the old pc culture is naturally that of the first games ever to appear in a computer, text and graphic adventures. It's the culture of PUZZLES. There's a door and there's a key. A console game for kids tells you exactly where the key is and how to get it. A pc game will refuse that, it'll split the two things and put an INDIRECT HINT on where to get it, the indirectness of the hint being an obstacle between the problem and the solution.
This hits quite the nail whyI'm constantly thinking/combining of role playing games and adventurte games having a similar background ... To me, RPGs were in general rather about puzzles than about fighting. With my "background" with adventures as my favourite and first genre in gaming (apart from Jump & Run), this is understandable, I think.
Which is I'm also so much against action-RPGs : They don't offer puzzles and no more thinking anymore. In action games, everything is reduced to a "non-thinking", graphics-heavy representation of a game. So, to cut it short, "action" games are in a tendency gravitating towards movies.
If I follow this thought concept, then I think I must say that PS:T is the most "mature" game ever made : Not because of the "dark & gritty" cliché, but because of then inevitable
thinking.
Personally, I don't think that "mature games" are about what the marketing people want us make to believe. I even dare to believe that marketing people try to create
their own definition of what they thing makes up a "mature game" - and then they do everything to make us believe
their kind of definition ... Perhaps this is what happened with the current DA marketing campaign.
(And) Now, this cliché of what makes up a"mature game" could be explicitely directed towards a younger audience which
whishes to be oh-so-cool and "mature" ... It's to me as if a teenager sprays the word "sex" on a house wall to appear as a cool guy before others (not to mention with the intention to shock others). It's as if this guy
believes that the word "sex" makes a shicking effect on all others ... But me, as a "real mature man", so to say, I can only yawn at this lame attempt - I do
know what sex is about, and to me it has no "shocking" effect whatsoever ! Actually, to me, it is even rather the reverse effect :
Real sex has
a lot to do with
love ...
To cut things short, I think we have here a contrast/hiatus between
- what people believe is "mature"
- what "maturity" really IS
That's all.