Why Can't Comedy Games be Funny to Play?

[Steve the Pocket]

Magicka might be a good example here. The plot itself is rather silly, but the real comedy gold isn't provided by the throwaway gags in the environment, but by the repeated murder-suicides your spells cause.

And in the meantime, those "throwaway gags" don't get stale either, because they're all scripted NPC behaviors and only happen once. Or at least, once per attempt to not wipe.

That's the other thing, which brings me back to Portal and the like: The other approach to keeping humor from being repetitive is to restrict it to one-time scripted events. And while once upon a time, that would have meant only having it show up at the beginning of each level or so, today's games rely far more on scripted events. Just look at Valve. They basically invented the "sightseeing tour" style of game design, where virtually the entire game is just a very long corridor. Basically taking the linearity that made point-and-click adventure games so ripe for humor and applying it to action games. Is it any surprise that Valve is also one of the biggest developers to regularly make use of humor in their games?

Maybe this is the niche that sightseeing tour style games fit into. In theory, with enough talented writers, time to record, and space on the disk for audio data, one could make a game that plays out almost like a Freeman's Mind [http://www.accursedfarms.com/movies/fm/] that you can actually interact with. I could stand to be railroaded for ten hours if it meant being subjected to non-stop comedy.

 

[Jaeger_CDN]

Lucas Arts back in the golden years was a master of the comedic game, granted they were pretty much all adventure games.

Sam and Max Hit the Road was a classic comedy for me when I bought that game back in the 90's, hell I still own it on the 3.5" floppys not that I can use them.

 

[SilverUchiha]

They might have already been said before, but the crime sandbox games typically provide a fair amount of comedy with their story and gameplay. GTA used to be incredibly wacky, but dialed it back for a more serious tone. But since the player will likely do a variety of insane actions like poor driving, murdering innocents, etc when they're trying to play a serious character in a serious story, that level of dissonance will cause some laughs, though it will throw the story back several steps. This is actually the same issue I have with Sleeping Dogs. I enjoy it, but the dissonance created between the actions I take (some intentional, some not) and the tone the story is trying to represent breaks the gameworld's logic and while it's funny, it's still awkward.

Saints Row is the only one of the three that currently manages to do so well. But I have a horrible feeling Saints Row 4 will jump the shark on this one. Hopefully it'll surprise me, but the absurdity of the story and absurdity of the gameplay in 2 and 3 were to mostly adequate levels to keep the games fun and funny throughout most of the game.

Beyond that, it really depends on taste and what you're looking for.

For example, WarioWare games are funny in the sense it's funny to see people look silly when playing even sillier minigames. Smash Bros can be silly when strategies and shenanigans to win a game go horribly awry or work in unexpected ways. Resident Evil can be funny since the writing is so terrible. Bayonetta had funny moments because they were over-the-top and very cooky. And even Left 4 Dead had moments of humor in just the dialogue from the characters and some of the ideas written on the wall. And when you really think about it, a zombie that throws up on people to summon more zombies is kind of comical in a way. Or the zombie with a really long tongue to grab people. L4D has a level of humor to it that is rather unexpected given that the world has gone to hell. Which is even funnier to think about now that I've kind of realized it.

 

[Daaaah Whoosh]

I think the best kind of comedy in video games happens when the game itself is trying to be serious. It's one of the unique parts of the gaming genre where you have the ability to completely overturn the tone for a moment of lighthearted fun before going straight back to the grim and gritty. This is possible because no matter how dark the story of a game is, its main purpose is still to entertain the player, and give them the ability to choose their own outcomes. That's why I loved Battlefield Bad Company 2 so much, because even though you'd start a level in a standard spunkgargleweewee gunfight, later on you could sit around and listen to the squad talk about their feelings, almost like a Quentin Tarantino movie. Or, you could skip the fun and keep on shooting people; it was your choice.
In fact, I think games with a lot of organic choices make me laugh more than any comedy movie. That's why I liked the Halo games so much (not 4, but the Bungie ones); there were so many ways to kill enemies, and so many fun things to do that didn't involve killing anyone but yourself, that every level had infinite possible funny moments. But it's the fact that the moments don't have to be funny, the idea that you could choose to play it straight, that makes the moments truly memorable. That's why I think Halo Reach was a funnier game than Portal 2: by the end of the latter, I knew there were jokes delivered at the beginning and end of every level, and while they were funny, I knew they were forced. However, Halo's funny moments happened when I chose to combine the tow hooks of a Warthog with the rear end of a Skirmisher, and therefore the joke was both hilarious, unexpected, and satisfying.

