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Why Video Games Are Having a Harder Time With Humor
Kotaku is running an opinion piece discussing why video games are having a harder time being funny as they've shifted away from text-driven adventures and toward graphics-intensive environments. "As technology improved, things began to get more serious. With the rise of 3D technology a strong focus was put on making games look good, delivering a more realistic — and often darker — experience to the player. Cartoonish comedic games became more of a novelty than the norm. Few titles, such as Rare's Conker's Bad Fur Day for the Nintendo 64, fully embraced humor." The article also talks about how the trend could soon reverse itself. LucasArts' Dave Grossman said, "As the games get smarter and start paying attention to more things about what the player is actually doing, using that ability not just to create challenges but to create humorous moments will be pretty cool. Eventually I expect to be out of a job over that."
You fight like a dairy farmer.
Team Fortress 2 has been a great demonstration of how an amazing graphics engine can be used in a less-realistic way, but the high-quality graphics still do a good job supporting the gameplay. Maybe more of this will come soon? And perhaps the artists in game development studios will get more of a chance to be... well... artistic as a result.
Because video games by nature are repetitive, and when you've heard the same joke for the thirteenth time, especially when you are trying to beat the same level and keep dying, it just makes you want to throw your controller through the monitor.
Of course some games are funny (Super Paper Mario had some great jokes), and even Smash Brothers Brawl made me laugh a few times. It's just something you have to be careful about.
Qxe4
Do you want to know what the secret to humor is timing.
Games have trouble with timing if the player is in control, and not the comedian.
I just played The Simpsons Game which, granted, is 2 years old, but it's still a PS3 game and has fairly decent graphics, and it was pretty funny at times. Sure, it's no Monkey Island, but hey.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is kinky.
Your mom must be a knob goblin because she helped me reach Orc Chasm.
Hilarity ensues.
Dave Grossman left LucasArts back in 1994 -- and he's been with Telltale Games since 2005. TFA points out that he's working on Telltale's new Tales of Monkey Island series.
Video games can be funny, but they have to employ different kinds of humor. For example, the guys at Black Ilse have gotten me to laugh multiple times while playing Planescape Torment and Fallout 2. Fallout 2 was hands down the funniest game I have ever played, but mostly because of the utterly absurd things you could do and the continual breaking of the 4th wall, which is critical for humor in games. I think one of the major reasons why games arent funny is because developers take themselves too seriously (witness the travesty that was oblivion with guns).
While I'd agree that humor in games is decreasing, it's definitely not dead entirely. Take, for instance, Portal. The only narration in the game is from GLaDOS (other than the turrets, but they're funny too: "hey! hey! put me down!" they yell in their funny voices). Every-other line is a wisecrack or snarky comment, and the whole thing is simultaneously hilarious and darkly sinister. I'd say humor in games is quite alive over at Valve, where there is certainly no lack of graphics and exciting physics... "in the layman's terms, speedy thing go in, speedy thing come out."
The two episodes of the Penny Arcade games have been quite humorous - enough even to get my significant other involved. Though sadly games like these are only rarities, and certainly the humour may only appeal to certain senses.
The problem is timing. For most jokes to be funny they require timing and to be seen or heard. This means when the joke occurs the player must be looking in the right direction, at the right time without feeling forced. Also (more importantly) the jokes have to actually be funny. A few games have pulled this off quite well. Most recently Ghostbusters.
Nowadays most games are either RTS and FPS. The most important factor is speed. Gamers simply don't have the time to admire any humor.
If these people think technology has the solution for humor, then they are really taking the problem too seriously!
If I'm flying a flight simulator the last thing I need is some poor attempt at humour interupting at the expense of the 3D graphics. The fun comes out of improving your skills at the task. However for an adventure - by which I mean any game with a storyline and plot - well placed and well done humour will keep my interest. So it does depend on the game.
I'd say given the failure and attrition rate, the gaming industry are getting it wrong and that they need to listen to what their user wants. Humour in the right context makes the game more fun. That is the only reason to play any game. It's fun. If it's not, it'll tank.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
No love for the minions?
Hands down the funniest video game ever made. Not just "video game funny", but truly funny. It's amazing how they managed to blend dead serious and even emotionally touching scenes with fantastic humour.
Running into the boss room and seeing this very ugly, gorgon monster thing and Sam says "Oh my, what's my ex-wife doing here?!" is still one the of funniest lines I've heard in a game.
I have no mod points, else I would heap them upon you.
