Games are for kids

Evidence that games are for kids and that you can’t even SUGGEST a slightly more complex or ambitious idea. That speaks volumes of the immaturity of the medium. You can’t even IMAGINE about going NEAR certain themes. People will freak out.

Hence, the immaturity of the medium is demonstrated by filters: you can’t show that, you can’t mention that. No go zone. No. No.

People freak out, people go hysterical: immature. All triggered by a theme that is acceptable in movies, but not acceptable in games, because games are for kids. To be played by kids. Adults can’t have games, as long they aren’t ALSO for kids.

So a game will always have narrow boundaries compared to “mature” mediums that can instead embrace every theme (and it is interesting this is happening to me at the same time the GTA controversy builds up).


Yes, but the purpose of my thread wasn’t to give a “cool concept for some game”. In fact all the gameplay side is something I already discussed years ago and that I didn’t think was worth bringing up again.

That thread only offered a story side, that is then mixed with gameplay. It’s an abstract story concept, a fun idea. I brought it up because I’m reading frequently that “games have to be their own medium” and telling stories that are only possible exclusively as games. Since that idea has, from my perspective, no hope of being realized, I thought it was interesting for someone else to read about it and have fun reading it. It’s fully complete. It’s a concept that maybe other people can use or spin their own way. It’s a post-modern interpretation of a genre.

So it was meant to be enjoyed as just a story: the transformation of a player perspective.

I’m sorry the way it was phrased at the very last line brought it to awful misinterpretation, since those accuses are really completely alien to the idea itself, but fine. I understand that not everyone has the same cultural background I have. There are strong cyberpunk influences there that come from Tsukamoto movies. For example the “iron rod” into mouth/head thing comes from this.

This body/machine is a cyberpunk theme, I used it because it means something in that story of a man becoming a ship, man and machine, man and computer. The reference about rape isn’t sexually metaphoric in the way it refers to normal sexuality in real life, it’s just a theme under the body/machine category. And entirely alien to sexism. It doesn’t “connect” man to woman, or man to man, or woman to woman. It connects *man to machine*. This story is about game as a medium, and so the interaction between the fictional and non-fictional level, the mind and the body, soul and hardware, flesh and metal. Cartesian dualism, mind/body dichotomy, Godel paradox, Homunculus problem. Cyberpunk isn’t sexist even if it deal with bodies or violence against a body, or fusion between body/machine. And fine, I understand if some themes are TABU here even if they are used in a more nuanced way and far away from how one usually sees sexism in games. I thought it was an “adult” forum and that it was possible to talk conscientiously about these things without people freaking out.

Tetsuo, again, uses sexuality, but not as its end. It’s simply a cyberpunk theme of the man/machine category. And sexuality is not always sexism, nor metaphorical of sex as an act. The cyberpunk theme of “fusion with a machine” is symbolized as a sexual act.

The symbol is “sex”, the meaning and theme is “fusion with a machine”. I used it the same way in that last line. There was no “subconsciously sexual” meaning beside the interaction between consciousness and information, or free will versus deterministic system. Or player and artificial intelligence. That was dialogue between player and AI. Literally AI speaking to you.

So again I understand if that’s immediately a no-go zone for some people, but you can’t blame me just because I thought people would be more reasonable and less hysterical about this. Nor I accept being accused of sexism or even worse things.

And what happened here (beside hiding it behind the policy of “no ideas here”) is just the demonstration that games are still a terribly immature genre because of perceived boundaries of what you can or cannot put in a game. Games are for kids, least you try for something more complex.

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