOw based on it's ability to be quickly downloaded) I'm wholeheartedly behind the main thrust of your post. The distinction between "games for adults" and "mature games" is valid, and furthermore I believe these terms describes two very different goals that should not be confused. The reason these goals are so different seems to me to be rooted in the history of our medium: unpacking it might help us move forward and get us closer to the holy grail of "mature games for adults".

The split makes a lot of sense when you think about it, considering the history of video games. Maturity has always been connected, in my mind, to theme and complexity... it begs the question, "is this a work that requires or rewards an adult understanding of the world?"* To make mature content, you need to be able to do more than talk about W-2's and split custody... you need to be able to layer your work, to embed meaning and reward interpretation.

It's worthwhile to look at how film became a platform for this sort of content. Part of film's maturation as a medium came about once viewers became literate as an audience... once they were able to handle the logical jumps between different shots, understand different perspectives, and generally accept the idea of the frame. In essence, people "practiced" watching films, and got better at it. It's untestable but conventional wisdom that, if you made a man from the 1920's watch "Fight Club" they would be utterly confused; yet we can appreciate the techniques used and understand them almost reflexively. Without those techniques, the movie loses much of its subtlety and would be less interesting to a film-literate audience.

To make mature games in today's climate, you must play off and build on the accepted tropes of interactive entertainment. You need to do subtle and informed things with your interactivity, and therefore expect a literate audience. Unfortunately, because video games came of age as kids' fare, game-literate doesn't really coincide with our traditional definition of mature. There's overlap, but not as much as we might like.

This is NOT because the audience isn't capable. It's because the literate audience knows, from experience, what to expect from interactive entertainment. They're more likely to turn to games for their familiar purpose, an adolescent escape, than they are to look to them for something deeper. The Evolutionary move towards maturity in our medium, whether through clever story, excellent art direction or philosophizing bullets, is a difficult path.

That's one of the reasons the Revolutionary effort has gained such traction among game designers. We want to win over the vast population of adults unfamiliar with the tropes of gaming, because 1) they have wallets and 2) they have no expectations about the use of games. Brain Age, Myst, and Wii Sports all played off this beautifully. But there's a problem with the Revolutionary approach: if you're going to make a "game for adults", you need to understand that, sadly, your audience is not literate. If you're going to reach this new audience, you're going to need to TEACH THEM TO READ. Furthermore, you're going to need to convince them the WANT to read damn quickly.

Therefore the goals of "making games for adults" and "making mature games" are not only different: they are AT ODDS. One is about generating complex, interesting content using people's understanding of Interactivity, the other is about introducing people to unfamiliar sorts of interactivity in a "soft" way. Paradoxically, making a successful "Game for Adults" require treating the audience as extraordinarily immature.

I don't think it will always be this way... a 40-year-old can only play their first game once. Wii Sports is a gateway drug... soon enough there will be something else, something that asks just a LITTLE more. Some people will rise to the challenge, others will put the controller down. As in any medium, not everyone will want to make the same investment. But one way or another, the "mature" audience will grow, and as it does, the mature content will grow as well.

In the meantime, are there ways to reconcile the seeming opposites, the "game for adults" and the "mature game"?

Sure there are: by marrying simple, easy to understand interactivity with complex, evocative themes. By making people consider their interactions, even if that interaction is a simple, repetitive button press. I tried to do this, with mixed success, in Hush... I consider that game, and the field of "serious games" in general, as an attempt to address the gap. While the game wasn't perfect, it was interesting that, in my user tests, non-gamers actually did BETTER, on the whole, than GAMERS did.

There are better examples of "mature games for adults" out there, such as Passage, which I found very touching... but even Passage, with it's self-conscious Dragon Warrior art direction, plays off and requires a bit of game literacy to be fully effective. Could the same effect have been achieved with a more inviting control scheme and graphical style? Maybe... but to those of us whose thumbs have been twitching on control pads for most of our lives, it might not have resonated the same way.

Whatever platform they can manage for their creations, game designers looking to make "games for adults" have a clear path before them: Simplify, Make it accessible, Make it familiar, Make it shine. Those who want to make MATURE "games for adults", however, are looking at an interesting and difficult task... they need to find ways to invite their audience in with understandable, non-frustrating mechanics and simultaneously challenge them with their content.

* The meaning and value of an "adult understanding" is an issue for another time. We can set up a debate, Peter Pans v. Captain Hooks, another time.