In terms of just making a game that deals with this stuff then yeah you absolutely could BUT I'm kinda unsure as to exactly why you'd want to. I mean vidcon theory is horrible in many (many, many) ways but you could still make a reasonable case that to whatever extent there is some distinguishing factor between games and other media it would involve things like environment, atmosphere, more kind of abstract aesthetic stuff that doesn't necessarily lend itself to discussing actual complex human issues. I read an article once that compared game design to architecture or maybe theme-park-ride designing which seemed kind of appropriate. People have mentioned that most attempts at storytelling are just cutscenes or whatever but while there have been games that tried to tell a story through environment or whatever (bioshock, passage i guess) the transition leaves the themes involved hopelessly generalized and neutered. I'm saying this badly but basically while you could make a game about any of those things I'm not sure whether doing so in any kind of DEPTH whatsoever would not mean going against the fundamentally videogame parts of it. You could do stuff with symbolism (although symbolism is kind of a boring copout anyway really heh) or recontextualisation or whatever but I'm on the fence as to how good those things are at conveying anything relatively nuanced. Most of the ones I've played that avoided textdumps or whatever still ended up being an awkward mishmash between 'message' and gameplay, which seems to kinda miss the point of the whole thing. A special mention has to go here to indie game darling 'Edmund' for the absolute best example of why crossing traditional game mechanics with complex human issues can be a horrible idea (PRESS X TO RAPE ahaha on second thought maybe we should be actively discouraging these people from tackling any issue more complex than savr princess)
But yeah I don't really play that many games and I'm sure there've been some ones that managed to pull this off. I'm not even saying you shouldn't try, either. I just think you should consider the extent to which you and the medium can actually do justice to any of these issues before just jumping on them to show how BAM! POW! GAMES ARENT JUST FOR KIDS ANYMORE!

Also just throwing it out but if you really want to see more mature games I think it'd be a lot more productive to look at/make ones that just deal with basic everyday human emotions and issues than some broad controversial theme (this is a dumb statement as it implies that racism capitalism etc are not REAL ISSUES but basically I'd rather see people attempt to convey humanity rather than make some vague 'statement'). Also maybe this is identity politics lol but I also dunno exactly how progressive or interesting to have white bourgeois hobbyists sit around telling each other that RACISM IS BAD anyway. I guess any attempt to develop the... games medium is to be welcomed but I am not particularly enthralled by the prospect of 'Crash: The Videogame'.

I definitely agree with you about controversy being unnecessary or even potentially harmful to a game's ability to be 'meaningful' or whatever. I think that to a certain extent, the opportunity for interactivity in games gives us a whole heap of new things to discuss that are kind of harder to do in some other mediums. Games let us talk about interaction, possibility and experience in the same way that paintings have discussed light and colour. They let us play with opportunity in the same way that design or architecture plays with empty space.

Games that are serious and are about tangible things that happen must exist. They can serve both as entertainment and criticism and people will make them as long as the means for producing video games is widely available. I think that the more interesting issue for game developers, however, is simply what it means to be able to create an interactive experience and how best to do it. What is fun? Which sets of rules result in interesting experiences? Computers are important in this because they can quickly process very complex sets of rules. This is similar to recent advances in theoretical science by Stephen Wolfram, Gregory Chaitin etc emphasising the importance of computer experiments in future scientific inquiry. Game developers who can better analyse interactivity, i.e. the medium itself will in my opinion advance it most. Using games as a vessel for 'serious issues', while important and interesting, has little effect on our understanding of what games can be.

Now I feel silly posting after all these long educated replies ​.

I feel that the extended stuff like rape, extreme violence or child abuse in a game is only ok, for whatever reason, if:

You do not see or hear it - a blackout before he grabs her, or the camera stops following the player and there are no sounds that can vividly help the asshole playing the game enjoy the fantasy.
 
It is of moderate horribility, like stuff you could watch on daytime TV, or find in the general section of the library. Like you cannot compare racism and adult abuse to anything concerning a child. I saw a show on prisons where a man was beaten by everybody else for hurting a kid, it's a touchy subject I think.

