The idea of comedy games has fascinated me for some time, likely due to the fact that,
when compared to, say, action or horror, it’s a genre that’s remained remarkably underexplored
in the interactive realm.
It’s easy to create action by putting a gun in a player’s
hand and telling them to shoot things; you can manufacture an omnipresent feeling of
dread even when you’re not directly scaring a player.
Telling an effective joke, however, is difficult to pull off in any medium.
It relies so heavily on being able to specifically direct an audience’s attention, with a precision
of timing that you simply can’t guarantee when, in games, you hand control of said joke
over to your audience.
Look up any list of the “most comedic video games” and you’ll see a lot of the usual
suspects—the searing satire of Grand Theft Auto or the passive aggression of GLaDOS in
Portal, for example.
Outside of a few noteworthy cases though, regardless of your thoughts on how funny these individual
games actually are, what sets them apart as comic often has little to do with how you
play them.
These are games with comedic writing, decorating otherwise unrelated game mechanics.
But what about games that specifically set out to be funny, whose moment-to-moment interactions
hinge on trying to make you laugh above all else?
In most cases of late, the more prominent examples of this have involved an examination
of the wackiness inherent to controlling a game itself—asking why players adhere to
arbitrary objectives, poking fun at the way things like moving or picking up an object
are taken for granted as a simple button press, or introducing an element of anarchic chaos
to mundane situations.
Games like Surgeon Simulator and Goat Simulator offer countless opportunities for absurd humour
as you wreak unintentional havoc on a quiet town, a carnival, a desk or someone’s brain.
That said, the havoc is, indeed, unintentional.
The immediate comedy of these games largely spawns from the difficulty most people will
face trying to play them quote-unquote “correctly”.
They go so far in making simple tasks as difficult as possible that part of their charm lies
in how frustrating they can often be.
To write them off as bad games or simply random for the sake of it does a disservice, I believe,
to just how fine-tuned Surgeon Simulator’s ridiculous controls actually are, or the way Goat Simulator
pokes fun at the eerie, uncanny worlds found in more “conventional” simulator games,
but the player isn’t so much enacting the punchline of a joke here as they are kind of the punchline
itself.
The fact that you’re playing this game at all, that you’re directly fighting the fundamentals
of control in order to… get a better score, I guess, is part of the joke.
You might see other visual gags around, you may enter the offices of the developer for
example, but the extent of your ability to create comedy is… the extent of your ability
to flail around.
And then, on the other end of the spectrum, you have a game like Jazzpunk, which flat
out markets itself as comedy.
Since its release in 2014 it remains a really neat experiment in favouring jokes rather
than mechanical engagement, all with an endlessly charming aesthetic.
But that’s just it though—whether the end result of your interactions is setting
off a Rube Goldberg-esque series of events leading to a punchline or simply pushing someone
off a bridge, as far as your agency over it all goes, you’re mainly just “pressing
A to see joke”.
Your opinion of Jazzpunk, then, is likely going to come down purely to how funny you
think said jokes are because… that’s kind of it.
So we have full-blown anarchic absurdity on one side and we have games where you merely
turn the joke crank on the other, but is it beyond the interactive medium to allow players
to actually tell those jokes?
To set up and execute on their own punchlines through mechanics and systems?
Well, enter Untitled Goose Game—a release that might be the purest embodiment of a “comedy
game” I’ve yet seen.
For a start, its premise is funny for sure—for an Australian game it captures that particularly
British sentiment of the stiff upper lip extremely well; that idea of pretending nothing is wrong
in order to avoid the social awkwardness of confronting the very obvious issue at hand.
What’s great about Goose Game, though, is that it doesn’t need to spew jokes at you
in order to convey this—instead the game uses its systems, making it your goal to organically
create said awkwardness.
Not outright havoc, not violence or death and destruction, but awkwardness specifically—the game presents
a series of clockwork systems, and through simple stealth mechanics combined with low-stakes
scenarios, encourages you to find ways to disrupt the natural flow of things; in order
to ruin someone’s day just a bit.
And it all starts with the simple fact that every action has a reaction.
Outside of the differing severity with which each NPC treats the goose’s presence, their
routines come down to one simple trait—if they notice something is out of place on their
route around any given area, they attempt to put it back.
It’s a really simple thing but consider that purely by virtue of getting a reaction
out of people, your actions suddenly carry much more weight than causing untold destruction
and having no one care.
Further, where the humour of a similarly systems-driven game like Hitman is perhaps an unexpected
side-effect of a game that has you trying to Hitman someone while avoiding being Hitman’d
yourself, Goose Game has no such failure state.
Instead, when you get caught, you drop the item you’re holding and flap around wildly
as a goose is wont to do.
This lack of failure state not only reduces frustration—all in your Goose feels incredibly
satisfying to control, which is more than can be said for other animal-based absurdity
generators—but it also reduces the stakes of any encounter to something more relatable,
more in line with the overall mischievous tone of the game at large.
It all serves to build the character of this world without dialogue; painting the goose
as a petulant child unwilling to take no for an answer rather than some kind of powerhouse,
and the villagers as mildly irritated as opposed to cowering in fear (well, most of the time
anyway).
