Being Adult is Not Momentous

This article first appeared on USgamer, a partner publication of VG247. Some content, such as this article, has been migrated to VG247 for posterity after USgamer's closure - but it has not been edited or further vetted by the VG247 team.

Putting aside the fact that it looks like a resort for fork-tongued, red-faced imp babies, DC Universe Online's upcoming DLC Sons of Trigon is, if nothing else, a cool-looking place. Familiar infrastructure sucked into a landscape made of burning mercuric sulphocyanate, cathedrals you could film the next Exorcist in and questionably titled amusement rides; Sons of Trigon has them all. An attractive excuse to see what Gotham City would look like under the reign of the Seven Sins and beat up a panoply of cultists, demons and super-people, Sons of Trigon is, more importantly, a reminder that video games still can be a little nudge nudge, wink wink about the things that happen behind closed doors.

In DC Universe Online's defense, the MMO is framed within an per-existing vernacular. Spandex, clear-cut attitudes towards good and evil, dramatic speech and other such hallmarks are essential to intellectual property. Yet, when the presentation migrated to Lust's dominion (and salacious, I assure you, it was was not), I couldn't help but wonder if it could have been just a bit more clever and a little less buried in the conventional. The re-purposed Amusement Mile, the theme park in Gotham City where Lust has set up shop, is bafflingly innocent with its overabundance of pink, deformed roller coasters and faces that vomit flamingo-colored liquids. The most scandalous thing here? The name 'Tunnel of Lust'. The actual contents of the aforementioned passage were quite tame and would, at most, inspire an indolently-raised raised eyebrow from the nearest conservative. Sure, there were the requisite succubi and a veritable entourage of cultists to boot but these too felt like 'safe' expressions of naughtiness, the kind your parents wouldn't be too incensed over.

Which is weird because this IS the Sin of Lust we're talking about and even if we're not going to go at it full throttle, we should, at the very least, have something racier than just two skeletons seated on a derelict couch, damn it.

"It's like they're trying to discuss the death penalty on a Saturday morning cartoon." A colleague remarks, as I try to put words into why the new expansion vexed me so.

Again, my discontent isn't so much with the new DLC that they're launching, but the fact it so often feels like we're largely operating on the set of Nickelodeon. 'Adult' themes are alien, debauched and titillating rather than cornerstones of existence, forbidden territory comparable to the the most lascivious of pursuits as opposed to things that happen on a daily basis. What you get then is the weird feeling that a lot of games seem to exist on the opposite ends of a fulcrum. On one hand, we have those that celebrate the idea of being adult and edgy with all the extravagance of a Las Vegas performance. Voluminous mammary glands. Torture-porn. Glitter. Sometimes, all of the above, if you're unlucky (or lucky, depending on your predilections). On the other, we have stuff like Sons of the Trigon, which meekly insinuate at such concepts with the trepidation of a Victorian duchess.

Like teenagers giggling nervously to each other about squishy biological functions, video games in general don't seem to quite have a handle on what being grown-up means just yet. This is not to say that they're unintelligent or incapable of elegantly presenting big, frightening ideas or that the medium has yet to demonstrate a capacity for being mature without resorting to sensationalism. Certainly, the indie scene has been forefront in addressing such topics. There's Auntie Pixelante's Dys4ia, an autobiographical examination of the reasoning behind and the results of hormone replacement therapy, Rogue Legacy, which delighted the Internet with how it handled the idea of being queer ("I had a few 'gay' characters' and it seemed like they were normal people." "I believe that's the point.") and Papo & Yo, a fantastical re-telling of the Creative Director's experiences with an alcoholic father. I could name a hundred more, all brilliant and all almost unsettlingly attuned to what makes our world tick.

And it isn't exclusive to indie development either. Bigger titles have been getting progressively better at doing the same. There's a sequence in the Personal Story (an instanced quest chain that puts your choices and character in the starring role) for the plant-like Sylvari where you find yourself assisting a pair of lovers. Both are male and this variable, as it should be, is treated as circumstantial rather than as a salient plot point. Similarly, Borderlands 2 and Fallout 3 make references to the diverse sexuality of their cast without so much as a sly grin. After all, gender is simply an aspect of one's physiology, one as simple as the structure of a person's hair or the color of their eyes.

It goes beyond those games too. Naughty Dog's Last of Us was recently heralded as a 'start' by Eurogamer's Ellie Gibson in our bid to eliminate sexism in the industry. "I don't think this is a game about men; it's about why humans need each other." Gibson says. She describes Ellie as someone residing in the middle ground between 'Defenseless Kitten' and 'Gruff Badass Who Has No Time for Emotions or Lipstick'. "Brave enough to show fear, powerful enough to ask for what she needs. She is not a princess or a warrior queen, just a normal girl trying to cope with life in a broken world."

Gibson's sentiments are reflected by Edge's Jason Killingsworth who notes how there is 'nothing pornographic' about Tess's demise, "Tess simply dies and the gears of the plot grind on without her, in the same way the natural world spends no time mourning the extinction of any other individual creature's passing."

That last bit, I think, encapsulates what I'm talking about best. Games don't have to be loud to be 'adult'. Death can be as much of a whisper as it can be a scream. Women can be multi-faceted beings who do not immediately evoke desire. Two men can kiss without the world ending. At the same time, games don't have to be afraid of making a point. To go back to Sons of Trigon, there are little things, nuances that do not need to sway into the realm of poor taste, that could be introduced to make Lust's home seem more like a den of Sin. Disembodied limbs, separated from incriminating genitalia, stretching out from the walls. Photos of Jared smeared across the walls like a stalker's shrine. Chains. The presence of incubus along with the bat-winged seductresses.

There's a word -lagom - in the Swedish language that feels applicable here. Devoid of a precise English equivalent, lagom can be loosely translated to, among other things, 'just enough'. Sufficient but not ideal, a hair's breadth before what we might construe as a perfect medium. We need more of that, I think. We should be able to address sex and death and other topics like depression or poverty without wilting from shock or resorting to exaggerated gestures. Being adult is not a momentous event, it's simply something that is and we should treat it as such.