You know, that's actually very well-written. You've managed to actually put into words a lot of the things that I had been trying to work with for a long time now. Understanding has always been my goal, but without understanding, I had been forced to work with concepts that I knew only instinctively. I will give your essay, as you call it, some though, and I think I can learn a lot from it. Some from the things you said, some from the things you meant, and a lot from your wording.
A little more to the point, I'd like to list a specific example of my first experience with what I've grown to see as "mature." That would be anime. Yes, not necesseraly the best place to look for that sort of thing, but one of the first anime movies that I ever saw was Ghost in the Shell. Before that all I had seen was Amercian animated movies and series, and those were all strictly for children, at least in their visuals. I cannot tell you frustrating it was to watch Wolverine never get the chance to use those close when he was fighting Sabertooth or someone like that.
Graphic violence was one thing that was simply absent from American annimation. Back at the age I'm talking about, I actually wanted to see blood and guts. I suppose it was a novelty. But after watching Fist of the North Star, and more recently the Happy Tree Friends series, I came to the realisation that FOCUSING on violence did not make something mature. It just made it sick and gross.
No, it has been my belief for a long while that simply allowing your animated movie or series, or even just your story to have violence when the story calls for it makes a story mature. Actually focusing your story on graphic violence makes the story silly and childish. Nudity follows the same rules.
In general, I believe that a mature environment is one that allows you to use mature themes, such as sex, violence, religion, and so forth. But it's what the members of such an environment do with those themes that ultimately decides how mature it actually is. Those themes are to be used as tool to further the story, not as a focus to shock or find cheap giggles. And again, I find myself unable to express this properly.
Now, there is one more thing. You mention a lot about intent, nature, hardship and how people respond to that. I agree with what you have said about it, but I'd like to add something to that. Over the years I have seen a lot of stories, and I have began noticing what REALLY makes a story mature as opposed to a childern's story. That's really how much the good guys are allowed to suffer.
Let me explain. I've seen a lot of movies where the good guys are always in danger, but they always somehow manage to get out of it. They call their experience an adventure, and it's fun for them to experience it. Those movies are like a carnival ride - intense, scary, but ultimately quite safe. When push comes to shove, they always find a way to secape, be it a secret escape rout, a secret weapon that makes short work of their enemies, a hidden power that makes it all alright or usually just someone comes to their aid just in the nick of time.
Well, things just don't happen like that in life. There are no adventures, at least not in the sense that children's cartoons will have us believe. Fighting evil isn't fun, it's dangerous, hard work that often takes casualties. Heroes get hurt, sometimes badly. Sometimes they die. Heroes have problems that dog them throughout their lives, just like we all do. Heroes often have to make sacrifices. And heroes rarely have the upper hand.
It's not really about shock value, it's about people being taken out of their comfort zone and having to fight odds that are often beyond their capability. It's about things not always going right and how people handle adversity. That's what makes it mature - when the narrative does not look after the main characters. When things don't always go right.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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As the person above commented, you've taken many of my own personal feelings on role playing in a mature atmosphere and worded them very eloquently. Honestly I think this essay is good enough to get a sticky, more people should read it.
The essay, while indeed a very good one, has also likely been plagiarized from White Wolf sourcebooks. I have nothing against the content of the essay, but please give credit where credit is due.
QR
(shakes head sadly)
The problem with Mature Roleplay is that it requires Mature people.
It takes a certain level of maturity to actually face the possibilility of your character being humilated, defeated, or simply to fail, and to accept that with both emotional investment and grace.
As opposed to, say, nerfherding, blaming your failure on 'unfair' rules, or simply emotionally trivializing the experience by appearing dismssive or aloof.
Of course, by definition, Mature Roleplay isn't for everyone.
Story Arcs I created:
Every Rose: (#17702) Villainous vs Legacy Chain. Forget Arachnos, join the CoT!
Cosplay Madness!: (#3643) Neutral vs Custom Foes. Heroes at a pop culture convention!
Kiss Hello Goodbye: (#156389) Heroic vs Custom Foes. Film Noir/Hardboiled detective adventure!
I see a lot of how to do things wrong in that essay and not many on how to do things right. Other than that I would say that you have hit on many good points.
Another thing I don't like is the categorizing of bad roleplayers, poorly created characters, and bad plots/plot devices.
Those are my only critiques. I do like how you hit on both characters and plots. You obviously know what you are talking about. Include theme, setting, and subplot and you have my full support. For what it's worth.
