To be honest, I don't see games like Wii Sports and Wii Play games as adult games. They're just very accessable. They're games for adults that want to be like kids again. A game like BioShock (to choose a more recent example) seems (I obviously haven't played it, I'm basing this on what I've read) a lot more "mature". And a game like ICO is infinitly more mature than Wii Sports or Wii Play. It's like saying Harry Potter is an adults book. There's nothing deep about it, it's enjoyable because it makes you fell like a kid again. Real mature books are things like Ninteen Eighty-Four or Foundation. They make you think. I'm not saying a game like ICO is as mature as Ninteen Eighty-Four but it's certainly a lot close than Wii Sports.

/rant


Anyway, I really hope that these adults that are being raked in by Wii Sports and Wii Play decide to give gamer games a go. Maybe they'll see how truely mature a game can be. If they don't, I see this big "non-gamer" push being completely useless to me. All we're going to see resources (not all resources, though) being switched to making overly simplistic games and "boundary breaking" games being left in the wayside again.

     I'll agree with that. Sports and Play aren't so much adult, but more the everybody title. Same with Brain Training, though I will say that does lean more towards the mature adult crowd, as it can (I assume) push your brain to working, less mature gamers might just want that surreal experience and not so much a quizzing one. BioShock might have a deeper storyline to it or a much more unique story element, but I'm not sure if it'll really appeal to anyone outside of that core male group (Though I will say it's definitely at least trying something new, not faulting it for that.)

    I guess you kind of have to look at a mix of different things, not so much just story or game elements but accessibility and content. A game based on Jeopardy or National Geographic studies would be more mature than even the deepest of shooter/RPG plots merely because of the level of interest you want to put into something. Anyone can really get behind a shooter and just explore around and shoot the bad guys, regardless of the story involved, or play into an RPG game and try to follow the story along. To enjoy a Jeopardy or NG game on, say, geology, you have to really want to enjoy something of that ilk. It's not something you'd just pick up and play, but the simple fact that it's content is based more off what you know outside the game, to really enjoy it. Hence, 'maturity' would mean more what your base pool of knowledge is, a 'more mature' game would expect more skill or intellectual prowess, while a 'less mature' game would be something that doesn't require as much thought to get into.

    It doesn't necessarily make you a bad person to play a game that doesn't require as much brain work or outside knowledge, but as there should be games of different genres, so should there be games that require more patience or more skill, or more thought.

I think this is a valid argument, although you'll have a tough time convincing me that Wii Sports is less mature than, say, Killzone, for example. I haven't even played it, by the way; I'm just going to judge a book by it's cover and say that it's extremely unlikely that any game called "Killzone" is going to have significant intellectual value.

Really, I don't expect us to jump from "almost no adults play video games" to "video games are a serious art form" in a single bound. There are a LOT of small, in-between steps, and as I said, I think the first step goes something like this:

1) Stop making so many games about killing legions of aliens or zombies or soldiers. 

From there, we can move away from video games as a young male's fantasy land and start attracting an adult audience. Not necessarily a serious artistic audience, just some adults, for any reason whatsoever. Once that is accomplsihed, then we can start worrying about providing these adults with complex story lines, mature dialogue, and intellectually sophisticated material.

I think the genres will evolve as technology does. As we move from the TV set to ARG and beyond we will see adaptations of older genre and totally new genres emerging. I can't wait for the advanced ARG Conference Table, of course I am already dreading the spin-offs and cheap cash-ins. CT:CEO, CT:UN Security Council, CT:WTO, CT:G8, CT:Big Business, CT:Local Government, etc. At least you can buy the CT soundtrack and have it downloaded directly into your brain.

Being a 22 year old male i have seen what my parents have played, i'm sure they would love games like gears of war and metal gear solid, but their is a thing they do during the day, its called work. After an hour drive home, they get dinner and watch some TV. not alot of time to play video games. But you know what they do have time to play. Games like tetris, puzzle games and my dad still loves to play hot shots golf. This is why the wii looks like fun to these people, they don't need to spend 30 hours to beat it. they sit down for 20mins and have fun then its time to do something else.

This is the only reason why adults seem to play the wii or DS, no more reasons to discuss this subject, lock the thread please :P

I´ve never seen a teacher playing Gears of War. I´ve seen two teachers playing Wii Sports and they both enjoyed it.

Realize it, Adults play Wii Sports rather than Halo, that´s a fact. Of course you want to be mature and that´s the reason why a lot of us play those games, but saying "they just play Wii Sports because it´s simpler/because it doesn´t need that much time/ it is more family friendly" doesn´t proof the point of this thread wrong, it proofes it right...do you realize that?

Real adult people don´t need to play games like Halo to feel mature. That´s what you don´t seem to get.

How many 35 year old people have ever been playing PS/GC/Xbox? Not that much I think... now they are playing Wii Sports.