I used to be an actor (theatre major), mostly doing comedies. Having had to deliver funny lines many times to audiences, I can tell you that the difference between a funny line and an embarrassing line are tiny, tiny differences in timing. People have good comedic timing (mine is pretty good) have an innate sense for when something is at peak funniness. It definitely has to have something to do with the speed at which people think, and the things that they will think, after the joke is set up. There is a moment during that process where the "interrupt request" of another line delivered will either knock the process out of whack or confirm what it was already beginning to predict was going to happen. This is why humor can be so hard to translate--it assumes a shared schema of the way the world works, so that one can assume that the listener is going to make the same connections as you.
Anyway, as you say, that all goes to hell when the user is in control.
Also, now that they're on Xbox Live, I encourage you to go back and play the Monkey Island games that seemed so funny when you were 12. They aren't.
in my pants ;)
I can't think of a single game for the 360 that made me laugh out loud. Last game to do that was Psychonauts.
I attribute this mostly to the changes in the industry. It went from a dynamic environment with a wide arrangement of companies, including small shops who put personal touches (such as humor) in games to its current form.
The industry is now filled with corporate supergiants. 99% or so of the market is locked up in companies such as SquareEnixEidos, BlizzardActivisionSierra, EA, etc. Just as in the rest of the software industry, this transition to giant corporate machines brought a mix of benefits and losses. With the focus on efficiency and professionalism, some things (easter eggs in software, humor in games) are lost.
I feel smarter, stronger, MORE AGGRESSIVE. I feel like I could... Like I could... Like I could...
CONQUER THE WORLD!!!
I miss "The Day of the Tentacle"...
I guess it is easier to define a destructive algorithm than a joke generator because if jokes were predictible, they eventually would become pointless.
I was about to write I also miss "The Incredible Toon Machine" but... hey! Isn't it "Little Big Planet" a reincarnation?
Humor is subjective. Some people will find a joke hilarious, some will find it offensive, and others won't even get the joke. Modern games today have extremely huge budgets compared to games of old, and publishers see humor based games as a risk. In this case humor falls under the same umbrella as innovation. Publishers can't afford a humor based game that only a small amount of gamers will find funny, or even worse, drive most of them away.
Rare did a pretty good job with this. The fact that I looked at the title of the RSS feed and automatically associated the story with Conkers Bad Fur Day before reading the summary attests to that fact.
I actually showed my friend a few videos from it on youtube last week, and he said "why did I never play this game"?
Just a real shame Nintendo let MS buy Rare, they may have pumped out some pretty awesome titles if they were still developing for them.
There are funny games out there (Portal, Paper Mario, Mario & Luigi, Simpsons Games), they just aren't a majority. The same way there are funny TV shows and movies, but they also aren't a majority. Although, I will say that it appear that humorous games make up a smaller percent than TV or Movies, it's still the case that it's just sort of a sub-genre.
That being said, one reason, I feel, is that game genres are based on gameplay, not content. People shop for RPGs and FPSs, not comedy games and drama games.
Additionally, many games, like gamers, tend to take themself too seriously. Some of the funniest moments I've had in gaming are when the joke is directed at the gamer ("I go on message boards and complain about games I've never played!" from Super Paper Mario), or when they really unexpectedly break the fourth wall (Ocelot's "And don't you dare use auto-fire, or I'll know!" from MGS).
Judging by the video game message boards, a lot of gamers take themself really, really seriously, (the type that go on message boards and complain about games they've never played) and wouldn't appreciate having fun poked at them, or the fourth wall broken.
Either way, I don't see it as a problem. There are humorous games out there, they just aren't a majority. Like every other medium. :)
a) The humor has not become less, it is still there and the genres which had it still have it in the same amount. Look at the myriad of adventure games released in the last 2 years and about 30% of them have been on the comical side, while the other genres occasionally have a humorous game. Same situation as ever!
b) Grossman does not work at Lucasarts (I think he used to work there) he works at Telltale Games and they just do exactly that, comical adventure games!
I wonder if part of the issue is not with games themselves, but with the audience. Previously, there was a certain demographic to a gamer that you had a good chance of hitting. Games like "Space Quest" were full of little inside bloopers, etc, taking aim at popular geek culture like Star Wars, Star Trek, computer jokes in general, etc.
Now that the demographic is broader, a lot of players simply wouldn't get the joke. I think that when the market was smaller, there were also less watchers. Now you have to watch out for PR squads of doom, who are ready to have you tarred and feathered for things like the "hot coffee" incident, etc.
Face it. Games aren't (just) for geeks anymore. Sure, certain games may still have that target, but overall the market has been saturated by "big corporate players" in the production end, and "soccer moms and dads" in the consumer end.
There is a lot of talk about repetitiveness, but as I was thinking about funny games the WarioWare series came to mind.