 

[Mahoshonen]

I think Yahtzee might be on to something when he says that the comedy value is tied to how hard it is to get the payoff. Take a game like IWBTG. The game is maddenly difficult, but if you go into it with the right mindset, the game lets you play the Fall Guy in every comedic bit. So when you finally navigate a particularly dangerous room only to get blindsided right before the save-point by something you thought was just in the background, you can't help but laugh at yourself.

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

Damn, somebody said Portal 2 before I could.

If repetition kills comedy, why are catch phases such as "Listen very carefully, I will say this only once" and "Don't panic, Mr Manwearing!!" Still raising laughs after all these years? I can't answer either, just a thought.

That someone managed to say Portal 2 before Yahtzee posted the article, somehow 0.o

OT: For me funny gameplay is gameplay where crazy, unpredictable, off the wall stuff happens. This often involves the game itself being absolutely terrible in the classical sense -- one of the (unintentionally) funniest games I've ever played is Bad Rats, which also happens to be mechanically the /worst/ physics puzzler I've ever played.

 

[TheZooblord]

Deadly Premonition, full stop.

The entire game was a so-horrible-it's-compelling comedy from start to finish.

EDIT: Whoa, this post kind of got away from me. Just skip to the bottom (THE CRUX) if you want the TL DR version.

STORY:
On the story side, you have likeable characters who go from serious discussion of a murder victim to talking about putting cereal and peanut butter into a sandwhich (The Sinner's Sandwhich).

The characters constantly switch from normal human interaction, to completely bizarro behaviors and actions, to reacting to that bizarreness very normally. A perfect example is early on, the conversation with the innkeeper (Polly I think).
Normal: The FBI Agent, Francis York Morgan, wants to find more information about the town, so he sits down to talk with the elderly owner of the hotel he's staying at. He's also hungry and needs food.
Bizarro: They sit on opposite ends of a twelve or twenty-foot long table, having to shout across the table to hear one another. The whistle and kazoo music is playing so loud the PLAYER can barely hear them.
Normal: York calls down to Polly, asking her to scoot closer so he can actually hear her.
Bizarro: Polly says "Oh, why MISTER MORGAN! And so early in the day! I'm much too old for you..." etc.

Most importantly, the characters find a good balance between acting normal and acting quirky: they aren't 100% "quirky" all the time, trying way too hard to stand out. They're written as almost-realistic characters, with almost realistic quirks. The thing is, the portion of their time they DO spend being quirky, their "quirks" are so extreme that it gets big laughs when they do drop their normal facade and reveal the insanity lurking just beneath the surface, and it completely changes how you see them even when they are acting normal.

And then there's the finale of the story: the plot starts out as a seemingly simple serial killer tale, but takes a sudden and MASSIVE change in the last three hours of the game, roaring at supersonic speeds down WHAT THE HECK DID I JUST SEE OMG LOL territory.

GAMEPLAY:
The gameplay compliments this because part of the humor of the game is how you never really know WHAT to feel about Deadly Premonition. You always think you have it figured out, then it surprises you. First the game is ugly graphically, weird, and seemingly poorly made. Then you start to laugh because two squirrels just used a poorly placed monkey sound file. Then you laugh because the characters are legitimately interestingly crazy. Then they start acting normal and you begin to care about them. You almost think they're real people. Then you get reminded they're crazy again, and you laugh, again. One second the story is tragic and serious, the next, a saxophone is blasting out the cheesiest solo ever played.