It isnt his, he plagiarised it. White Wolf wrote pretty much all of that and he copied it word for word.
After hearing several anti-roleplayers (and anti-mature roleplayers)rant their misconceptions on the Help channel for the past few days, this newcomer to the City of Heroes Virtue server roleplay scene(though an experienced roleplayer of 8 years) has something to say.
You've seen the little banner and slogan on the back of White Wolf books and many other RPG games --- "Games for Mature Minds." You've read the books themselves and seen stuff that would turn TSR'S Legal and Editing Departments pale as ghosts. You've even been considered "mature" yourself. But what does that really mean?
That's an important question.
Consider the BDSM, highly sexual imprint on "mature roleplay gaming" for a moment. Is that stuff mature? The cover sure claims it is -- even more so than other heavy roleplaying material. Is there anything in anthropomorphic "yiff" roleplay that wouldn't send Beavis into a conniption of laughter? Is the community of Master-and-Slave roleplay "adult" material or simply prurient? Would you hesitate to show any of your half-cybersex logs to your mother? Is roleplaying anything other than a bunch of hacks, cobbling together pornography and juvenilia and peddling it to pretentious goth wannabes?
If you've even bothered to read this far (and I don't give a damn about people who don't - call me whatever names you want, guys, but I think everyone will know the truth when you break out the old war stories about how your 50th level paladin whipped the holy bejeezus out of an entire orc colony), you've probably got an opinion on the matter. But whether or not I may have insulted you this far (which isn't my intent), let's take a -real- look at it, shall we?
(Author's Note: This whole essay is going to sound supremely pedantic, arrogant and self-righteous, but believe me, I've seen enough miserable games nominally run under the title of "Mature" and "Roleplay" to know what I'm saying here. So sue me.)
Mature roleplay, at it's core, deals with some pretty mature themes. Most commonly the world is dying, assisted in the throes of it's mortality by a humanity too dulled to care and an aspect of the cosmological evil (satan or however else it manifests in the game itself), hell-bent on making that death come all the quicker. The heroes of such settings, if such can be said, are nigh-rabid self-righteous monsters trapped between socities and products of a nightmare spirit world too vast to understand. The valiant are truly creatures of intense emotions like Love(for what they choose to protect) and Rage(against what hurts the innocent), creatures often predisposed to punish first and let someone else sort out the casualties later. They are further divided along cultural lines (in our case, origins) that, as ancient and indelible as they are, would do any modern-day hate group proud(such as what we see going on with the X-Men and their struggle not to become prejudiced against humanity.)
As a supernatural being, you're damned if you do(because you're assuming the right to judge) and damned if you don't(because the greatest victory of evil is for good men to do nothing). You're just a little bit less damned if you do.
And yet, many times, that complex personal tragedy is lost, buried under a miasma of splatterpunk bloodlust purveyed by an infantile "storyteller" in a Metallica T-shirt and black Reeboks. The endemic horror of the world we face in City of Heroes vanishes under a thin veneer of slapstick "villains", hurled headlong against a pack of slack-jawed social retards (and their characters)in a mind-numbing exercise of Power-listing and halfhearted emotes.
This is "For Mature Minds?" This is adult-oriented? No; this is advanced dungeons and dragons in which the characters have superpowers, each episode plotlessly seguing into the next with a new stream of thugs and villains.
Roleplay can be so much more than this.
"Mature" roleplay can be so much more than this.
Mature gaming is not using the word "[censored]" in game context. It is not liberally sprinkling homosexuality, hermaphrodites, BDSM, and alternative religions among the ranks of our characters. It is not vociferous use of slang, and it is not knowing the real-world names of the drugs or sexual perfoirmances your character engages in. Mature gaming is elegantly simple: presenting a difficult situation and reacting to it as an adult.
Not that any of the above examples -couldn't- be dealt with in a mature manner (I am not denouncing the sort of roleplay people choose for themselves, but so many newcomers to the worldwide roleplaying scene seem to think that mature roleplay is nothing but elitism and cybersex - which is wrong);quiite the contrary! How does a character react to a drive-by shooting she witnesses? How does he react to "coming out of the closet" to his supergroup? Or to acknowledging his forbidden love for another Warshade? How does she respond to regaining consciousness after men attempted to [censored] her, finding herself drenched in the blood? How does he deal with the mutant hunter that just shot all of his "furry" friends for their pelts or bounties? In fashion, "mature roleplay" can be achieved simply by rationally exploring what the character in question would do.
