Mature Themes?

[Darji]

Mature themes, to us, means exploring concepts in a frank manner from many angles through the story and the characters in it. Dead Money explored obsession. Honest Hearts explored religion. Even when dealing with alien (or elven[?!?!]) cultures and magic/technology, themes should relate back to what players would understand as part of the human condition. E.g. a film like District 9 is good at triggering sensitivities to (real world) racism and dehumanization in the audience even though the aliens are fictional.

 

Perfect. Just what I am expecting of Obsidian^^

[generic.hybridity]

Thanks for responding on the boards like this Josh. Gotta say, i'm liking everything I am hearing about the direction of this title.

[pseudonymous]

Mature themes, to us, means exploring concepts in a frank manner from many angles through the story and the characters in it. Dead Money explored obsession. Honest Hearts explored religion. Even when dealing with alien (or elven[?!?!]) cultures and magic/technology, themes should relate back to what players would understand as part of the human condition. E.g. a film like District 9 is good at triggering sensitivities to (real world) racism and dehumanization in the audience even though the aliens are fictional.

 

Thank you.

[Longknife]

You can't think of anything else that qualifies as Mature?

 

Ok well how about substance abuse for the sake of substance abuse?

Everyone knows smoking and drinking makes you an adult.

 

 

 

 

I'd hope they mean mature themes, meaning storylines and themes for people with refined tastes that younger audiences may not be able to appreciate. Not that scaring away the kiddies is the strongpoint, mind you, but rather that oftentimes the themes we see that are for all ages are VERY clich

Edited September 16, 2012 by Longknife

[Tauron]

I like what i am reading and its great that people transcend "mature concept" more than does nipple shows or how visually violance is.

[The Sharmat]

To be fair, substance abuse is kind of the point of substance abuse. Like potato chips are the point of potato chips.

[Tale]

To keep the ball rolling, I want to give a fair example of what I think are mature themes.

Let's take a war. The way this shows up in lots of work is that the evil army invades their good neighbor and that's terrible.

 

When I think of a mature approach to war, I think of a work that motives the invading army not because of good vs. evil, but because the invaders have suffered an extensive drought for the past few seasons or years. However, inside the neighboring country is a freshwater river surrounded by adequate farmland. His people, starving and dying, are still mostly a moral sort. They would balk at the idea of a war to steal their neighbor's land. So the king sends out his spymaster, who comes back and points him at a group of feuding clans on the border. They've been killing each other off and on for 3 generations and everyone left them alone. This time is different, when the clan on their side of the border loses a particular battle, news spreads around the kingdom about an unprovoked attack from the neighbor. The people of the neighbors look like just like us, but they are truly sub-human beasts who will kill for petty reasons. They must be pushed back to protect the borders. And the biggest threat is perhaps that town with the river and surrounding farmland.

 

Maybe the king troubles himself over the fact that he has to lie to his people, send them off to die and kill so that perhaps their children won't starve. Or maybe he hasn't the slightest qualm about what he is doing, believing without question that it's always the needs of his people before any moral obligation.

 

These are the things I think about.

[Darji]

Also a very huge problem here is to stay consistent to the world.

 

Here a bad example from yeah Dragon Age 2: In theory I really liked the conflict between Mages and Templars. It had much potential but it was destroyed through people in the world not reacting to your actions. For example you had a fight in a city full of Templars and you were clearly a Mage and casted spell after spell in their sight and even fought besides them. But suddenly as it ended they acted like nothing had happened. They thanked you for not being a Mage and just went on with their business.

 

Such events could destroy any mature story line and make it laughable in my opinion. So in short if you actually have such conflicts about racism or discrimination in your story make sure the world is aware of that and is reacting to your actions.

[Longknife]

To be fair, substance abuse is kind of the point of substance abuse. Like potato chips are the point of potato chips.

 

You're right, that was totally unfair of me to the substances.

I'm sorry substances.

[WDeranged]

I think we're mostly on the same page about what maturity means, we know it's not bewbs, ass n blood, it's about complexity and angles...everyone's got an angle and we all want to be right, what happens when the angles meet is where the good stuff happens.

[Longknife]

I think we're mostly on the same page about what maturity means, we know it's not bewbs, ass n blood, it's about complexity and angles...everyone's got an angle and we all want to be right, what happens when the angles meet is where the good stuff happens.

 

Though I just wanna clarify, that doesn't mean Lonesome Road wouldn't've been better if Ulysses was actually an "Ualana" who wore skimpy, revealing outfits while discussing philosophy and the importance of being aware of the meaning of- and taking responsibility for- one's own actions with us.

 

Just tossing that out there.

[Badmojo]

Actually, there is no reason that both versions of mature cannot be used, the witcher does it good.

 

The biggest thing that has prvented real mature themes from coming out was because publishers forced censorship on anything controversal in a game. I would like to see a game cover many topics of maturity from high brow to low brow stuff.

 

Children and child Killing - no game would allow this now, most games are childless hollow worlds or have immortal children. Allow kids in but do not make them immortal, let them be killed but there will be a price on your head if you are seen doing it.

 

Child soldiers - a sad fact of life is that children in poor countries are usually dragged into the military to fight and die. A tactic in the past was to have an army take over an area, kill most of the men, take the women into slavery and the children (and surviving men) were either taken as slaves or forced to join the military.

 

Drug use - every society has it, should be shown.

 

Prostitution - been around since the dawn of civilization, it should be prevelant, but not "token" characters all in some dark alley brothel, but common in some places.

 

Religion - religion has always been a controversal topic, but what if it was more? The gods/beings worshiped are real here. What if one god/being gave nice weather, perfect health to all, maybe even bring back the recently dead. However, what if the price was the occasional human sacrifice?

 

Slavery - slavery should be in, one thing that was cool about fallout was you could fight slavers or become a slaver.

 

Politics - I love politics in RPG's, I would like to see more done for those of us who love social quests, like manipulating groups through gile, seduction, blackmail...etc

 

romance - should be in, its fun for some us and as long as its optional, nothing is wrong.

 

Blackmail - everybody has dirt the characters could find, the flip side is to avoid doing something that the characters could be blackmailed for.

 

Sex/seduction - its a fact of life and it should be in the game, but I would like to see more of it than simple romance. I would like to see sex as a social tool/weapon. In fallout 2 you could accept sex as payment from a woman to save her husband. Was that a jerk thing to do, yes, yes it was but I loved that you had the option. There is also the fantastic moment where you sleep with the daughter in a barn, the father catches you and forces a shotgun wedding. Its been a while, but I think there was also a way to seduce/sleep with the mob bosses wife to gain information. Just like to see sex/seduction used in a social situation to add another layer of gameplay outside the usual types.

 

Racism/sexism should be in, these are things you could try to change or things you use to exploit people.

 

Prisoner Treatment - some created gladiator rings for entertainment, some were used as slaves, some were treated humanly, some were used in experiments, etc

 

There was a good list of things listed earlier, along those lines would be nice.