The gameplay reflects this in that you never know what to expect. The controls are clunky and messy. So that's bad. Then you see a zombie creature, and your interest is kind of piqued. Scary? Generic? Then the zombie makes stretchy glove sounds and bends over backwards, doing a weird limbo at you. Okay: this zombie is officially Goofy. You try to shoot it: controls suck, does this designer even know what he's doing? You get a headshot: York says "Nice! Fantastic! Great!" to himself with every pull of the trigger. His little self-congratulations which sound sooo proud are hilariously out of place with the situation (FBI Agent, investigating a murder, suddenly assaulted by zombie creatures). It charms you.

The game involves a lot of shooting those zombies, and it does get repetitive, but it has many other activities. I mean, you are an FBI AGENT, here to find a SERIAL KILLER, in a TOWN FULL OF ZOMBIES. But why do that when you can do other stuff! You can go fishing. Do sidequests where you help drive a crazy lady to her home before her cooking pot (which she thinks is sentient) gets cold. You can shave your beard and freshen up, and if you don't, you will have a stink cloud and flies following you in every single cutscene, dramatic or otherwise. You can get to know the crazy characters around town. You can collect trading cards. You get around via open-world driving that is juuust bad enough to be goofy, but not impossible.

THE CRUX:
At first it just seems like the game is poorly made, but multiple post-launch interviews with the developer revealed that he knew *exactly* how weird, offbeat, and uncanny his game was, and consciously used it for comedy and to compliment the story as a whole.

The whole time, you're questioning if the game really knows what it's doing. Is X Story Point/Character/Texture/Animation/Mechanic SUPPOSED to be this BAD? Is Y supposed to be this WEIRD? Z seems so normal and functional, what's with X and Y? It's a journey you take from the start of the game to the finish. First you scoff, then you laugh, then you love it. And it wouldn't be the same if any element was subtracted. The gameplay, story, and presentation ALL keep you off balance as they go from Normal to Bizarre to Bad, all three running on different tracks just to keep you even more off balance, and what you get is a game that is nothing BUT hilarious surprises. AND IT KNOWS WHAT IT IS DOING, ALL THE WAY.

Except for the wall-crawler zombies that take like 30 minutes to kill. They are extremely rare in the game, but the two or three segments that contain them are so bad it's NOT funny. Forget them. Lol.

 

[FallenMessiah88]

I think Blood had some pretty funny humour, mostly because of all the references it made. The same can be said of The Suffering and The Suffering: Ties That Bind.

 

[Ymbirtt]

Octosnip

So someone took that "Sir Bearington" D&D story and made a video game heavily influenced by it?

What, you mean this?

Yeah, they basically did, right down to the one guy who manages to see through the disguise and makes everyone else think he's insane. It's also free. Here you go [http://www.octodadgame.com/octodad/download/].

 

[RatherDashing89]

The adventure games written by the makers of the homestarrunner cartoons back in the day were actually really good--Peasant's Quest being a King's Quest homage, and the Thy Dungeonman games being nods at text adventures like Zork. Despite being made by cartoonists, not game devs, they had really solid puzzles that were jokes in and of themselves (such as how often you have to solve a puzzle with the command "throw baby" in Peasant's Quest). I know Yahtzee mentioned point-and-click games already, but I figured I'd bring them up--they are free and browser based, so I would highly recommend them!

A lot of gameplay-based humor is player-driven. Portal is a hilarious game, but I've never laughed harder than while sitting on the couch playing Halo or Smash with friends and watching all the ridiculous stuff happen. Team Fortress 2 has a lot of those moments as well. When playing alone, honestly only point-and-click games really come to mind as far as "funny" mechanics go. Using mechanics as a joke seems like a great way to end up with really bad mechanics.

