[INTRO MUSIC]
We've been asked many of times why there seem to be so few comedic games out there,
or at least fewer than there once were
So today we would like to tackle the question of why comedy is so hard in games
But one disclaimer before we begin though,
One of the few types of games James hasn't worked on,
is one in which humor was the principal method of engagement.
This is something he's discussed a great deal with other designers
but, from a practical standpoint, this is all just speculation on our end.
As a general rule, comedy is pretty challenging no matter what medium you're working in.
The first problem with building a humor-driven game is that
comedy, as we traditionally understand it, is all about timing.
Timing is something that can be tightly controlled in the film, TV show, or the stand-up routine.
But, in an interactive environment, timing is something designers have no control over.
If you look at the early games of your,
the early adventure games which were principally based on humor.
you'll find that a lot of that humor was contained in
moments more akin to traditional media.
In these adventure games, you'd finally find what do-dad to use your sprocket on,
and most of the time, the gag was something visual that would happen.
Something you had no control over.
It was almost like a cutscene that hammered home why using that item on that thing was funny,
only it happened in-engine and usually only took 3-5 seconds.
The other place that old adventure games found much of their humor, was through dialogue.
Which, again, they could do much more to control the pacing of.
And in fact, even if you look at most games intended to be humorous today, this is still the case.
Take Portal.
The vast majority of Portal's humor comes from a very carefully scripted and timed voice-over.
A voice-over that you can't affect or interact with.
A voice-over, where, at most, you can control when it triggers.
But your actions can't fundamentally change it in any way.
So alright games can imitate comedy techniques from other media by
keeping it out of the player's direct control
but is there someway that we can rethink comedy for the interactive age.
Truth be told I'm not sure but I think a clue lies where we find unintended humor in a games we already play.
Have you every watched someone who doesn't have much GTA experience
try to get a car out of a tight parking spot
It's hilarious
Or what about someone doing that terribly sadistic
Kill, revive cycle, on civillian and infamous
It's disturbing, but also absurd
Or how about, grappling hooking a car to an aeroplane. In Just Cause
Heck, Just Cause is littered with comedy like that.
Comedy by choice is a vector of design that fascinated me.
Giving the player the tools
to enact real time interactive comedy. It's something thats totally underexplored in our industry
and yet, thats where some of the most engaging, satisfying
and certainly most hilarious moments in games come from.
What if we could actually harness that?
What if we actually designed a game around that?
Where would we begin?
Well i won't claim to be a comedian, nor by any means an expert on humour. But,
in the broadest sense, i'd say that a lot of comedy falls into two catagories.
Satire, and the absurd.
Satire for our purposes, being anything that highlights the frustrations and consistencies
or hypocricsies, in everday life
by taking them to the extreme.
The absurd on the other hand, is just taking things we know from everday life
and offering them to us in a way that breaks our understanding on how they should work.
of the two, the absurd seems as though it's easier to deliver as a player driven form of comedy.
It's not that satire is impossible. In fact, the Saints Row series is almost entirely satire.
The problem though, is that
most of the interactive satire in Saints Row,
the Satire that's not delivered to you in a cutscene, voiceover or static props
Is almost always about lampooning other games.
Games are very good at presenting us the frustrations, inconsitencies and hypocrisies of games.
Because there something the audience is very familar with in the first place,
and will be very tuned into as they play.
But to make the player enact
satire on a broader scale, may require that the player understands how to approach these games
in a way that i'm not sure we've reached yet.
The absurd on the other hand is something that players reach for all the time.
With just a few quick YouTube searches, you'll find
Assassin's Creed guards humping walls with the player joinging in.
You'll witness the most ludacris kills in Battlefield.
You'll watch Fifa glitches that players milk for all their worth.
Taking things to the point that they break out understanding for how they work
is something we already love in games.
Whether it be Day Z party buses,
or even just the concept of rocket jumping,
players seem to gravitate towards finding the places where they can flip
the common understanding of a game, on its head.
So how do we build a game, around the possibility of creating the absurd?
Well that is an incredibly tough question. But
were it me, i'd say it would require two main elements,
first you'd need a lot of freedom.
You see the players exploiting the absurities inherent in virtual physics systems all the time.
Because systems like that are so vast they inherently allow for ludicris edge cases.
The broader you can make your systems,
while still mimicing, on the surface things we can understand.
The more opportunities you provide players to craft the hilariously absurd.
Second you must embrace things going wrong.
Were it me, were was creating this type of game, I'd actually intentionally throw in bugs.
I'd randomly but very rarely
allow standard behaviour to just go haywire.
1 out of 1000 times
I'd have a car, which normally drives down the road in a straight line. Obeying all the trafic laws.
Pick random angles to turn every few seconds,
and have it turn the opposite direction if it hit anything. So
on occasion, you'd get a crazy car veering down the street.
I'd periodicly assign the wrong animations
to skeletons, or have guns that randomly choose a physics object, to shoot instead of bullets.
I mean imagine finding the rifle that shoots cows.
Or the machine gun that limply mimics a garden hose.
Creating this chaos in an otherwise mostly sane world.
Will allow your player to find humour in ways you couldn't possibly imagine.
It sets the stage and lets them dictate the comedy in real time.
Making it truely interactive in a way that voiceover, or a cutscene, simply can't be.
But with those thoughts I will leave you to ponder the problem of comedy.
This is just the barest, most surface exploration.
It's something that games have to delve much deeper into and something which
quite sincerely we are not quallified to talk about.
But in the end if I can say one thing for certain, it would be this.
If we can make comedy interactive, rather than simply a passive part of an interactive experiance.
We'll open whole new doors on design, and hopefully create thousands of hours of laughter the world over.
See you next week!