The villagers just want to keep this world prim and proper; which gives you all the more
reason to cause a mess.
You may just be untying someone’s shoe or misplacing their possessions, but that’s
all you need to do to make an impact here.
It’s a stealth game where the supposed “enemies” are very much aware of your presence and the
inevitability of incoming inconvenience.
And with this, the stage is set for you to plan and execute your own hijinks.
After getting the gardener to open the gate and repeating the same routine of moving objects
around, being chased and having said objects taken away from you, you might notice that
the keys to the gate are an item like any other you can stuff in your beak, and that
the gate itself is an interactable part of the environment.
You lure him out, steal his keys and close the gate behind him, causing uninterrupted
chaos while he watches on powerlessly.
It’s a satisfying realisation to act upon, but it’s also just a solid gag—gardener
goes to sort a problem and, thanks to you, ends up making things so much worse.
It’s a scenario made all the funnier when you realise that you’re also stuck without
him, so, you coyly stick your head through the gate, whereupon he snatches his stolen
keys before grumpily marching in as you nonchalantly walk beside him like nothing has happened;
the goose’s blank expression very much painting them as some kind of pet who stares you coldly
in the eyes as they slowly push a fragile object off a high shelf.
You strut along, confident in the knowledge there’s nothing this person can do to get
rid of you, and that he, like all the villagers you’ll come to terrorise, is resigned to
their life in Goose Hell.
It’s a sequence of experimentation and discovery found across all the areas of the game, where
you might wonder what would happen if you put someone else’s stuff on the shop podium,
knowing how aggressive the shopkeeper is based on how she reacts to you.
What would happen if I brought an item from another area, for example?
That, or you consider how the old man might return an object you’ve dragged through
from the neighbour’s garden when the only passage between the two houses is conveniently
goose-sized.
The game never guides you towards any of this stuff; it merely provides you the pieces and
invites you to put them together how you see fit—fully prepared to provide you with some
kind of payoff for your poking and prodding, turning every object you come across, every
move you make into a potential joke—and it’s all the more rewarding and crucially
funny for the fact that you stumbled across it all yourself.
And what’s more, you still have that same style of video game wackiness you get from
more outwardly absurd titles.
The complex series of machinations leading to the delightfully wicked punchline of a
kid losing his glasses is made all the crueller by the fact that that kid will forever be
searching for those glasses unless you choose to close that systemic loop.
It’s yet another layer of control placed in the player’s hands about just how much
they want to toy with the villagers—drawing comedy not only from the gag itself, but also
the fact that it’s being controlled in a video game.
But it’s not just the systems themselves that make Goose Game a fantastic example of
a primarily comedic video game—alongside the deeply expressive animations conveying
character without words and really selling the reactions of your victims, Goose Game’s
soundtrack is arguably the glue that binds everything else about the game’s humour
together.
See, as opposed to a traditional score, the game takes disparate fragments of the piece
Minstrels from Debussy’s Preludes—itself a kind of patchwork of jaunty staccato rhythms
and jarring modulations—and uses it to accentuate your movement.
Tiptoeing around and scouting the area will result in plinkety arpeggios; preparing to
strike will see the music swell discordantly until you finally make your move and a cartoonish
melody explodes as you tumble triumphantly away.
It’s like your every step is being uniquely soundtracked by Carl Stalling or something—like
you’re the central character in a Looney Tune of your own creation.
Music isn’t a constant underlying bed here, it’s not an afterthought; it’s dynamic,
with periods of silence, build-ups and releasing of tension reflecting your precise movements.
The music, like seemingly everything else about Goose Game’s aesthetic and technical
workings, is a mechanic in service of amplifying your own comedy.
Of course, a video like this is barely going to scratch the surface of what a “comedy
game” entails.
There are plenty of other games that experiment with comedic mechanics and there’s no way
I could cover all of it.
I’m not saying you should take my reading as gospel; I’m not saying that any of the
games I’ve mentioned are bad because they don’t do exactly what Goose Game does.
I’m just saying that when I envision what a comedy game could be, a complicated joke
that requires a mere button press to get the gears turning is always going to pale in comparison
to a simple joke that players are allowed to control the precise workings of.
Or we could just disregard all of this and think that it’s kind of just funny to flap
around as a wee goose—you know, that’s fine too.
So I hope you enjoyed my piece on comedy games.
I’d just like to take this opportunity to thank my patrons who are the ones that make
videos like this possible; you can really help out (and join the names on screen) by
heading to patreon.com/writingongames and pledging even a dollar or two.
You ensure I can keep doing this and for that I cannot thank you enough.
Special thanks go to Mark B Writing, Sivaas, Artjom Vitsjuk, Rob, Bryce Snyder, Tommy Carver-Chaplin,
David Bjork, Lucas, Hibiya Mori, Dallas Kean, William Fielder, my dad, Ali Almuhanna, Timothy
Jones, Spike Jones, TheNamlessGuy, Ham Migas, Samuel Pickens, Shardfire, Ana Pimentel, Jessie
Rine, Justins Holderness, Nicolas Ross and Charlie Yang.
And with that, this has been another episode of Writing on Games.
Thank you very much for watching and I’ll see you next time.