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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."
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.
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."
You've mixed the lines. It's:
Insult: You fight like a dairy farmer!
Retort: How appropriate, you fight like a cow.
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.
No love for the minions?
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.
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?
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.
When you make something like a video game, music or a movie for a very wide audience you have to aim for the lowest common denominator. Humour and the lowest common denominator of very wide audiences doesn't mix well. That's why huge Hollywood comedies are to comedy as easy listening/pop is to music, and why they feature subtle comedians such as Adam Sandler or Martin Lawrence.
You just got troll'd!
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.
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
I'm a clod, you insensitive cow!
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.
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!
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.