You can label a game as Adults Only, you can restrict access and even lock it up but once an idea leaves the human mind into reality, somewhere/somehow/someway someone who isn't meant to see it will and shit will hit the fan.

I think violence is only ok in movies or games if:

- there is no visible blood
- it's off screen so that the viewer/player can't enjoy it in any way
- it isn't against decent people (excluding arabs, jews and homosexuals)

if xenogears is the only game you've played that touches on racism then i take it the only games you've played are xenogears and mario.

So Sonic the Hedgehog touches on racism now?

But it raises a good point. You can't think of art in a binary or "is/isn't" style relationship.

Anything is anything to some degree that is that is numerically equivalent to some value inbetween 0.0 and 1.0.

It's also why I think not only that operant conditioning is a fertile ground for game development, but it is also the very medium that composes all of reality as we know it.

There was an intelligent game. "Harvester," for DOS.

Harvester is awesome, but I'm not sure how intelligent you think it is.  It was REALLY GOOD yes but idk it didn't tackle any controversial issues it just INCLUDED them.  It wasn't trying to make some point about murder and rape and racism or anything like that (well except maybe it was saying video game violence doesn't lead to real violence, that is the only argument that it tried to nail and that's if you got the BAD ENDING so take of that what you will).

Unless you were being sarcastic in which case you aren't given Harvester ENOUGH credit.  it's pretty average on the pure entertainment <----|----> hard hitting social messages scale.

It did have a lot of satire about 1950s mentality but that's a different sort of thing.  It's a lot easier satirizing the past than dealing with current issues.

edit: to be fair this kind of has more to do with what the conversation turned into than what it started off as being.  To the original question "can video games intelligently handle topics", then yeah Harvester did a pretty good job of things.

you know, i would almost be inclined to say that games SHOULD NOT attempt to touch on mature topics as often as they currently do. i am so fucking sick of seeing the orwellian dystopia stretched around idiotic, boring shooters. it takes a degree of intellect and creativity to do something with these complex ideas, and most game designers are rather tragically lacking in this ability, or are simply unwilling to incorporate these concepts in any real way beyond the occasional cluster of poverty-stricken npcs milling about feeling sorry for themselves.

take half-life 2, for example. pretty good game on the whole, but they rather sloppily throw in this dystopian society in as the supposed foundation for the game and elect not to do anything with it at all beyond a couple vaguely poignant npcs in the first five minutes. you stroll by these miserable wretches, engaging in a scenario of a completely different nature that is only tangentially related to what the story appears to be physically about. in a very real way, gordon freeman goes through the game experiencing a very thinly-veiled continuation of the first half-life, while everyone else in the world is actually experiencing the half-life 2 story. it's this peripheral element that ultimately contributes nothing to the game, and i seriously wonder if the game would have been significantly better if the people around you were actually OBLIVIOUS to the terrors going on around them.

for these concepts to be both appropriate and meaningful in games, the player must be given circumstances to directly interact with these concepts, rather than simply litter the streets with them or make them topics of concern for the npcs. that's how good art works. you take the rules and boundaries of the medium and use that to create something important within BOTH the context of the medium and human experience. simply referencing something important does not make the work as a whole important. most game designers are either tragically unaware of this, or are unwilling/unable to take the next step to make these higher concepts a true reality in their games. or they simply don't care, which is another conversation entirely.

seriously though, how many games have really taken complex ideas and made you play with them until some sort of meaning was squeezed out? the three games that immediately come to mind are deus ex, and the first two fallout games. there is a lot of superfluous fluff in deus ex, but the game had some extremely legitimate ideas and honestly made that the player's focus throughout virtually the entire game. so many games drag you around the game world to various locations simply because the designers thought it would be COOL, but the writers of deus ex legitimately thought the course of events out in ways that tackled a rather wide variety of perspectives of the major concepts. i think it's really far from a perfect example, and only rarely are you really interacting with the concepts being raised in the game, but i think it's a mostly good example of crafting the game's interactivity around the issues present in the story. the early fallout games are a bit clearer example, if only because of the sheer amount of dialogue in the game. the game often falls into the realm of the good/evil polarization(yuck), but if nothing else you are forced in the game to directly interact with these rather complicated ideas to progress your character through the game.

