Like the companion cube sequence, this game first manipulates your emotions in a traditionally gamelike way, then mocks you for getting so emotional. It’s a funny idea, and also has a funny ending song in the Portal tradition, but the comedy works as well as it does because you probably feel momentarily pleased, then totally silly, after killing the Grinning Colossus. It takes the pattern of a modern boss fight, strips it down to the point of absurdity, and makes you play through the result. Kian Bashiri’s You Have To Burn the Rope parodies a different genre of games in as focused a manner as possible. There are two broad areas where games have so far been consistently successful at creating gamelike humor: genre parodies, and slapstick. (Another example is the scene in Dragon Age 2 where Varric takes some liberties with the narration.) It’s more common out in the experimental and indie world, where designers screw around with conventions as a general rule. This kind of specifically gamelike humor is rare in the AAA mainstream, but it’s not unheard of. The scene became an instant classic for good reason. That the designers and writers of Portal do so with such brutal efficiency is impressive. The whole scene toys with how easily and irrationally players get attached to things (and poorly drawn characters) in a game, so it’s necessary to create such an attachment in order to make fun of it. Here, the player’s actions are an essential part of the joke. There’s one exception to this: the companion cube sequence. It’s all funny, but it’s not funny in a way that only games can be. Take all of these away and the game plays pretty much the same. Portal is hilarious, but the comedy mostly comes from Ellen McLain’s excellent voiceover work, the graffiti you find in the world, and Jonathan Coulton’s end-credits song. The same comment could apply to Portal, which is rightfully held up as an exemplar of funny games. There’s nothing wrong with this, but it doesn’t advance the state of the art. As with a lot of important dramatic moments, most game comedy gets shuffled off to the cutscenes. Many games manage to pull off some character-based humor, but rarely in a way that involves the player. For my part, I can’t think of a game that has succeeded at doing this particular type of comedy. They had a rather high-profile failure recently with Duke Nukem Forever, which aimed to be funny in a pop-culture riffing, intentionally offensive kind of way, but was generally considered to have missed the mark. The issues with dramatic storytelling generate more commentary, but comedy is serious business, too.įairly or unfairly, games are so far not known for doing comedy very well. Just like drama, comedy depends on timing, internal logic, and empathy with characters – all things that pose challenges in game design. A similar set of problems are faced in games that go for a comic tone. Game writers are forever struggling with how to create suspense, emotional impact, and thematic consistency in games with grand epic storylines. Many aspects of drama are famously difficult to copy directly from other media to games.
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