 

[OtherSideofSky]

You want a comedy action game that creates an endless string of comical situations through unscripted gameplay? Cel Damage. It's like Loony Tunes meets Twisted Metal. There are a bunch of crazy cartoon characters in silly vehicles running around big stages and killing each other with a wide variety of weapons that cause various ridiculous effects on death. It's kind of like the Serious Sam cannon ball example, except it happens with every weapon in the game, and there are a lot of them.

The land-shark gun from Armed and Dangerous is another comedy weapon that never gets old. All the joke weapons in that game were pretty solid, like the mine that turn the world upside down and drops enemies into the sky, but there's just something about that animation of the shark breaching out of solid ground with a screaming enemy in its mouth that never loses its appeal.

As for one-liners, a game that did something fairly good with this was, shockingly enough, Bloodrayne 2. The one-liners are all funny by virtue of being un-ironically awful, but, in addition to the set of lines the protagonist spouts off during normal combat, she has a set of one-time, scripted conversations with henchmen that occur at various specific points during levels. There are actually a fair number of these exchanges, and they keep the rest of the combat dialog from getting as monotonous as it would otherwise. I can only imagine that a game with actually good writing would be able to get a lot more out of the idea.

 

[Callate]

Repetition can be funny, but it has to be aware repetition, not simply going over the same thing again. Some of the funniest moments of comedy come of anticipation from a joke being set up to repeat- or not repeat at a moment when it's expected, and highlighting its absence. The character who is deadpan and droll through everything- and proves to continue to be so facing events that could destroy the universe. The character who solves everything through violence suddenly having to do something delicate or requiring social finesse. The "macchupichu!/ouch!" joke in "Curse of Monkey Island". GladOS's ongoing references to cake. And so on.

I feel like there have been some games where the main character started to crack wise about having to do the same segment of the game over and over again, but no instances come immediately to mind.

Similarly, I wouldn't say the heart of comedy is just about crazy characters, but the intersection of the crazy and the sane; predictable craziness using clear, but skewed logic in approaching recognizable situations. Sometimes it's the classic "screwball/straight man" dynamic; sometimes it's crazy characters in a straight world, or the opposite.

In some ways, good comedy is about creating a path that the audience can follow and wants to follow, dropping just enough bread crumbs that they feel clever for picking up the path. I suppose in that regard comedy and game design have something in common.

 

[In Search of Username]

Conker was a funny game, and it had context-sensitive button presses - i.e. you stand in a certain area and press the same button as always, you end up with a different unique result depending on what's required in that area. So you may be onto something with the whole lack of repetition thing.

 

[Pat Hulse]

I am surprised that Psychonauts were not mentioned in the article. I replayed it few weeks ago (thanks steam trading cards for making me start a new game). And the i think that game play and story are exceptionally well combined and almost everything is funny the dialogs, character reacting to the stuff you do and the level design and art is just superb.

I was surprised it wasn't mentioned either since Yahtzee was the one who made me injure myself for not having played it all those years ago. For shame.

Just the lungfish level alone is a great example of comedic gameplay. Stomping around as a giant monster as little fish run screaming and saying laughably silly lines is great even when some of those lines repeat because the visceral joy of cartoonish mass destruction never gets old.

I think another key to finding more comedy in gameplay could come from better understanding of the Skyrim Phenomenon. Some of the funniest gameplay I've ever seen came from that game, although the vast majority of it was unintentional on the part of the designers. Videos of glitches and socially-questionable dragon-shouting could keep me chuckling for hours. Obviously this humorous aspect of the game doesn't mesh with the story elements, but I think there's something to it. While you can't necessarily replicate this sort of gameplay humor intentionally, I think that more designers could experiment with the desire of the player to act against their best interests and against the goal of the game. It's one reason I've always loved the amount of detail in "Metal Gear Solid" games where they account for player transgressions and have in-game responses to them (i.e. killing The End towards the beginning of MGS3).