but do these games do a particularly good job of this? i wouldn't say so. in virtually every game with complex ideas you play THE OUTSIDER; the mysterious traveler with otherworldly abilities that is somehow above being caught in these complex scenarios, and only interacts on the way to some mostly unrelated goal. you are not going to be able to tackle complicated concepts by granting the audience such a vast disconnect between what they are doing and the important ideas that are happening around them. rare is it to see the major injustices of a game happen to THE PLAYER. if anything it's always some other poor slob getting shit on, with the player coming by to fire a couple bullets at the oppressors to make bright, colorful flowers fall from the sky(sometimes literally). the unique creative element in videogames is its perspective. you aren't simply reading about someone's experiences, or watching it happen, you ARE EXPERIENCING THESE THINGS. to honestly tackle ideas in videogames, you must make the player literally experience them, not simply watch them happen. you can get ten times as much from reading one or two key wikipedia pages than you can out of any one videogame that attempts to tackle some complicated idea. that's really unacceptable, especially if anybody wants to go around calling videogames art. great art transcends explanation and blurs the line between information and experience. i doubt i could name five videogames that have ever managed to do this for more than a few moments at a time.

to me, it's a matter of a commitment to the idea, and a desire to break the hallowed videogame archetypes. NOBODY out there is willing to do this, and until somebody is, you aren't going to see games be artistically or socially worthwhile.

It's a very bleak way to look at things Hundley but I must agree with you. It's not like games cannot do it, you raised some good concepts on how they can, but nobody is willing to take the risk. The other problem is that the cultural spectrum of most game designers is restricted to pretty nerdy stuff like DnD, Star Wars and comic books. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but maybe we could draw inspiration from somewhere else. Leigh Alexander wrote a pretty good article this summer about this same issue and brought on herself the ire of a few gamers when she basically said to them to get some other hobbies than video games; read books, watch (good) movies, go see plays, etc... Some gamers obliviously took offence since they can't imagine life outside of games.

The sad thing is, there is probably 5 games that are "great art [that] transcends explanation and blurs the line between information and experience", but I cannot name them since I don't know them. They are probably hidden amongst the nominees for this year's IGF but you are never going to see them outside of this context. They are risky and publishers hate to take risks, even if the development cost isn't immense. They'd rather go with the same male power fantasies that they know sells.

Chris Hecker also makes a good point when he asks: "Why do you make games?" It's a question more game developers should ask themselves.

Why has no one mentioned Six Days in Fallujah? The game to be originally published by Konami, but the plug was pulled because people didn't want a current war to be "glorified".

I think when people think of "video game" they take the word "game" in too much of a literal sense, it does not have to be a game in the traditional way, as most games these days are more like "experiences".

Sorry for quoting Wikipedia but:

"Atomic Games describes Six Days as a survival horror game, but not in the traditional sense. The fear in Six Days does not come from the undead or supernatural, but from the unpredictable, terrifying, and real tactics employed by the insurgents that were scattered throughout Fallujah."

To me, that doesn't sound glorifying considering the fact you'll be put through terrifying scenarios... and I can say for certain that Six Days had more intend of being more "arty" than a number of horrible Hollywood warfilms.


imo

Hmmm maybe I'm missing the point but I think that was cancelled not because it was just......too arty heh but because every single person with half a fucking brain in their head saw a survival horror videogame about heroic marines fighting off spooky towelheads in Fallujah and had to throw up a little in their mouths. jesus christ. The fact that noone complains about films doing this is more of an indictment of the film industry than it is some kind of proof that that was not an absolutely appalling idea.

actually maybe I'm being too harsh and maybe it really was an intelligent and morally ambiguous look at the military action in Fallujah

or maybe it was just another dumb game about mowing down faceless arabs with maybe a tacked on cutscene or two about how WAR... WAR IS HELL (for marines, obviously) except this time there is SUDDEN LOUD MUSIC when terrorists jump in through a window and other spooky things

taking all bets