Probably not, but some will try. My previous game (made alongside Karsuman) had a character who was raped and then locked in a church for her childhood. While not an OVER-ARCHING THEME, the main character can get her to confide in him if he talks to her every day. You can see another character's knowledge of what happened, but he never actually realized that she was violated.

Oddly enough, we haven't gotten many comments back from people about that... they only care about the random teddy bear's reason for existence (smuggling?). Maybe people aren't ready for mature games? Sure, some people in a forum on the internet might be, but they're not the audience for most, if not all, games.

Our current project (not that Diablocide thing in this forum, which is just me, but something else) is partially about being possessed by a demon (lolfantasy) and partially about the politics of an area - specifically racism. Not only did we have to decide which trope each character falls in but also what their political stance is. The game is still a lolfantasy RPG, but it has potentially disturbing themes of racism and, although much less, sexism throughout both the good guys and the bad guys. Fucking terrorists, of course a Tartolian would murder the prince!

CAN a game handle these things and do just as good a job as a great film?  Of course it can, there's nothing specific to the medium that's stopping that.


WILL a game do it, and do it properly?  Most of them won't.  Unfortunately that's just how things have been so far.  It's basically the same as psyburn's complaints about how video games can't be art:  there's no reason that they CAN'T BE, but I can see the argument that a lot of them just aren't.  Games are just as capable as movies at handling controversial subjects incredibly well, but (again, just like movies) it takes a GOOD game to do it well.

Also Kubrick has a K in it.  Didn't want to nitpick that bad but someone else is bound to say it so might as well do it now

Yes why not?

A game can, in my opinion, definitly be art. But it cannot be art in the same way as a film or a book. Just as a book can't be art in the same way as a film, and a film can't be art in the same way as a book. They simply work differently, most notably the way narration works. How would then a game be art, working with the principles of the medium? A series of cutscenes was mentioned, but that simply turns the game into a film, which makes it a different medium. Arty cutscenes with some traditional gameplay inbetween? Still a film, in my opinion, since it doesn't work with the medium, but simply becomes sort of a montage. What makes the experience of art that can only be achieved through the video game medium? I think it can be done, but commercialism stands in its way.

Yeah, the topic might as well be over now that there's nothing left to discuss or debate.

But seriously speaking, I don't really see games as art. Just like I don't automatically see films or books as art as if being able to classify something as such is what defines the piece as art. You can make films that don't have any artistic intentions to them, just like you can make a book on how to build birdhouses. You can use either medium to express whatever you want, and what your intentions are in doing so have a huge impact on whether or not you are creating art. The way I see it, you take each one as a way to create a piece of art, and whether or not you do create it as art is up to your own motivations when actually making it.

In that respect, if someone is trying to make art by creating a game, then it fits perfectly within their capability to do so. And if they do make that particular decision when it comes to expressing themselves, then it goes against the entire spirit of artistic achievement to censor the type of subject matter involved. It should be in control of the creator when it comes to what should be appropriate and what shouldn't. If it's a decision that's truly in bad taste, then it's because the creator already failed to personally portray his message to the intended public, and he should have the right to make that failure his own and try to learn from it.

Then minute you acknowledge that it is indeed possible to create something "artistic" using a certain method resulting in a certain type of self-expression, then you have to accept anyone's capability to say absolutely anything with it in the spirit of producing their own art. Whether or not the so-called "artist" can make the connections he sought is his own matter entirely, and his attempts at such shouldn't be censored or mucked around with in any way. Hell, it's the ability to communicate in new, unheard of ways that naturally draw artists to expressing themselves in new mediums in the first place. When they take those mediums to places that nobody could imagine before, then we owe it to them to acknowledge the field they are working in as one that contains "artistic capability". Saying that much alone does not automatically make everything created in that field count as something "artistic", even if it just so happens to be a field that involves lots of artists in it's creation already. A part of something that is mostly non-artistic as a whole can still be art in of itself. The way I see it, everything has some artistic merit on one degree or another, and they can only be referred to in black and white terms when one thing is being directly related to another.