You see, mature roleplaying (and mature storytelling)is more than a simple smattering of R(or X)rated movie standbys. It's your motivation (why is this element here?), your intent (what does this have to do with the story?), and your end result (how do the players react?). Anything else is gratuitous.
Here, in no particular order: are a few of the concepts that make the game (as a roleplaying game), the hidden treasures that make learning all that game history and cosmology worth-while. At least as I see them.
1. There are heroes in this game. Yeah, let's start with this one. The concept of tghe antihero has been real popular in modern-day society. In fact, you pretty much can't escape it. But in City of Heroes, it's socially acceptable to be a hero in the most idealistic, literal sense. Not necessarily like Captain America or some other caricature - but like a firefighter, an honest cop in a bad district or an underpaid social worker. A person who has problems and difficulties but still does whatever he or she can to make things better. Develop your character as a -human- first, mix in the superpowers and you'll find yourself with a real hero. No, you don't -have- to be one of the real heroes. But you -can-. That's something not every mmorpg out there can offer.
2. There is a palpable evil in the universe. They key word here is "palpable." It exists. It's not just a 'bad feeling' or a religious supposition. Some people can touch it. However, it's existence does not instantly imply that all moral issues are necessarily black and white. Nor do I say that it is the source of all evil; that would be a pretty naive viewpoint in light of human or sentient humanoid behavior. Suffice to say that this dark entity exists and that it's presence has certain unsavory ramifications, not the least of which are driving home the point that City of Heroes is an -epic- as an RPG story, and that bad things are about to happen. Important things to remember.
3. Human/sentient humanoid nature is complicated. I hate comic-book villains who call themselves things like the "brotherhood of evil." Almost nobody thinks of himself as evil, and those few who do aren't the ones you should worry about. Life is sort of a Jackson Pollock painting filled with various (and proverbial)shades of gray splattered across each other. Even given the existence of a vast spiritual embodiment of corruption, the most terrifying people are the ones who feel such a palpable entity of malveolence without knowing or caring that they do so. And they always have a reason. Always. In this way, apathy is closer to a real aspect of "evil" than "evil" is.
4. Love is good. Yeah, I know I've gotten on the angst parade's shitlist by saying that, but it's a proven tenet nontheless. Love literally makes people stronger, it gives them confidence in their convictions and makes them feel worthwhile. It's a foundation of unity and cooperation. It's what keeps many heroes going when anybody else would have given up and slouched off into apathy centuries ago. Don't be afraid to roleplay some degree of love with your heroes, whether it's love for what they protect, brotherly/comradic love for their supergroup members or real, romantic love for a significant other.
5. Explanations are allowed to be simple. When you get right down to asking "Why?" or "How?" in City of Heroes, you are allowed to go into as much scientific and/or philosophical detail as possible - or none whatsoever. There's poetry in simplicity, if you do it right.
6. Explanations are allowed to contradict one another. Another beautiful thing about this game is that any character's beliefs could be the right ones. Creation could be benevolent, malevolent or just a big joke. The players are kept guessing about the truth of the balance of good and evil in the universe they interact within, and even the story leaders needn't know -all- the answers ahead of time. It's kind of freeing that way.
7. Finally, Evil is not responsible for the actions of humanity. No way. It dosn't hypnotize fathers into hurting their daughters or cause the thugs on the streets to rob anything with two legs and a purse that looks like it can't defend itself, but something -else- does. Asking yourself these sorts of questions is important for building an In-Character atmosphere for your in-game persona to develop opinions and thoughts on, as these personal ideas and beliefs are what fuel the the tenets of "mature roleplay" we discussed earlier. But more than anything, Evil (or Satan or whatever else)dosn't make any human in this game turn bad. It dosn't -have- to. Those things are already going on. If a person is some kind of villain, that dosn't indicate that the devil or whoever else made him do it. It just means that he did it....and that the Devil noticed. I can't emphasize this point enough; there's nothing terrifying about a real-life atrocity than the fact you can't pass the buck. You can't blame God, or Nature, or anybody but another human, sentient being for the state of the world in City of Heroes. We had problems long before any Rikti aliens or whatever else messed the place up further.
Think about it.
(Next weekend I'll write a thorough essay on "Heroes and Antiheroes". Stay tuned.)