These people will laugh at you when you tell them they don´t play adult games, Wii Sports is not adult enough. Because adults don´t care if something is adult. When your 40 years old you´d rather like to be a teenager again. When your a Teenager you´d rather like to be 30 years old. That´s it.

You´ll grow up once and realize this fact. Up to that point there is no chance of talking to you I think... you are just afraid your not mature anymore when playing Halo is not as mature as playing Wii Sports.

How old are you? Really...

"I have spoken now please lock this thread!"

There is a save option for a reason you know: you don't have to, and rarely do, play Gears of War-style games in one sitting. If your parents really want to play Gears of War, but somehow can't find two hour intervals with which to play it (does this mean they also never watch movies?), then your parents are very unusual. I'm not saying no adults play Gears of War style games; I'm simply saying it's quite uncommon.

Most importantly, however, this doesn't explain why girls don't play. 15-23 year old girls have just as much free time as you have; why aren't they playing Gears of War? Answer: because they don't want to. It's a 22 year old male's fantasy land. Moreover, it certainly doesn't explain games like "The Sims" and "Civilization," which have also proven to be very popular with adults, and are not usually played for 15 minutes in one sitting.

A game about a criminal-turned-soldier who goes out and kills hundreds upon hundreds of space aliens (and wears a ton of football-style body armor but never a helmet, because obviously he looks so badass with just his little cap on that the additional protection isn't worth it) is targetted at 20 year old boys, and not, say, women or adults. Repeated disclaimer: this does not mean that zero adults and women play these games, it simply means it's significantly less common.

If you're simply going to insist that tons of adults would love to play Gears of War, but simply can't find time -- yet manage to find time to watch movies like "Pan's Labrynth", or go to the Opera, or play Wii Sports, or play The Sims, or play Civilization, or play Brain Age, and girls have tons of free time, but don't play Gears of War for magical and unkown reasons, then I'm not sure you can ever possibly be convinced of anything. For goodness sakes, it's a game about blowing up space aliens with giant guns. Just admit this is a game targetted at young males, and move on.

For me the reason I play games is that a small guy called Link dragged me into an enormous adventure I had to play with a dictionary during the NES days. But of course it was the Wii sports of that era, Super Mario Bros and Duck Hunt, that forced me to beg my parents to get one.

The new gamers that bought the Wii for the hype or Wii sports/Brain age/Cooking mama games will eventually come in the store and see other types of games and think, "hey that's that Zelda/Final Fantasy/FPS I've heard about, I'll give a try". And a part of them will love these games. There's the real gain for the industry.
The Wii raised the acceptance level for game devices and dragged it out of its subculture. The current popularity of "non-games" doesn't mean the old-style (call the hardcore if you will) games won't be sold to this new demographic. They need time to discover gaming, just like I started with SMB and Duck Hunt.

The future of gaming is that more people and also more kinds of people will play games. And just like people have different tastes in Music and Movies, people will play different kinds of games. The Wii is the first step into making gaming mainstream along all people.

Maybe then we can kill the real baddies, the ones that kill our troops in Iraq with friendly fire, and then don't punish their soldiers for it then...

Seriously, why do they ALWAYS paint the Germans as the baddies, they weren't. If you know anything about how WWII started, it was because Germany was punished severly, so most Germans felt pretty better, so it enables an evil man like Hitler to come to power.

As long as they change who the enemies are, rather than recyling old ideas, and put in a great storyline, then I won't complain.

Since Civilization was brought up in this thread, I should comment briefly on the game. I help run a mid-sized website for Civilization 4 (http://realmsbeyond.net/civ/) and have been actively involved in the Civ community for quite some time. I've done beta-testing work for both Civ3 and Civ4, and I was contracted to write lengthy portions of the Civ4 manual (where my name is listed in the credits). In short, I'm a very biased commentator when it comes to the Civ universe.

That said, I would like to see more games along the lines of Civilization, and less of the aforementioned shooters. I'm not saying that we need more turn-based strategy games (although we do....), but that ideally more games would be open-ended, and allow the user to shape the story. For example, in the Civ games you can be a bloodthirsty dictator and kill all your rivals if you want. That's actually how much of the young male demographic plays the game, in fact. But there's so much more you can do too: try to win by culture, convert your rivals into friends via diplomacy and religion, fight an economic cold war through the space race, sabotage the other guy with espionage, and so on. The Civilization community consistently has a different age demographic than most online groups; fewer young males and many more family men and women in their 30s and 40s. A lot of the people I've spoken with indicate that "beating" the game isn't really their goal; they more enjoy building the world wonders, developing their cities, expanding their civilization, etc. I'd love to see a new console version of Civ so that more people could experience the game (it's been done in the past, although not with great sales).

I'm not saying I want all games to look like this, but more games with user-created content and open-ended gameplay are what I would really like to see. I use Civ as an example because it's what I'm most familiar with, and I think it does a relatively good job of this.