It's repetitive and you're doing the same type of stuff over and over, but it's still a very amusing game. And it does have a lot of humor in there and even some laugh out loud moments.
Humour requires good writers. Publishers and developers rarely pay for good writers.
Anything cartoonish or artistic is more expensive. It requires imagination, more artistic talent and, it's harder to recycle stylised assets where as a realistic human, tree, building, etc will look the same in all games.
Between western developers complete lack of imagination and the shitty business model for video games, asking for humour within gaming is a lost cause.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suydUkhCWkM
There were tons and tons of gags through the whole game, but who can forget The Great Mighty Poo the coolest video game boss ever?
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The recent Coding Horror post demonstrates that games are still a laughing matter.
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001286.html
Fallout 2 was hands down the funniest game I have ever played, but mostly because of the utterly absurd things you could do and the continual breaking of the 4th wall, which is critical for humor in games.
Don't ask Gizmo to 'speak louder/clearer into your pocket'.[paraphrase]
That devolves into a 'sticky situation' quickly!
Usually those that are stumped by other media references while playing FO2, have been asked to 'turn in their geek card' more than once on /. (getting 'Dogmeat' to join your party at the special encounter...Who is Dogmeat?)
(hint: leave all NPC's at some town, then head for/around Navarro with either no armor, or with the 'Bridge Keeper's Robe' as armor. When you encounter the tavern...SAVE GAME!!!!, then worry about armor, NPC's, and "Charisma' to get Dogmeat to join your party.
Offtopic, BTW:
I found it interesting that Ron Perlman served as 'voice actor' as the narrator in FO1, FO2, and FO3.
I'll have to dig out my FO:BoS disc and see if Ron is the narrator for that as well.
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
In Soviet Russia... overlords... Natalie Portman... hot grits... like a ferrari... fixed that for you...
Most really good comedies withstand repeat viewings or even improve over time. Lots of stuff... I was going to reel it off but it's pretty much all by Zucker Abrahams Zucker, Mel Brooks, Mike Judge or Mike Meyers.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
PSYCHE! Mr Zurcon lives only to kill.
I think the guys at Insomniac Games do a really good job of mixing humor with action. Ratchet and Clank is 1 of my all time favorite series on the Playstation.
Maybe if it was correctly speleld it would be funnier?
Todd: I hope it proves as delicious as the farmers that grew them
As we know, realism is what you use, to show the world on the outside of our minds.
But humor happens on the inside. The side that is usually described trough abstract things.
So what we need, are more abstract games. Which A am saying for a long time.
Look at how successful Kongregate.com is. (Called the YouTube of Flash games.)
Many if not most of their games are pretty abstract. Which forces developers, to come up with a good basic gameplay mechanic. You can't just hide your incompetence and lack of humor with pretty graphics and realistic worlds. Because Flash is too slow to allow it.
Of course, a good game also has beautiful aesthetics, a good story, and innovative technology. Additionally to the best mechanics.
Then even great humor is no problem at all.
In my opinion, the best place for such games, is the Wii. Because of the added controller technology. And because it also is a bit weak on the graphics side.
I bet a game with a crazy but self-confident humor like the Monty Python's one, combined with a specific artistic style that does not require big graphics, and a good set of mechanics behind it, would sell like crazy. Add a story to it that drags people with it, and you got your place in history books, reviving the whole genre of funny games.
In my opinion, there are no excuses. There is just the laziness of adding the newest graphics to sequel 5000 of a series or very similar games, and expecting to get a good game out of it. :)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
There have been masses of funny games since the days of text adventures. Duke Nukem, Max Payne, Grand Theft Auto, Fallout, Portal, Team Fortress. If the article is right, and creating humour in modern games really is harder than it was in the old days, then the designers must be doing a damn good job.
Oh, and I couldn't let an article about humour in games go by without mentioning Rom Check Fail. No-one who loves MAME or old arcade classics could fail to find it amusing!
Humor, at its most basic level, is simply the end result of doing something other than what you set your audience up to expect. However, humor is also highly subjective. Because of this, you either have to adapt to your audience's tastes or you have to cater to a very small group of like-minded people. This means producing a large-scale interactive experience based on humor is extremely difficult to pull-off. As a result, the "humor" that ends up in such products usually ends up either watered down for a broad audience or made so abrasive that it only appeals to children (or anyone else) who enjoys "fart" jokes.
At this point, the best anyone has come up with are complicated dialog trees that involve input from the user to meet the user's approximate tastes.
Fortunately, this could change once technologies, like Microsoft's Project Natal, arrive on the scene. This will give programmers a way to gauge a user's reaction to something on-screen and then immediately adapt to it to help push the envelope further into the desired direction.
