Article: "Grow Up - Why are video games for adults so juvenile?"

Holding Conker's Bad Fur Day up as an example of a 'mature' adult game and then berating it for being stuffed full of crude humor is just plain silly. Its blatently just your regular 3d platformer wrapped up in immature swearing and visual gags. Not that theres anything wrong with that, I just didn't find it actually fun.

Getting more to the point of the article:

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Console games (for PlayStation 2, Dreamcast, N64) boast great game play, requiring eye-hand coordination and providing an immersive, physical environment. PC games lack action but excel in concepts and complexity. Why can't we have the best of both worlds?

Because, by and large, we don't want both worlds at the same time. The type of gamer (or, the current mood of a gamer) typically wants to focus on one style of game at any given time (sometimes *because* they're not very good at the other styles). I play a mean game of UT, yet am terrible at most RTS games. Should I therefore be forces to play at a style that I'm not very good at in-between my FPS fix?

Equally, some styles are mutually exclusive. Most wartime stratergy games require advanced planned (eg. civ) adding in something that requires quick reflexes (say, realtime battles) can break the balance - after all, when you can win the battles based on your ninja reflexes, why bother with the careful planning?

Not that different styles can't be combines, in fact they already have been sucessfully blended multiple times. Games like Deus Ex, Theif, BattleZone, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicals and Phantasy Star Online (to name but a few) are all games which "have the best of both worlds".

In short, I think the writer is horribly wrong and not been playing a wide enough set of games. Hell, the blanked comment about "all console games are quick action, all PC slow and strategic" should be a tip off that the writer hasn't been doing his homework.

Thanks for the article Oluseyi but I have to say this was one of the most poorly written, overly generalized pieces on games I've seen since the "videogames cause violence" screeds. To the author I ask, just what exactly is mature? Let's take movies as our standard: For example, is the gothic horror of Aliens mature? If yes, then if you take the exact same concept and put it into a game, is that game now mature? If so, then just about every serious first person shooter out there is mature, and that covers a huge swath of the gaming industry.

Is the content of World War II mature? If so, there are countless turn-based, real-time and FPS games that are then also mature.

If murder and killing isn't mature subject matter the you have to wonder why the author didn't take on adventure games. Has he even heard of them?

This line:

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And many PC games ("Civilization"; the new "Black & White") are complicated and strategic enough to bewilder most tykes and intrigue many adults. But there's a missing niche. Console games (for PlayStation 2, Dreamcast, N64) boast great game play, requiring eye-hand coordination and providing an immersive, physical environment. PC games lack action but excel in concepts and complexity. Why can't we have the best of both worlds?

leads me to believe that the writer doesn't know jack about PC or console gaming as both types appear on both platforms. But the real gem is this misguided scrawl:

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It won't happen until we recognize games' capacity for real art. Current designers come from programming backgrounds, so millions of dollars in development costs produce a beautifully rendered world full of farting scarecrows.

As one of the many people on this board and probably thousands of people out there who have labored to distill complex social actions into numerical systems and workable gameplay, this is an insult. Only a person ridiculously ignorant of the sheer difficulty inherent in such an endeavor could have the nerve to whine about it being the programmer's fault.


And to this

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Meanwhile, the nerds behind strategy-based PC games lack the drive or ability to design a responsive, explorable, 3-D environment or characters that move the way you want them to.

I have to say: Really now? So exactly how much work is it to get thousands of autonomous AI entities to react and adapt to their environment? Where are the bottlenecks? What are the resource constraints? What are the core engineering problems?

But of course, you know all you need to know when you read these lines:

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Interactivity could be the most powerful artistic tool we have, yet no one does anything with it.

As Greg Costikyan once wrote, a light switch is interactive. I flip it on, I flip it off. Big deal. If the author is asking for a responsive system that responds to minute changes, he'll just have to hold his breath until several dozen games try (as Morrowind: Oblivion claims to be doing) and very likely fail.

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The pieces are all in place: The money's there (games now outgross movies),

... and as anyone who has ever tried to secure funding knows, it's just laying out in the gutter waiting to be picked up, right?

