No Laughing Matter

[Reid McCarter]

I also wish that I had asked for a 500 word extension to write solely about early adventure games and how important they've been for setting out a blueprint for successful videogame comedies. I'll still stand behind the fact that they are far less "generally" influential than louder, dumber examples of game humour though -- I think the non-gaming public are more likely to know what Doom or Mortal Kombat are than Day of the Tentacle or Monkey Island.

But is other form of media that much different from video games when it comes to comedy? For every genuinely funny and intelligent film, there are dozens of "comedies" which comedic depth doesn't go further than jokes about sex and bodily functions, and those aren't all box office flops either. The most financially successful comedy movies aren't the most sophisticated, and I'd say it's very similar when it comes to games.

That's a really good point. I think the only difference is that, since games are still more of a niche form of entertainment/art than movies (although this is, thankfully, becoming less true with every year), general audiences are more likely to hear about only the massively successful titles than the smaller ones.

Huge film comedies can range from a "Meet the Parents/Fockers, Whatever" to a "Kick-Ass" or "True Grit" because film is a more widely accepted medium in our culture right now than games are. More people are paying attention to what's being talked about, basically. Luckily, as mentioned in the article, big game releases are maturing along with the medium and we can have a spring release schedule where Portal 2 is as noteworthy as DNF.

I definitely see what you're saying but I think big, culturally-noteworthy games are still in the process of reaching the kind of mix of sophistication/lack of sophistication of films. This is especially true with older titles. As people who are passionate about games we understand that there were great, truly funny titles being released at the same time as gross-out ones but not everyone will be able to see this as well because the "immature" games took up more cultural real-estate.

 

[Trishbot]

C'mon, when making an article talking about humor in video games, you can't just go straight to the crudest failure of humor like Duke Nukem. That's like saying all comedy films are only as good as "Good Luck Chuck" or "Freddy Got Fingered".

Where's the mention of Portal? Where's the brilliant humor of Monkey Island? What about the Lego Star Wars games? Mass Effect has some awesome comedy moments in it. Even a horror game like Silent Hill 2 has moments of bizarre humor and easter eggs (just like the Dog Ending).

My friends and I still laugh over Brutal Legend and we still find the goofy bits of Mortal Kombat endearing. Even Pokemon White is filled with these insipid side-characters that are beyond ridiculous and have some of the most amusing dialogue in any video game ever.

Focusing on Duke Nukem Forever and Shadows of the Damned is, yeah, a bit of a disservice to humor in games, just as it would be like saying Postal and Leisure Suit Larry are the most prominent "mature" games on the market. The games and genres have given us so much more than that.

 

[Bostur]

I definitely see what you're saying but I think big, culturally-noteworthy games are still in the process of reaching the kind of mix of sophistication/lack of sophistication of films. This is especially true with older titles. As people who are passionate about games we understand that there were great, truly funny titles being released at the same time as gross-out ones but not everyone will be able to see this as well because the "immature" games took up more cultural real-estate.

Let me first say that I appreciate your activity in the discussion, you are receiving a lot of flak for this article, and a lot of people would have taken cover by now.

I realize that full coverage of video game humour isn't possible due to space restrictions. Still I don't agree that immature games took up more cultural real-estate and I especially don't agree that games have moved to a more mature stage over time. This seems to be your basic claim but it only looks like that because of the examples that you use.

It's a very subjective topic of course. Trying to cover the topic from an objective stance would be impossible.

I find that movies in the 80's were far more immature than gaming culture, who mostly looked to litterature and earlier decades of moviemaking for inspiration. Monthy Python was used a lot for inspiration in video games, so was Douglas Adams. It was a culture of geeks, and geeks tend to have pretty advanced humour. Since then the market has become more mainstream and this rarely helps maturity in my opinion.

Still my own point of view is also limited of course based on age, platform and nationality. And the 80's and 90's certainly had its share of immature games. The sheer amount of games made in that time was staggering.

 

[Eternal_Lament]

I think the thing that is being overlooked is that when dealing with humour in games, unlike in say movies/music/books/tv shows with humour, is that how we feel about the game aspect of the game is going to affect our appreciation of the humour. While I haven't played Duke Nukem and as such cant comment on the gameplay or the humour, I'm willing to bet that the fact that DNF's gameplay was crap was also why people didn't like the humour, and while I'm not saying that the humour is bad only because the gameplay is bad, what I am saying is that bad gameplay is inevitably going to have a negative view on the humour, worsening it by one level (amazing to great, great to good, good to bad, bad to awful, etc.). And this doesn't have to be all at once either, it can happen gradualy as the game continues.

Take Shadows of the Damned for example. The game is certainly a humour-centered game, and as the game contiues the humour should grow with it, but it doesn't. Why? While the humour certainly continues for a while, there appears to be less of it, and in some cases the quality of the humour goes down, with humour peaking during the Big Boner section, and then the humour sort of just drops alot in both quantity and quality. But again, why, even though there were still some things left, did the humour feel really bad towards the end? Because after the Big Boner section, gameplay started to drop down. There were no more new mechanics, enemies started to repeat and were following predictable paterns, basically it felt like alot of potential had gone untapped, and that in turn affected the humour. After all, dick and fart jokes can only go so far, and when the gameplay that helps to disperse the jokes feels bad, the humour feels bad as well, even if the humour from before was good and is somewhat unchanged throughout. The gameply is ultimately going to decide the flow of the humour, and unfortunately for games like Shadows of the Damned even if the initial humour was pretty hilarious its the humour towards the end thats also going to determine the full quality of humour, which in this case does not work in SotD favour