Medium doesn't define art.  If I draw an elaborate illustration on a blank CD it can be art, but if I just label it with whatever music I put on it it's not.  Intent has a lot to do with it, and yeah it's not a black and white thing but you make it sound like we shouldn't say mediums can be used as art for fear that non-art within those mediums might be classified as such.

Art should be a case by case thing, never "every x is art".

I think maybe the question is this. You can have controversial films that follow a rapist or a child molestor(The woodsman), but can you have a game that puts you in the role of this person and you must carry out his deeds in gameplay, rather than just have a cut scene showing it?

@Lyndon
Many hentai games come to mind :S

To explain further, one game is called Biko 3  ( or which one I don't remember ) let you play as a stalker in one of the four scenarios. ( four stalkers, four girls ). The game is pretty much like Metal Gear where you have to follow the girls in 3D environment without being seen by them. During the stalking, you will get various of items that will let you decide your ending, whether you just want to return them the id card they had dropped in the library , or you want to use the rope you found to tie them and you know the rest :O

The ending for each scenario was pretty interesting actually.  One of the scenario is that the girl is a runner, and you happen to be her neighbor or something. If you decided to rape her, she will won a race in the ending and said something like 'Fuck that bastard who rape me, I can still live my life after what you have done to me.' during an interview on the tv, which cause the player to feel guilty forever ( or at least it's supposed to )


Seriously , many hentai games have done this already. Many are poor, but some are pretty good.  But most of the good ones are visual novel which have almost no gameplay whatsoever so it's still a good question if we can tie gameplay or interactivity to a mature theme and still tell the story in an 'intelligent way' instead of selling sex scenes like in hentai games.

which cause the player to feel guilty forever ( or at least it's supposed to )

see the problem is that most of the people that think like this aren't playing this game, whereas the people who ARE INTO RAPE tend to be the ones playing it, and therefore aren't getting very positive messages from them

I agree with you there. That's why the question should be is it possible to have interactivity with a mature theme in an intelligent way. 
In books and movies, you don't control what happen and observe them rather than interact with them like games allow you to do. 

Of course, there are interactive novels like visual novels and interactive movies like Phantasmagoria or Yarudora series from PS1 ( These tell great story actually. One of them is about a man who found a woman who lost her memory. He fell in love with her so he fooled her that she is his wife. ), but can we tie more interactivity than just multiple choices?

Bully came out a few years ago, and since then every school in the UK has had to be shut down because everybody was copying that and GTA. Games are evil vicious murder and pedophile simulators that promote rape, violence, crime and anti-conservative behavior. You guys are disgusting plying games like Mass Effect which contains INTERACTIVE ALIEN SEX or modern Warfare 2 which allows you to BE A REAL TERRORIST AND KILL REAL PEOPLE, or GTA which tells kids how to MURDER PROSTITUTES.

THANKS RUPERT MURDOCH FOR SHOWING ME THE TRUTH ABOUT VIDEOGAMES

First of all, I am so pleased to see that I actually received some very serious response to this thread. I really didn't expect it, and it simply shows the level of reflection people on this forum have for game development. Now, to my post...

I think that the issue of interactivity is important. The way I see it, it sort of stands in the way for the artistic control.

Hell no, it's just something else you can use however you want

The player has much more control in a game than in a film or a book, otherwise it wouldn't be a game. The problem then for the artist, is to be able to communicate what he wants without getting bitten off by a simple requirement of traditional game mechanics.

This is no excuse artists can do whatever they want with whatever they want. To prove my point here's art using beans as a medium:



How do you make art with (anything) ? You just do it

How do you, for instance, incorporate intelligent metaphors into the gameplay mechanics themselves, without relying on cutscenes that draw from the film medium.

There are a billion ways you can do anything

In a way, that is what defines the video game as an immature medium: When it comes to story telling, it largly bases its narrative techique on an ancestor medium: the film medium. To use an image: the medium itself hasn't yet completely cut off its umbilical cord.

But you don't have to do it like the films do.

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'.

The only game I can think of that touched upon SOME of those themes is Xenogears. mainly:

- suppression
- child abuse
- social injustice
- racism

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.