IS HUMOR HARDER TO PULL OFF IN GAMES?

I find often that games try to be funny in the wrong way. Text-based games try to have humour based on vocal timing. There's also lots of "this is a reference hence it's funny".

I think generally it is just difficult to actually be funny. Of course there's also the issue of what people actually think is funny.

Now I think that with voice-acting and random quips things have improved slightly. (and will hopefully continue to improve) There's more possibility for timing based humour. There's still the issue where (I believe, I wouldn't actually know) people's voiced lines often are recorded separately. So there are rarely natural interactions between people. So when there is good funny. It's usually in a monologue.

However I played Oxenfree a couple of months ago and that dialogue system felt very natural and flowing and although I might not remember anything too funny in it, there were a couple of timing based jokey things that I thought landed a lot better than in so many previous attempts.

I wouldn't say there's any lack of comedy games though. Most of them are pretty terrible but they often have a chuckle-worthy joke or two. Absurd humour is pretty common as well. Often games themselves are pretty absurd so pointing it out is humourous.

The hardest thing I think. And one I don't think I've seen done is make humour through the game systems themselves. I think Goat Simulator tries something like that but as far as I know that game is just terrible. Basically a game that is an actual comedy game, where playing the game is what is comedic. I guess lots of buggy shite games can be seen this way but often that is just unintentional.


And on laughing that's also maybe troublesome in a game. You can't laugh so hard you fall out of your chair if you also are trying to actually play the game. There's nothing funny about a joke that is so funny that you have to replay the sequence because you died the first time. Literal Monty Python deadly joke sketch!

(oh that's another thing I didn't think of. Games often use repetition. So a joke will quickly grow stale in such an environment. Of course a game like Stanley Parable will play on that repetition theme to make jokes... There's loads of approaches)

It's a difficult question to answer. The nuances of one's sense of humour are probably one of the biggest mysteries of humanity. What is "funny"? You can ask 100 people and you'll get 100 different answers.

I tend to lean towards the surreal or absurd when it comes to putting humour in my work. I like to poke fun at established conventions or lampshade tropes. One thing I really like doing is writing funny descriptions for items, like in Sidhe Quest I had the conceit that all your equipment started out as being made of cardboard, so there was a Cardboard Ring with the description "Don't propose to your partner with this, trust me."

At the end of the day, jokes are as hard to pull off in video games as they are congruent with the sense of humour of the player. And your mileage will wildly vary with that one.

I think it can be said that one of the most "safe" ways of doing humour in games is, as I said, making fun of all the things in games that we roll our eyes at when we see them but put up with for the sake of the medium. As Liv puts it "With my inexplicable healing powers and unrequited love for you, there's no obstacle we can't overcome!".

author=Shinan
There's also lots of "this is a reference hence it's funny".

I think it's some unwritten law that you have to have a joke about Link smashing pots in your game.

But yeah, there's some pretty big arguments out there as to whether or not relying on references and meme humor are acceptable at this point, and I think that largely stems from so many games doing them poorly. I've always found references best used subtly, tucked away as little extras. But then you have games that put the references front and center, and then they feel cheap and feel like an aversion to writing original content.

But man if you're gonna do it, reference something other than Zelda. Seriously.

author=SgtMettool
I've always found references best used subtly, tucked away as little extras. But then you have games that put the references front and center, and then they feel cheap and feel like an aversion to writing original content.

Just gonna leave this here.

No, I think the people making those games that can't pull off humor just aren't funny. I actually managed to make people laugh out loud twice with my Winterruption game and I don't consider myself a truly humorous fellow, but I still am okay at telling jokes.

It's not games; it's the people making them.

No, it's just that humor is not usually the main focus of games, and not everyone has a sense of humor.

If you're asking about this, then you should really be playing games whose focus is on comedy (or at least one of its genres is comedy).

Either way, humor depends entirely on the writing, not the medium (games/books/TV shows etc.)

author=eplip
and not everyone has a sense of humor.

Sidebar: I think if you don't have a sense of humor, that's strange as hell. Like??? Did I misinterpret this?

Everybody has a sense of humor. Not everybody has a good sense of humor.

author=pianotm
Everybody has a sense of humor. Not everybody has a good sense of humor.

I'd normally emptyquote this, but I also want to put in my oar on the topic of references:

There's nothing inherently wrong with references. The problem arises when the reference IS the joke, because 1) you're really stealing someone else's bit, b) usually the bit isn't even a bit, it's just "HEY GUYS THIS THING EXISTS AND I KNOW ABOUT IT! LOVE ME!", and iii) it only works if your audience knows the thing.*

Good reference humor works kind of like sneaking in adult jokes in kid movies: You want something that those in the know will appreciate, without giving those out of the loop any inkling that there's something up. (Or, in the very best case, have the reference be baked into a joke that works whether you pick up on it or not.)

That's extremely difficult, which is why one so rarely sees good reference humor.

*I tend to suspect this habit became as widespread among geeks as a sort of shibboleth, so they could identify who, in meatspace, was available to natter with about their choice in media. Not that reference humor hasn't been around previously, but geeks have taken it to a super annoying level.