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the audience is ready for something new (older gamers now resort to emulations of retro games just to find something fun to play),

Even if I believed this (show me the data), I would again say big deal. You don't take a risk with your millions unless you know you can gain an edge.

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and the technical foundations have been laid.

No they haven't. The guy doesn't know what he's talking about.

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It would have been very interesting to ask how we appeal to a wider audience, or how we support deep emotional content with gameplay rather than cutscenes. Picking out one game for its immature humor and then generalizing it to the rest of the industry is just simply inept. It reminds me of all those English papers I had to write an hour before the deadline: Overly generalized, filled with slipshod reasoning, thrown together just to make the minimum word count.

I guess if I got A's for all of those this guy deserves to be published. [rolleyes]

I like the way that RTS games are made by nerds... obviously FPS games are made by rock stars like John Romero? [rolleyes]

I think the article *is* interesting, if way off base, simply because it shows how someone not in the industry sees games. Sadly, it's based almost entirely on one game (which incidentally sounds pretty cool). Has he ever played games such as Max Payne? GTA?

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Original post by OrangyTang after all, when you can win the battles based on your ninja reflexes, why bother with the careful planning?

I just had to laugh when I read that.

Unlike most of you, I see a genuine point in the article. Of course it is rife with generalizations and miscues, but it also makes valid points from a certain perspective.

I am not a gamer. Not because I don't like games, but because I find the contemporary selection of games embody conventions that I can't come to terms with. I despise RPGs because there's a lack of role-playing with them and an excess of statistical/numerical obsession. I don't play reflex games on my PC because the keyboard is an awkward device (some of you disagree, but it's really mouselook you're enamored of). In short, hundreds of games are released every year to critical and popular acclaim that I find to be entirely unplayable.

For that simple reason, I'm more favorably inclined toward external perspectives that are critical of gaming. For me, and people like me, there's something very wrong. And the fact that all the responses so far have been dismissive on the basis of "this guy knows nothing about game development" (he's not supposed to; he's a writer, writing as a consumer) is, to me, symptomatic of the problem: insularity.

[As an aside, the comments on the misapplication of "mature" are just... obtuse. There's a "Mature" ESRB rating for games, which is the usage here. There is no ambiguity.]

Essentially, the article asked why we didn't have smart, clever, strategic adult (in the sense of "not kiddie") games that also required good reflexes. All the rest is beside the point. I hadn't fully thought it through when I posted the thread earlier; the nature of the responses have helped me focus on the essentials.

My mistake. I'll be careful not to post material that asks admittedly naive questions ever again. I mean, we don't want that, do we?

"Essentially, the article asked why we didn't have smart, clever, strategic adult (in the sense of "not kiddie") games that also required good reflexes."

The audience of a game is the intersection of the parts, not the union. If you make a strategy game that requires twitch reflexes, you reduce your audience to people who like/excel at both.

Smart + Adult + Strategy + Reflex/Action likely reduces the number of potential buyers to less than profitable margins (if in fact there are not games out there that meet your desired style).

If course, it is also possible that this is a unique, unexploited market that publishers have ignored. I have a high degree of faith in publishers abilities to make money though, so I am a bit skeptical of this.

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Original post by Oluseyi Unlike most of you, I see a genuine point in the article. Of course it is rife with generalizations and miscues, but it also makes valid points from a certain perspective. I am not a gamer. Not because I don't like games, but because I find the contemporary selection of games embody conventions that I can't come to terms with. I despise RPGs because there's a lack of role-playing with them and an excess of statistical/numerical obsession. I don't play reflex games on my PC because the keyboard is an awkward device (some of you disagree, but it's really mouselook you're enamored of). In short, hundreds of games are released every year to critical and popular acclaim that I find to be entirely unplayable. For that simple reason, I'm more favorably inclined toward external perspectives that are critical of gaming. For me, and people like me, there's something very wrong. And the fact that all the responses so far have been dismissive on the basis of "this guy knows nothing about game development" (he's not supposed to; he's a writer, writing as a consumer) is, to me, symptomatic of the problem: insularity. [As an aside, the comments on the misapplication of "mature" are just... obtuse. There's a "Mature" ESRB rating for games, which is the usage here. There is no ambiguity.] Essentially, the article asked why we didn't have smart, clever, strategic adult (in the sense of "not kiddie") games that also required good reflexes. All the rest is beside the point. I hadn't fully thought it through when I posted the thread earlier; the nature of the responses have helped me focus on the essentials. My mistake. I'll be careful not to post material that asks admittedly naive questions ever again. I mean, we don't want that, do we?