8==8 Bones 8==8
At least part of the reason for the decline in humor is that there has been a shift in focus from quality writing to things like 3d modeling, game physics, and texture work. That's my opinion, anyway.
In the old days, you didn't have the advantage of high resolution models and fancy special effects to bowl over your audience. You had to wow your audience with great writing. I think many developers have forgotten this.
Also, now that they're on Xbox Live, I encourage you to go back and play the Monkey Island games that seemed so funny when you were 12. They aren't.
Heh, I was recently looking at some YouTube walkthrough videos of MI and indeed what made me laugh back then isn't anymore... Nevertheless, for their day they were hilarious and pretty good entertainment for lots of teenagers.
"Sum Ergo Cogito"
I remember paying a game called NOX that was pretty funny. It's a RPG where the guy gets his TV stolen for no reason at the beginning.
I think games are a medium where they can be more amusing kind of humor, the stuff that makes you smile, not laugh out loud kind of humor. A game can have a generally humorous premise and setting and such and it'll work well. You can also have some comic relief and such. However trying to do it as an overall comedy, designed to make people laugh, I just don't think will work because, as you say, timing.
The timing thing got me thinking of an odd, but relevant example from back in high school: We had some silly song we were playing in band and one part of it just really sounded like a drinking song. This lead to various chatter about drunken trombone playing (I was a trombone player) and to me proceeding to play the part in a goofy, drunken fashion (slurring notes, staggering about, etc). This was met with general amusement by those watching but what sold it, what turned it from something amusing to making everyone busting out laughing was a small matter of timing. At a certain part in the song there was a significant jump in pitch between two notes. For some reason, it occurred to me not to play it straight out, but to delay for a small fraction of a second before sweeping in to the higher note. That just killed people. I did the same bit for other friends in band and every time, it was that delay that sold it and got them cracking up.
It seemed real interesting to me at the time and in retrospect that such a small thing could be so funny. Somehow adding a delay there just conjured up the proper image of a drunk in people's heads and sold the bit. Wouldn't have worked arbitrarily either, just delaying a random note wouldn't have done it, nor would have an excessive delay. For some reason, a small delay right in that point sold the funny to most people.
Thus I think you are quite right, true comedy isn't the sort of thing that can be delivered well in an interactive format. You can have an amusing game, and you can have comedic moments in a game (in cutscenes mainly) but you can't really have a game that is effectively a whole comedy because timing is so important.
No mention of Giants: Citizen of Kabuto? That game was funny as hell :)
The only games I can think of with really good humour are anything in the Paper Mario series, and Portal. I'm sure there must be more, but nothing else springs to mind.
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
I nominate Myst - Riven - Exile. Humor? Depends on the player. Dark? Again, that depends on the player. I love those games. My individual favorite will always be the original Zork, but then Adventureland ( on Apple ][+ ) is where I'll always be from! :)
Graphics? Get off my lan....
The lack of comedy in games isn't confined to games. Most mass media that's intended to be funny really isn't. I can count on one hand the number of funny sitcoms on TV (in the US, I don't watch much foreign language TV.) You could do something similar with comedy movies, or the light moments in otherwise serious movies. It's a general failure to which games are also susceptible. I agree with some of the assessments from others in the thread, too, especially about timing being key.
However, I would like to add that things aren't that funny when you've seen them before. Bones3D said in an earlier post that comedy occurs when something happens that the audience didn't expect. The more games we've played, the harder it is to surprise us with game events or plot twists. So we're left with comic dialogue which is not so easy to write or deliver.
By the way, those of you who mentioned TF2 and Portal should read some Old Man Murray, as one of the two guys (Chet Faliszek) from that site is responsible for much of the comedy in Valve's games.
Finally, I haven't seen these two games recommended as funny, so:
When the axe came to the forest, the trees said, "Look out - the handle was once one of us."
Space Quest 3, Leisure Suit Larry, Day of the Tentacle, Sam & Max, Katamari Damacy, Psychonauts, Ratchet & Clank, Super Mario RPG, these games have lots of humor in a wide variety of ways. Humor's always been there and done right, it's just that not a lot of people bother since they're trying to provide a visceral experience and not one that is simply just entertaining. It depends on the type of game you want, but you can definitely find it.
Twinstiq, game news
I got plenty of laughs out of the new ghostbusters games. It was all what the other (NPC) characters were saying. Dialog will always be a key to humor.
Mine came in the first Tomb Raider demo. Couldn't figure out the controls, and Lara just stood there — until she shifted her weight and sighed pointedly.
