Ask someone to give you the name of a game that's made them laugh and undoubtedly they'll mention The Secret of Monkey Island or Psychonauts. Ron Gilbert and Tim Schaffer, geniuses of the adventure game genre, have made their mark with clever writing, ridiculous scenarios, and over-the-top characters. But while the writing is good, the gameplay of graphical adventure games has marginalized them. These kinds of adventure games have been criticized for their nonsensical puzzles (combine the coconut and door handle to open the wall safe) and heavy emphasis on textual material. And though they have seen a resurgence in the past few years, the genre remained unpopular for many years after its PC heyday.
I recently played 3D Dot Game Heroes, a game from From Software that professes to be a humorous take on the original 1986 The Legend of Zelda. The game pokes fun at action-adventure and role-playing games while supporting itself on its audiences' nostalgia. Yet, rather than a reimagined trip down memory lane, I found the game patronizing. Its target audience is the kind of videogame player I tend to avoid: one who thinks the obscurer the reference the better, the more absurd the scenario the funnier. It's easy enough to parody an established genre, but it's difficult to meaningfully contribute to it in the process. So though I enjoyed the over-the-top giant sword wielded by the hero because it made it easier to proceed through the game, I was less amused by one of the upgraded swords that turned my weapon into a fish.
Humor in games is a difficult subject. Our experience of humor is highly verbal/textual: jokes, anecdotes, puns, and wisecracks are told, heard, written, and read. This makes it easy to have funny dialogue and humorous writing in print, television, radio, and film. When words aren't involved, we get sight-gags based on the interaction of people and objects, physical comedy that allows the body to express humor, and fixed and moving images composed of unusual juxtapositions. The textual/visual have been the most common forms of comedy taken on by games: absurd scenarios, exaggerated characters, odd locations, funny descriptions, humorous conversations in cut-scenes, and the like.
We snicker when we teach one of the residents of our Animal Crossing town an inappropriate word and it propogates throughout the village. We chuckle when the description of crazed maniac Nine-Toes in Borderlands notes "also, he has three balls." We're amused by the oversized enemies of Giant Land in Super Mario Bros. 3. We laugh at the ridiculous lines delivered by a voice actor as Haggard in Battlefield Bad Company 2. But it's much more difficult to write funny code than funny words. Does a game like Bad Company 2 suffer as a result? Hardly. It is a well made modern day first person shooter that is set apart by its tone. It's a game that is funny, but it's not a funny game.
What, then, might we imagine a funny game look like? The humor should result from interacting with the game's mechanics. One way we do this is through direct manipulation of objects on the screen with our controller. In the Super Nintendo game EarthBound, mushroom enemies have a chance of emitting spores that 'mushroomizes' the characters. If the player is mushroomized, not only might they be confused and attack a fellow party member, but on the world map the control scheme is inverted: press right to walk left, press up to move down. If the player is not frustratingly trying to escape a purusing enemy, the disorientating controls might elicit a chuckle: an accomplishable task rendered temporarily difficult even though no complexity as been added.
Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island accomplishes something similar, as related to controls and the level design. Stage 1-7 "Touch Fuzzy, Get Dizzy" uses floating balls of fuzz, which, if the player touches, sets Yoshi's head spinning. The once horizontal ground turns into a waving unstable line, the music is modified to different speeds and tones, and a wide-eyed Yoshi experiences unusual momentum shifts as he attempts to tread the landscape.
Another instance of player control and mind-altering substances is found in Grand Theft Auto IV. The player can choose to visit a bar with one of Niko's buddies and down a few pints. The game then simulates being drunk. The player must carefully control Niko's movement to avoid him falling down. And don't even think about performing grand theft auto: the changed reaction times behind the wheel serve as a fair warning about the dangers of drinking and driving (a lesson I learned previously trying to play Forza 2 with a few gin and tonics in my system). Though drunk driving is no laughing matter, GTA IV exhibits the humor of being unable to accomplish simple tasks through the manipulation of control input.
Humorous processes are more difficult to enact than humorous controls. What, exactly, makes a process humorous? Though they seem natural in their telling, jokes are actually procedures. They contain an initial and final state: the setup and the punchline. A successful joke has a payoff supported by a premise that permits a result through transformation. "To get to the other side" is produced by combining the question "why did the chicken cross the road?" with the expectation of an absurd answer that is then subverted by a literal answer. One could procedurally generate knock-knock jokes if given the right parameters. But our videogame comedy need not be verbal or textual.
Designers work hard to build games that engage the player in a fantasy world, a world in which we hold the internal logic of the game to be true and natural. But absurdity resides under this belief. When Kratos climbed atop the hydra in the opening battle of God of War, we didn't laugh at the ridiculous combination of buttons the game prompted us to press. Instead, we conceded that in a game world this is perfectly acceptable. Yet, rapidly mashing the A button to break away from the death grip of a zombie lusting for brains is entirely unnatural.
Sure, flicking the analog stick side-to-side perhaps better maps to the motions of shaking of the undead, but when we stop to consider it, games ask us to do strange things. Motion control based games, such as those on the Nintendo Wii, Microsoft Kinect, and PlayStation Move ask us to even more embarrassing things. Videogames had, for a brief period, turned play into a solitary and reserved activity. But play has traditionally been enacted in the world with other people. So during the transition period before (and if) motion games become commonplace, we will continue to laugh at ourselves and our friends as Dance Central asks us to strike a pose, as New Super Mario Bros. Wii has us waggle our controller to float along in a bubble, and as Mad World requires an absurd set of exaggerated gestures to punch, grab, and throw our enemies against walls of spikes. Even Saturday Night Live has pointed out how ridiculous motion controls make us look.
We laugh at the unexpected, so why not build puzzles that do just that? For example, we have an expectation in games that a sealed door can be opened by an elaborate series of movements: Link must push the correct blocks into the correct locations to progress to the next room in the dungeon. But what if after solving the puzzle the door remains closed, and only upon walking up to it and turning the knob does it open? (This has probably been done, though I have not personally encountered it). Doing so would parody the mechanics of games rather than the textual material.
Ian Bogost's recent Facebook game Cow Clicker has also taken to parodying the mechanics of games like Farmville. Cow Clicker takes the interaction between Farmville and player to the extreme: you click on things for the sake of clicking on things. Clicking in Cow Clicker doesn't map to planting, building, or harvesting. Every six hours the player is allowed to click on a cow, which is then counted as a click. Clicks earn 'mooney' and can be spent on other cows to click on. It asks the player to consider the absurdity of Farmville's demands. An absurdity that is, in and of itself, humorous.
Consider this article a challenge to the game design community: rather that rely on textual and visual material for humor, explore instead the potentials of process and mechanic based humor.