Not one single game title captures what you want? How about past titles?

I don't think there's a computer game out that allows REAL role-playing ala Dungeons and Dragons. And even in that game, back when I was into it, almost no one "role-played". We hung out and acted like ourselves and played the game. No one talked funny or actually pretended to be a wizard. If they did they probably wouldn't have been invited back. You only see that behavior at Gen Con or other things. Almost no one who plays want's to actually pretend to BE a warrior or a wizard, they just want to play their toon really well and have a good time. By making a game that is specifically focused on the role-playing aspect (for real) you are zeroing in on a market of, perhaps, thousands. Not enough to make a title.

And why are all PC RPG's so freaking depressing?

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Original post by Sluginator And why are all PC RPG's so freaking depressing?

Is that a rhetorical question?

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Original post by BrianL If course, it is also possible that this is a unique, unexploited market that publishers have ignored. I have a high degree of faith in publishers abilities to make money though, so I am a bit skeptical of this.

That's looking at it backwards. Consumers will settle for the best available option for certain goods/services. That doesn't mean it's everything they wanted.

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Original post by Ned_K Not one single game title captures what you want? How about past titles?

Some past titles were essentially perfect. Why? Because the limitations of technology constrained both consumer (read: my) expectations and gameplay possibilities, requiring more of an imaginative investment to "see" the game.

But that's entirely beside the point. Most contemporary games I've played have one critical flaw that seems so obvious. Project Gotham Racing 2 has no traces of AI; the other cars just drive along an approximately ideal racing line. ESPN NBA 2K5 has poor control and that stupid IsoMotion2™ crap. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time has that iffy camera behavior, and zero strategy, anyway. Splinter Cell is pretty good, but some solutions are non-intuitive and some deaths/failures are cheap (I'd consider a game like that a resounding success if a person could conceivably play straight through without a single failure/death on the first try - ie, no "cheese").

Why do games hide their play mechanics? To sell strategy guides? Have the decency to explain to me how things work (RalliSport Challenge 2 is excellent at this: the pre-race screen includes fairly detailed driving tips that actually help you improve your play; Project Gotham Racing 2 gives a few tips here and there, but not in as much detail). Make me better at the game by telling me how it works, and increase my enjoyment.

If you can't challenge me intelligently, then don't cheat. Move on. Don't make the game pointlessly longer. Respect my time and my intelligence.

I do need to get around to playing Max Payne 2, though.

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Original post by Oluseyi Essentially, the article asked why we didn't have smart, clever, strategic adult (in the sense of "not kiddie") games that also required good reflexes.

Then the writer has never played anything online, or never bothered to try and play anything well.

Many people play for fun - which is after all, the whole point of games, to be fun - but they forget that playing for fun and playing to win are not mutually exclusive. In fact, for many games, one is required for the other.

Take chess for example. No-one plays 'just for fun' - the entertainment value of moving pieces around a board is pretty low unless there's some motivation for doing so - like winning. Even in a 'friendly' game of chess, you're trying to win, otherwise there's not much point in playing.

Now of course with computer games, you have pretty graphics and animations, cool sound effects to entertain you. You can have a certain amount of fun without even trying to play well, but it's very limited. In this respect, perhaps the graphics and sound are subconsciously distracting the player from the actual game. If you discipline yourself to try playing a game well you might find there's a whole lot more to it than you thought. Of course this is best seen playing online - computer opponents are never quite as interesting as human ones - although they can still be a good challenge.