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
This article obviously fails to consider the upcoming multi-platform Brutal Legend starred by Jack Black. Having tested this game, I can assure it'll give hundreds of laughs to every player, not only script-wise,but also graphic-wise. I can't wait for it to come out. Those who don't know what the hell I'm talking about can check the website or Wikipedia, though most of it is still confidential.
No One Lives Forever was hilarious! A great first person shooter in it's own right, the dialog was really funny. It was a parody of spy movies of the 60's and had very amusing dialog between enemy thugs that you'd be sneaking up upon. I recall a lengthy dialog on the psychology of beer and criminality as well as one on faulty space station construction (after numerous accidents they "spaced" the design engineer"), not to mention the danger of "excessive simian casualties".
[Insert pithy quote here]
Nobody's mentioned the Ratchet & Clank games yet? They're full of humor, especially the arena sections. "Remember kids; don't try any of this at home, go to a friend's house!"
Humor in games seems only a problem with Western franchises, where being gritty and gory is almost a requirement. Anyone who's played a few Japanese games -- Katamari Damacy, any of the Mario RPG series, for instance -- will see that they've become quite facile with humor in a game context.
In Gokujou Parodius there is a point in the high-speed highway level where a "falling rocks" type road sign will appear, and moments later rocks will tumble out of the sky to crush your ship. Then a "deer crossing" type of sign will appear and you have to dodge the hail of falling deer. After that a sign with just an exclamation point appears, and I bet you can guess what happens next.
Three massive exclamation points tumble out of the sky.
It was one of the funniest things I'd ever seen in a video game, and I laughed so hard I was completely thrown off.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
Many games have great humour. The key is to do it in dialogue that you overhear, cutscenes, scripted responses to actions etc. Most games don't deal with this because the best selling games are semi realistic shooters or etc, but there are a great many examples of humour in games. NOLF, Serious Sam, Duke Nukem, any simpsons game, the fallout games, etc and etc and etc
If you ignore ACs because they are anonymous - you're an idiot.
I've always enjoyed Sierra's Space Quest series. No other game series I can think of had "taste" and "smell" as valid commands. "This rough area tastes strangely like blood. Oh, that is blood. You've shredded your tongue. Your mother should've warned you about licking strange areas." Gary Owens was a great narrator.
For a more subtle brand of humour, Sierra's Quest for Glory series was great. The subject matter was often serious, but the developers threw in plenty of awful puns and simply bizarre non-sequiturs which really added to the world.
After that, I don't think I played anything genuinely funny for years until the Sam & Max episodes from Telltale. Their Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People had its moments, and I really enjoyed Episode 1 of PA's On The Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness (haven't played #2 yet).
Soylens viridis homines es
Why spend 1000 man years developing a 3d comedy act ? It's much more effective and cheaper to pay the current comedy star to stand on stage and deliver an act, or on a cheap set (sitcoms). Does Comedy benefit from interactivity ? I don't think so.
Most Nintendo games are full of cartoon humor, Team Fortress 2's visual style is hilarious, Blizzard games are full of tongue-in-cheek jokes and silliness, the Grand Theft Auto series is full of adult humor...I don't feel like there's a lack of humor in gaming, and I don't think there was a lower number of more serious games in the past, from Quake to Phantasmagoria.
I really enjoyed the original Grand Theft Auto, in it's top-down, colourful, pixelated glory. The sequels have never interested me.
I have to agree. Sam & Max (even the new 3D ones) are laugh-my-ass-off funny, and some of the puzzles in the game are equally comedically brilliant.
So the people in question haven't played any of the Ratchet & Clank series? Those have some great humour in them -- some low brow, some more sophisticated.
The problem in a lot of games is just bad writers, like poor comedies on TV.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Any comedian can be dramatic, not any dramatic actor can be funny. Between drama and comedy, Joss Whedon said it right, comedy is the hard one.
"bad day LA", "psychonauts", "armed and dangerous", etc- but they are all generally the same time period- Portal more recently was hilarious which is really one of the biggest appeals to the game (though gameplay was of course awesome)
Got any comparable data to back that up with? It seems to me that the book industry has not in recent history gone through the changes in popularity that video-games have, nor also the technological changes unless you count the mac-coloured Chapters touchscreen kiosks etc.
For music and movies... it seems to me that a disproportionate amount of material is often a fairly good parallel to books. Crap that is big explosions or good looking boy-bands, but often enough lacking substantial depth.
In fact, it seems that the movie industry is so devoid of talent in making intriguing plotlines, that they've pretty much decided to plunder all the childhood series' of the current generation. I'm still waiting for "smurfs 2012, the movie" because I think that's one of the few they *haven't* planned to remake yet.