Should games become “darker” or is it just a pointless trope?

Matija Mandic wrote: "General home gaming has existed for 30 years now, since the painfully unplayable Magnavox Odyssey, through the ashes of Atari 2600 to the legendary NES, to pave path for the Genesis, SNES and numerous other home consoles to this very day. Presentation in games is what forges the first impression when starting it, whether it was by an interesting story, beautiful graphics or most importantly, addicting gameplay, and it always depended on the system’s capabilities and the control potential. Back then in the era of Atari and NES, graphics were never the best way to immerse yourself into a game, but they served as somewhat of a mind fuel - looking at those barely rendered pixels in all of their 8-bit glory, along with the sound effects that nowadays sound like dubstep background noise, made the imagination of the player do all the work."

[Summons75]

Depends on what you mean by "darker" if you mean Dark Knight "dark" than no, I don't want melodrama in my games. But if you mean the game will end in a tragedy where there is not suppose to be a happy than I'm all for it. FF13-2 was like that ended with absolutely no happy ending and it was great.

[linkenski]

The thumbnail isn't very saying what we mean by "darker". One of the "darkest" games i have played was Majora's Mask because it had such sad themes and an overwhelming feeling of suspense because of it's doomsday setting and time limit. and that's from a game that has many many more and brighter graphics than games like Heavy Rain and Max Payne would offer.

I've also thought that more eye-candy rather than pixels have taken away a lot of our imagination, that we once used to shape the rest of the images in our heads.

But in terms of presentation in games right now, it's mostly about the 'cinematic feel' and as long as that's what developers are trying to achieve, i think games should become even darker (in graphics) but ultimately i think it's better to leave a lot of it up to the players' imaginations.

That's why pixel-ish graphics are still used in new games (mostly indie-games) like Minecraft, Fez and Resonance.

[alegolo]

If it means more mature games then that's a welcome.
A lot of game have become ''darker'' but they are indeed trigger to an inmature audience such as Gears Of Wars while games very colorful and cheerful like Rayman Origins can be more ''hardcore'' in gameplay.

[Hicken]

Games should be games. Why the hell does everyone want to use these blanket statements?

Should Mario be darker? Probably not. How do you make a racing game or a puzzle game darker?

If a game is made with a dark tone, and it's done well, there's no reason to complain. But a few games doing it well doesn't mean that, suddenly, more games should follow suit.

[SJPFTW]

Games like Halo and Uncharted are still great even though they have colorful and vibrant graphics and their violence is not over the top, more like cartoon like violence not "OMG I JUST BLEW TEH GUYS HEAD OFF!!!!" like you see in Max Payne, Gears etc...

[StrawberryDiesel420]

Well, I personally would like to have seen a more mature, darker, and grittier uncharted game. It would make the game that much better in my opinion.

[Venox2008]

we have lots of dark games already, I would rather get more colorful games