Of course, time is an issue here. Older people have less spare time to learn to play games well, so perhaps there's a natural tendency to stick to games they learnt to play well in their youth, hence the popularity of retro gaming.

That said, the PC certainly has a wealth of games that fit both those criteria, (reflexes + strategy) and I don't doubt that the consoles do too.

[Edited by - Sandman on November 8, 2004 5:10:53 AM]

Ok just throwing out random thoughts based on the responses I scanned..


a) the original article IS a shallow, generalizing diatribe with no meat. But the writer's heart is in the right place.

b) I agree that INTERACTIVITY is the key. Whether you like online games or not...the far future of gaming are virtual game worlds (god VR has so much "never-lived-up-to-the-hype" baggage) that are as immersive as possible.

It amazes me that MMOs dont even have the level of environment interactivity of today's Adventure Company mystery game. (Im working on fixing this).

c) People do play chess 'for fun' The fun is figuring out the puzzle of moves - knocking the king over at the end is a much shorter euphoria. Its about the journey not the destination.

d) I think that besides INTERACTIVITY, WRITING is the real culprit in games. And by this I mean the amount. For games to get more immersive, open-ended, and fulfilling emotionally the amount of writing for each title needs to explode exponentially.
Of course this comes down to money. Once all the old ideas get used and people cry for more, perhaps someone will break out with some exponential writing projects.

I had an idea about how to redo MMORPGs because people didnt feel like they were playing a role, nor was the story fulfilling.

Start out with 50 hero/anti-hero types...
Take 4 races of beings...
add 8 faction (read: civilization with goals and grudges)
then create 8 basic sets of skill proficiencies (read: what configuration of skills characters would have at the start)

THEN WRITE A STORY FOR ALL PERMUTATIONS! Each with a novel-like beginning, exposition, story arc and climax!

Talk about a huge undertaking...but without specific characters and a hero;s journey for each (I suggest reading Joseph Cambell's Hero of A Thousand Faces)...games will truly be boring.

I personally wouldn't want blazing action in my geeky strategy game or RPG. I'm not good at action, and forcing me to use it will mean I'll probably never get very far through the game, and thus I'll probably never see half the scenes that get advertized as being so cool.

However, I think there's a point here. Most of the action games I hear about (FPS's mainly) seem to be about "if it moves, kill it". If all I wanna do is shoot stuff, I can go play Space Invaders or something. Why don't we have more games of this type with more of a story than "Aliens landed and they wanna kill us"? Why do people spend millions of dollars each year making bigger and better graphics for things to shoot at, without really adding anything new to the genre? Why doesn't everyone just go play Space Invaders or something?

As for "mature" games...well, I think my mom embodies a large portion of the mature gamer market. She's in her upper 40's and usually prefers games that don't require a whole lot of thinking, because if it gets too intricate chances are she won't remember what she was supposed to be doing, heh. If a game has a whole bunch of special moves that you have to push specific buttons in a certain order for, she'll usually just use the default attack due to not remembering the button combos, or because she thinks games shouldn't be made in such a way that you have to use outlandish button combos to complete them. She used to love RPG's, but I haven't seen her finish a single one for a few years now, mostly because she's too tired to bother exerting that much effort on a video game. Plus, if it's a game I haven't played before, she can't ask me where the Uber Sword of Smiting is, so she has to spend hours exploring and getting annoyed by random combat encounters, heh.

I think for a lot of people, the conception is "mature=boobs and butts". This isn't mature, this is teenage hormone overdrive. There could be all kinds of games that make you think about important subjects like why politics sucks, why do people misuse power, how does accidentally causing a friend's death affect you, and if humans have such a great capacity to do amazing things, why are there so many mean people in the world who only enjoy knocking others down a rung so they can be on top of the ladder. I think that our society as a whole isn't very mature. Most of us follow the instant gratification process, and the "mine mine mine" method. When our society seems to have the average age values of a 3 year old, how are we supposed to produce truly mature games very often?

OrangyTang has said it in a nutshell basically. It's all about the demand for such games... there just isn't much for one which considers both worlds.

