Making mature games has been a task that this industry of ours seeks to understand with a constant pace.

There have been several games that have been seeking that glory filled valley of mature games, from Custer's Revenge to Heavy Rain. The have tried many ways to make mature games for gamers that are getting older. There is even a rating for mature games and a rating for games aimed at adults. The only problem is that AO games have become synonymous with porn video games, games such as Rapelay. Is the problem with the distinctions between the mature games and the games that get put under the banner of the AO games which invariably get put behind the retailers desk, or more common just refused outright to be sold, or even played on the consoles of the time.

  Custer's Revenge was a porn game nothing really else, the point of the game was to get from one side of the screen to the other side of the screen so that you could rape the Native American woman tied to a post. That was the entire game just do that over and over, not exactly what I would call going forward for the industry. Makes you glad that our industry has matured since that day doesn’t it? If only however we matured more, while the game graphics and structure and story have advanced we are still children trying to figure out how to properly use our industry to say what we want to say.

  Another such game that is trying hard to bust into the area of mature game content is Heavy Rain, a game centered on a story about child kidnapping and what one father will do to try and save his son. The story is a very mature one in an industry almost centered on space marines and nerd wish-fulfillment ala Half-Life. Games that want the player to feel strong and powerful against opponents that they normally wouldn't be able to face, being able to save the world, or the princess, in the process. These are not mature games in the sense that the older gamer generation wants the games to become. These are games that revile in blood, gore, and sex games that want to be taken seriously by other mediums while allowing you to kill hordes upon hordes of enemies in minutes.

  Do not get me wrong, those games are some of my favorite video games, however these are not mature games not in the sense that movies have mature movies. Heavy Rain on the other hand gives a very mature setting and story along with a nice set of consequences for your actions. I believe this is how the medium will become able to really use the term mature game. What really makes these games mature is the story, the sense of vulnerability in your character, and consequences to your actions. Such games do not even need to be constricted to Heavy Rains formula, take Mass Effects game play; it's all about the action when something happens. They want you to move about to shoot when you want to shoot to stop when you want to stop. They want you to inhabit this character and this universe. This is exactly what they are creating for the players, a universe constructed by your decisions and give you the ability to change the galaxy to whatever you want it to be become, or find out that the decisions you chose have more far reaching consequences than what you thought they had when you first decided to kill that Rachni.

 This is what I believe the more mature games will soon steer more towards, consequences and storytelling will soon become more popular and not just in RPG games. Here is hoping that soon mature games won't necessarily mean there are tits and someone's head is getting ripped off.