Why Video Games Are Having a Harder Time With Humor 202
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 have a reason..... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
secret to humor (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:I have a reason..... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Makes me wonder why the +5 Funny chair throwing jokes haven't resulted in more broken monitors.
Not dead entirely (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How appropriate (Score:5, Insightful)
Insult: You fight like a dairy farmer!
Retort: How appropriate, you fight like a cow.
Re:Maybe TF2 for inspiration? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd say Portal was also fairly funny, even if the memes it sprouted have started to wear out their welcome.
And I can think of dozens of RPGs, old and recent, that had their funny moments. Though in those cases they tended to be serious games with the occasional comic relief.
I think TFA is expecting games that are purely comedic, i.e. in the same vein as Monkey Island, and those never were that common. All the classic games that fit that bill are either adventure games, which don't get made anymore, or aimed mainly at a young audience. Pure comedy written for adults (and no, that doesn't mean "mature" in the sense of inappropriate for kids) is a niche that's largely empty, but what we have instead in abundance is non-comedic games that don't take themselves too seriously.
Re:I have a reason..... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:secret to humor (Score:2, Insightful)
The monkey island games made their humor by having the player make choices, and then interrupting their control to tell the punchline to their setup. By making sure the player was only ever presented the option of telling setups or punchlines, the jokes come thick and fast. The actual art leant itself to comic action and the whole game was interspersed with non-controllable cutscenes, something the industry is desperately back-pedalling from except when they want to tell the next part of their "EPIC STORY!!!". Books have their epics, light romances, comedies and everything - games only seem to have "epics" and "casual puzzling/arcading" nowadays. The lack of alternatives is worrying.
Some modern games which can play comedy well are the Ace Attorney games on the DS. Now THEY know how to tell a joke, even if it is in the middle of a muder trial. But again, even they use the "Choose an option: game takes control" path. A lack of dynamics.
Re:I have a reason..... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
It doesn't really seem to me like that's a huge obstacle in too many settings. If there is ANY cutscene you have to view multiple times, or any dialogue to repeat a level after dying, that's annoying even if it isn't a joke. Jokes would also be old if you had an NPC say it too many times, like every time you walked by, but again, that's almost anything. GTA for example has some funny lines from pedestrians ("Baby fat- I just never lost it") that got old after a few hours, but so did the non-jokes, like "Hey CJ, what up?"
Repetitiveness isn't unique to games, there are just a -few- more situations in which repetitiveness can be a problem, and you can avoid those situations easily, you know what parts are going to be repeated.
A few times the repetitiveness has been actually pretty funny. I'm thinking of one example in Fallout 3
***minor spoilers***
In one of the vaults, all the residents are clones of "Gary." They know only one word: Gary. They say it gleefully as they run at you to kill you. They say "Gary???" when they lose track of you. They say "Gaaaaaarrrryyyy!!!!" in pain as they die (when you don't blow off their heads with a shotgun.) Not laugh out loud funny, but it was a good little dark comedy situation.
I think the real reason there's not much humor in games is because videogames are really a pretty new medium. Decent plots, dialogues, and humor in videogames are more common than they were a few years ago, but the writing in your average blockbuster movie is still high above the dialogue in your average big release game. To that end, Grossman says "To make a game so funny with so many comic alternatives, that would be like writing three hit movies. The scripts are impossibly long. That would be a considerable investment."
Plus I think we gamers LET them get away with it because we don't have the same level of expectations for dialogue that we do for movies. Yet.
YES! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:YES! (Score:4, Insightful)
I am in my early twenties. I recently replayed the Monkey Island games and Sam and Max Hit the Road not even a year ago. They were still as funny as I remember, actually even more so only because I got the jokes that I easily missed when I was 10 when I played them the first time.
Because the Industry is no longer Funny (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
My view (Score:4, Insightful)
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. :)
Wider audience? (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:Humor == Risk (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Humour is too expensive (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Yes, it *is* because of realism. (Score:3, Insightful)
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. :)
eh (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Ghostbusters (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Humour is too expensive (Score:3, Insightful)
Why is Hollywood so much better at it?
Hollywood has, in theory at least if not in practice, the concept of a job - the director - who is responsible for the final vision of the product, and generally has the authority to carry out this vision.
Western-style game development, in many studios I've worked at at least, has no such equivalent. The lead game designer is often no more than the head of a single department among the four main disciplines of game development (programming, art, design, and audio). Very often, *producers* are actually in charge of the project, and have the final creative say over the game. Producers are typically the lowest rung on the 'management' track, and so, similar to how a fresh-faced Lieutenant just out of the academy outranks a 20-year veteran Sargent, producers tend to outrank game designers. The best producers I've worked with tend to get out of the way of the designers and let them do their jobs (and shield them from upper management when necessary), but it doesn't always happen that way.
My understanding is that Japanese studios have closer concept to the 'director', which is why I think you see more commercial Japanese games that feel more like a director's vision (often much more narrow in focus) and less than a design-by-committee feel. I'll bet a lot of you can think of reasonably large-scale Japanese titles that were so quirky, you can't even imagine trying to convince some publishing executive to make such a game (Katamari Damacy, anyone?).
That's not to denigrate all of the great games Western studios have made - obviously there are a lot of them out there. And of course, Japanese developers produce plenty of uninspired drek as well, but I think there's definitely a different style of development which leads to slightly different results.
Re:Maybe TF2 for inspiration? (Score:1, Insightful)
Either you're a druggie or my sense of humour is a lot more sophisticated than yours.