Most adults are also too busy to get involved in games, that's why it makes more sense to appeal to teenagers and young people of the generation.

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Original post by PointSoft OrangyTang has said it in a nutshell basically. It's all about the demand for such games... there just isn't much for one which considers both worlds.

How do you determine the demand for a product that doesn't exist? It's not like anybody ran focus group tests to determine the viability of such games. No, it comes down to what the developers and designers and publishers think should be made. It has nothing to do with what consumers want.

(How many FPSes do you think consumers really need? And since they're all so fundamentally similar, why don't they use successive iterations of the same tech, saving time and money for other projects? There's nothing rational about the game development business, so enough with the shallow economic analysis.)

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Most adults are also too busy to get involved in games, that's why it makes more sense to appeal to teenagers and young people of the generation.

All the data contra-indicates your assertion. Adults have more money. The explosion of T- and M-rated games isn't because the "average gamer" is a 15-year old kid. Try looking up some of the facts one of these days. It'll prove quite illuminating.

[Note: I haven't read the article because from all the posts it seems pointless to do so]

Summary: Bad games result in optimal profit.

I think the reason we don't have many good(IMO) games (on the PC anyways, as I have no consoles) is because quality takes creativity, hard work, and lots of other things that would cost game studios more money. Since the goal is money (be it the studio's goal or the goal of their publisher etc), they want to optimize the amount of profit, which means making cost low and profit high. Since most people seem to buy into bad games (take CS:Source as a good example IMO, and CS before that), and bad games cost less money (no time 'wasted' on creativity, just take the old technology and design it over again with a few new features), making bad games is an obvious win for studios/publishers/etc.

Of course, if they would cut back on the technical specs of the game they could spend more time on everything else, but it should be obvious that eyecandy sells to 99% of the world (or at least the US). Listen to the radio, look on TV, or even on gamedev.net and you'll be bombarded by advertisement that essentially shows/takls about 'eyecandy'. "OMG ITS NEW AND IMPROVED WITH LEMON SCENT!" And people buy it, making the rest of us suffer through it all =-/
If they cut back on eyecandy for gameplay, there is no guarantee they'd make any sales at all, while with good eyecandy they're practically guaranteed to make millions.

Games for adults? Define that term first. Do we mean games for hardcore gamer adults? There are tons - the RTS and FPS industry are full of them.

Games for adults who're working stiffs? Most of those are intelligent kids games or sports games - sports games appeal to manly men who need everything to tie into golf, football, and nascar; while kids games appeal to girls and guys who can look past a game's studliness in favour of gameplay.

For example, my jock friends play Wrestlemania and NHL200X etc. My geek friends play UT2004. My girl friends play Chu Chu Rocket, Tetris, and Bomberman.

The remaining games are aimed at harcore games for whom gaming is a time-absorbing hobby.

What do we play when we get together? Chu Chu Rocket, Tetris, and Bomberman. So adults play the kids games, because the kids games are actually designed not for kids, but for _everybody_. Why? Because only the hardcores can play the harcore games, often enough only the ones who're into that particular genre - not even all the hardcore players. Nobody likes the jock games - they're dull, sacrificing fun in favour of accuracy. So we play the games that are designed to be fun and easy to jump into.

"It's not like anybody ran focus group tests to determine the viability of such games. No, it comes down to what the developers and designers and publishers think should be made. It has nothing to do with what consumers want."

...because publishers don't do focus testing to determine what is likely to make money? Developers pitch games all the time which are shot by publishers as niche.

"And since they're all so fundamentally similar, why don't they use successive iterations of the same tech, saving time and money for other projects?"

...perhaps Epic and Id should start licensing their engines. I apologize for the sarcasm, but tech reuse is huge. Sure, such titles still require programming for specialization/new features, but hardly anyone starts from scratch each iteration. Heck, many publishers see this as too risky and won't fund a title that is all new tech anyway.

I would suggest that the reason games are becoming more polarized is the cost of developing a game these days. A few years ago, 200,000 copies sold was considered a moderate hit. Now a game that doesn't sell a million across all platforms is a failure. This is a direct result of the cost of developing a game increasing; it has reduced the visibility of many genres as the dev cost exceeded the profits.