One game design idea I'm surprised nobody has capitalized on yet (as far as I know) is a game built entirely around people's tendencies to eventually destroy their creations in sim games. A cross between "The Sims", "The Incredible Machine", and "Final Destination" where your goal in each level is to set up the most elaborate and ridiculous death possible for your unsuspecting computer sprites.

Anyway, I feel like there's a lot of inherent humor in gameplay that could be better explored through experimentation.

 

[lacktheknack]

In case anyone laughed at the silly made-up non-sequitur that was "putting the spaghetti on the mummy" in the article... no, that really happened.

You had to flush the spaghetti down the time-travelling toilet to get it to the right era, and the player in that era has to use the spaghetti on the mummy, and then they have to use the fork to make a decent hairstyle.

How else was that mummy going to win the beauty contest?

...Day of the Tentacle was a damn good game.

 

[EvilRoy]

I really found Postal 2 funny, I imagine in large part that I had never played a game quite like it before. Or since now that I'm thinking about it.

On one hand there was the concept that despite certain militant censors you could reasonably go through the game following the rules of everyday society, never hurt anyone, and still win. On the other hand was the utter surreality of the world the game took place in. It was very much like our world, but different in a few fundamental ways and offering numerous freedoms, such as peeing on people and in their mouths, that made it really interesting and funny to explore.

 

[Elijah Newton]

I am surprised that Psychonauts were not mentioned in the article. I replayed it few weeks ago (thanks steam trading cards for making me start a new game). And the i think that game play and story are exceptionally well combined and almost everything is funny the dialogs, character reacting to the stuff you do and the level design and art is just superb.

I was surprised it wasn't mentioned either since Yahtzee was the one who made me injure myself for not having played it all those years ago. For shame.

Seconded. Thirded!*

Speaking of threes, on the topic of repetition killing jokes the Rule of Three ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_three_(writing) ) is a pretty well known technique wherein things that come in threes are inheriently funnier. I'd never noticed it too much myself until a friend told me. When I asked for an example he sort of shrugged and said, "Every Simpson's episode ever"... and he was right. It's not just them, of course - I started seeing it on every weekly sit-com I watched.

It extends well beyond comedy, too. Those in marketing may be able to put the name of a famous copy writer to this, too. He was kind of the guy who started the, "Thursday! Thursday! Thursday!" style of repetition in radio ads**, and had some explanation for what each iteration was doing differently in the mind of a listener. Something along the lines of "attention, consideration, memorization", though I'm paraphrasing very badly. Point being I think you can have repetition as long as it's doing something different each time, though that difference can be pretty subtle.

I think one of the disadvantages videogames have is that humor needs to be spontaneous, or have the appearance of spontaneity. Watching tv / movies / plays we suspend our disbelief to accept that the actors are acting spontaneously but the humor has the benefit of being polished and prepared. In a game where the player has agency I think there must be a definite challenge to inserting humor*** without letting them know they've walked onto a scripted event.

Another odd note of humor which I don't think has been mentioned yet : Lemmings, specifically blowing them all up. I haven't played it in ages but there was something in the catharsis of watching them each grab their tiny heads in turn before vaporizing in a puff of pixels which was definitely funny regardless of the number of times you did it.


* And also, ow - but I played it, man, why'd you hurt meee?!

** first with radio ads, not the trebling. "Veni, Vidi, Vici" has a couple years on him

*** fer instance.

 

[odolwa99]

Pilotwings on the SNES or N64 is hilarious. I defy anyone not to laugh themselves silly after watching their character plummet to their doom in a skydiving mission or screaming with terror after being launched from a cannon. Priceless!

In fact, AVGN and Mike released a video documenting their exploits on a play-through just today!!

Check it out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rL2XPPVcI8A

 

[MailOrderClone]

The contrast drawn in the actual Deadpool video review between the spectacle of Metal Gear Rising and the comparatively average gameplay of Deadpool may have hit on a great idea. Combining the bombast of a Platinum game, Metal Gear Rising, Bayonetta, what have you, with a propensity toward openly comedic writing may just be the proverbial 'two great tastes that taste great together'.