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'm not much of a gamer, but... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
The 4th Wall (Score:2, Interesting)
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).
On the Rain Slick Precipice of Darkness (Score:1, Interesting)
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.
Re:Maybe TF2 for inspiration? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:On the Rain Slick Precipice of Darkness (Score:0, Interesting)
Overlord 1 & 2 (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Maybe TF2 for inspiration? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Not dead entirely (Score:2, Interesting)
I'd guess it's declining because of common gameplay elements. Games with lots of exploration and dialogue are relatively rare these days. Most gameplay is a series of physical actions, usually punching, kicking, shooting, destroying but also jumping, climbing, racing. In those types of games either the developers have to (a) fit the comedy in non interactive cut scenes (Ratchet & Clank, Psychonauts), (b) have a running commentary from one or more of the characters (e.g. Duke Nukem) including a radio/disembodied variant (Portal) (c) parody/slapstick in the visuals/action (e.g. God Hand)
The great humor based games were adventure games that rely on dialogue/environmental exploration. Recent games that do have dialogue/exploration tend to follow the western RPG formula of the faceless hero and/or have poor writing, an issue with games in general that hinders dialogue, story, character development in addition to humor. From what I've read Fallout 3 had a lot of quest dialogue written by developers which isn't going to be up to the standard of the dialogue choices in earlier games written by professional writers.
I feel smarter, stronger, MORE AGGRESSIVE. (Score:2, Interesting)
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?
Two mistakes (Score:5, Interesting)
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!
Re:Because the Industry is no longer Funny (Score:3, Interesting)
Big studio games are going the same way as big studio movies now. Some game are now just as much games as they are movies. Huge budgets, huge production teams, the same type of writers for the story as in Hollywood movies, and the same kind of voice actors too. Just look at CoD:WaW, it's all a big blockbuster movie with a big linear story that's only waiting for you to do what you're expected to do for it to proceed.
When I was a kid I went to the Futuroscope park and saw a movie where you could choose the unfolding by voting on the branching of the story. Big budget video games these days tend to be the same way, except that instead of voting you have to destroy 3 tanks and advance to a checkpoint. And more often than not you have little control on the outcome of the story, you just try it again until you succeed.
Re:I have a reason..... (Score:3, Interesting)
Seems to me, what video game designers need to do is focus more on the storytelling and less on animating individual strands of hair.
No kidding!
What I want in a game:
1. Immersion-does the plot/premise pull you in and get you involved?
2. Is the premise of the game interesting? (hint: think 'bus driving game' that you piloted a bus across a vast stretch of 'nothing'...in real time!)
3. The need to engage my brain, not my 'twitchy fingers'.
4. Functional UI. Fix the UI bugs before release, and gameplay/artwork bugfixes as patches as ready. (no matter how 'awesome' the gameplay is, what good is it if you cannot interact with it as intended?)
5. A playable Demo, available as a download. I want to see if it is worth my $$$!
Nice graphics are...well, nice. But not essential to the enjoyment of the game.
I recall many hours spent with:
Flanker Su-27 SCE
Tom Clancy's SSN
Front Mission 3 (for Playstation 1, ran on my PC with Connectix's Virtual Game Station emulator for Win98)
Fallout 1 & 2 (currently playing Fallout 2...AGAIN!... in WINE on my Kubuntu box on another desktop)
Excom
Graphics were the least of my concerns while playing the above games.
And humour abounds in the Fallout series, but it can be subtle and obscure at times. (I've heard that it continues with Fallout 3!)
Although I have no experience with either of the games, Mario***, and Zelda*** also come to mind here.
Individual hairs moving is great from a technology standpoint, and eventually will be demanded, but...focus on this stuff at the detriment of why the game exists/is in-production now seems silly.
It seems like a 'foot shooting festival'.
*disclaimer: I am a customer for your games if I can run them in *nix, otherwise I can be dismissed as a customer of yours!*
WarioWare? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Humour is too expensive (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
So many funny games! (Score:3, Interesting)
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 [farbs.org]. No-one who loves MAME or old arcade classics could fail to find it amusing!
It's actually pretty simple... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Japanese games do it better (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:I really have to disagree with this article (Score:5, Interesting)
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.