Finally, people in this thread are making a lot of judgements about the quality of games out there. Keep in mind that a game you consider rubish make be someone elses favorite title. As much as people like beating up Valve for CS/CS:Source, it is massively popular. Several of my favorite titles over the last few years probably won't get sequels because, while critical successes, they were commercial failures.

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Original post by Oluseyi I despise RPGs because there's a lack of role-playing with them and an excess of statistical/numerical obsession.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't there a number of non-statistical online RPGs where the community gets together to decide rules and real human beings interact with each other? I would have had to concede this 10 years ago, but I don't think this complaint has any basis nowadays. Why aren't you playing something like A Tale In The Desert?

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I don't play reflex games on my PC because the keyboard is an awkward device (some of you disagree, but it's really mouselook you're enamored of).

Why don't console games suffice, then? The playability of a Halo or Return to Castle Wolfenstein or Serious Sam is pretty much the same on Xbox or PC, for example. And aren't there control pads you can hook up to a serial port?

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In short, hundreds of games are released every year to critical and popular acclaim that I find to be entirely unplayable.

The problem here is that I find this to be an all too common complaint, even amoung hardcore gamers. How many people want multiplayer co-op? How many want more open-ended games? How many want a non-Medieval Europe RPG? That there are hundred of games that we both find unplayable isn't anything special.

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And the fact that all the responses so far have been dismissive on the basis of "this guy knows nothing about game development" (he's not supposed to; he's a writer, writing as a consumer) is, to me, symptomatic of the problem: insularity.

He is an ignorant consumer. His complaint is no different from all those people who whine that MMORPGs only let you do what the designers want you to do, and no more valid. The author bandies about "interactivity" as some cure all, which is laughable considering that games already are interactive. He sends us off searching for the McGuffin that doesn't exist or that we already have.

His error is in treating the computer as a magic light box and making demands on it that one would never make on a real-world system.

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As an aside, the comments on the misapplication of "mature" are just... obtuse. There's a "Mature" ESRB rating for games, which is the usage here. There is no ambiguity.

This is being just silly. The author complains about content. I cited content. Games already ARE mature unless we want to analyze the definition of what makes mature content. There's no argument here.

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Essentially, the article asked why we didn't have smart, clever, strategic adult (in the sense of "not kiddie") games that also required good reflexes.

What about all the arcade-like flight sims or spaceflight sims? What about the numerous FPS games like Half-Life which include timed puzzles and careful strategic positioning?
And don't many an RTS game exactly fit the bill of good reflexes and strategic planning, especially when it comes to rapid-fire response to troublespots, scrolling the map, selection and deployment?

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I'll be careful not to post material that asks admittedly naive questions ever again. I mean, we don't want that, do we?

You might have got a more productive response if you'd have simply phrased the question without citing a 3 year old article, dude.

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How do you determine the demand for a product that doesn't exist? It's not like anybody ran focus group tests to determine the viability of such games. No, it comes down to what the developers and designers and publishers think should be made. It has nothing to do with what consumers want.

Oluseyi, I'd never expect you of all people to make this kind of assertion given how knowledgable you are of industry's internals. At the publisher level how do you think the approval process works??? Developers propose and publishers choose, often based on heavy input from marketing, which has conducted market research and focus groups.

The game industry will swoop on any market segment as soon as some product proves it exists-- it has less to do with engineers and more to do with VPs who hold the money. Take as a perfect example The Sims: It was universally rejected by Will Wright's own company until EA bought Maxis and took a risk. And that was WITH a focus groups that claimed the playing with virtual dolls just wouldn't be enjoyable!

A VP of the game publisher / developer I used to work for had this saying: "Nobody, no matter who they are, knows what the next hit is going to be. If there were a formula they'd be mass producing it like crazy already. Not even Hollywood, which thinks it has a formula, can guarantee a hit."

It's fine to complain that games aren't being tailored to your tastes. But drawing the conclusion that its because of insularity is just baseless.