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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."
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.
This is well demonstrated in Penny Arcade's series of games "On the Rainslick Precipice of Darkness". The artistic quality of the game improved my enjoyment of it far more than the high polygon counts of modern shooters and other such games.
I think that with the success of games like this and the latest Paper Mario games we are finally starting to see that it's the story and artwork that we are paying for, the technology is secondary. I hope the future holds more games with a strong story focus like these and Silicon Knights' Eternal Darkness.
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No love for the minions?
One thing I love about playing TF2 is the humor in the dialog. As somebody mentions below, it has the potential to get repetitive, but I've never really noticed it happen (I'm focused on the gameplay). I think a big key to the success they've had at this is that they really do seem to get the timing right and the characters are just very funny -- both stereotypically and originally. It isn't one-liners dropped left and right with no reason, but rather in response to what's going on around you.
For example: the Heavy's maniac laugh (and matching face) after unleashing a couple hundred rounds of ammo, things characters say in response to other player actions such as the heavy teleporting ("Engineer is credit to team!"), a medic healing people and their replies, the Engineer dominating people with the sentry ("Take it like a man sonny"), the scout smacking the Heavy ("Eat it fatty!"), and of course all the great taunts ("Kaa-Boooom!"). Heck, almost everything the Heavy says cracks me up -- it all just meshes and "feels" right.
TF2 isn't perfect, but it definitely does a lot of things right, including humor.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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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!
Speaking as someone in the industry...
Nobody but the cheapest developers recycle assets. Slight differences in pipeline, technology, art direction, etc. conspire to make it not happen even if you're trying to share assets between projects.
Also, decent writers will work for peanuts. One or two narrative designers who are being paid as much as a mid-level designer make little difference to the bottom line on a team of 50-200 developers. Getting everyone to agree on who the good writer is, well, that's harder... getting a substantial team of designers who all have different senses of humour to form some kind of consensus and maintain a shared, consistent vision with the writer, that's nigh impossible.
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!
I'm an adult and I disagree with you. I've only played Vice City and San Andreas in full so my experience is limited among all the releases, but I do believe Vice City was one of the funniest games I've played. Hopefully someone who has played them all can throw in their voice and perhaps say Vice City is the funniest of all the GTA titles.
Visually and thematically, the whole 80s thing was brilliant. Hawaiian shirts, lesiure suits, big white marble Neo-Classical mansions etc.
Then there was the 80s music, some of which is funny because we're embarassed how much we like it and then the moronic Spinal-tap-ish band made up of drug-addled Northerners and Scotsmen. Love Fist was it? I think it was also based on the backstage and off-stage scandalous antics of bands like Motley Crue.
They outdid themselves with the commercials and the talk radio shows. Yes, I concede that some of the ads are very crude, like Robot Chicken crude. No finesse, just toilet humour on steroids (I'm thinking of a particular commercial promoting chocolate donuts). They poked fun at things like the Atari having super-realistic graphics ("That one dot just vaporized the other dot!!!")and Casio Keyboards making you an instant musician (anyone remember the 'key-tar' i.e the "keyboard guitar").
My greatest praise goes to the talk shows. They did a great job satirizing the biggest topics of American politics: religion, gender and sexuality, Republicans vs. Democrats and the usual Oprah topics for flavour.
Of course let's not forget all the racial stereotypes. Sort of a very dark Quentin Tarantino makes fun of Mel Brooks' standard character tropes. The cowardly neurotic accountant comes to mind. Then there are the silly names so typical of TV shows of the 80s like Lance Vance. C'mon, you had to chuckle at that. Finally the random soundbites from NPCs walking around who themselves are each and every one, a caricature of some stereotype. I thought the bikini-clad rollerskating girls were hilarious, such an artifical expression of 80's beach culture.