IS HUMOR HARDER TO PULL OFF IN GAMES?

Anything that's translated from another language is going to have a really hard time pulling off humor.

Anything that's made by an amateur team consisting of two and a half unpaid hobbyists, none of whom are writers, is also going to have a really hard time pulling off humor.

If you get rid of those two obstacles, what you're left with are professional games made by English-speaking teams. When these games try to be funny, they succeed just as often as movies and TV shows. Which is to say, they still fail most of the time, but it's clearly not the medium's fault.

author=Pancaek
The only games I've played that have actually made made me laugh are the Portal series and the Fallen London series.

You should check out:

• Sam & Max series
• Monkey Island series
  
• Day of the Tentacle
  
• Actually let's just say basically the entire catalogue of 90s adventure games by Sierra and Lucasarts, many of which also have more recent sequels

For some reason comedy games just aren't much of a thing for major US developers though. Nobody is trying to make them in English except indies. I'm not sure why. Horror games are a huge thing, and is equally driven by timing, voice work, and player emotions, so I'm not sure what the difference is. Maybe horror games are just easier to make graphical assets for, because everything is supposed to be hard to see. But lots of Japanese games try to be comical - they just lose all the humor in the localization.

author=LockeZ
For some reason comedy games just aren't much of a thing for major US developers though. Nobody is trying to make them in English except indies. I'm not sure why. Horror games are a huge thing, and is equally driven by timing, voice work, and player emotions, so I'm not sure what the difference is. Maybe horror games are just easier to make graphical assets for, because everything is supposed to be hard to see. But lots of Japanese games try to be comical - they just lose all the humor in the localization.

There's a known audience for horror games. Big developers start hyperventilating at the thought of releasing anything that might not sell to the largest possible audience, which is anything that isn't already known to be popular.

That's nonsense. Books don't have voice acting. Comic strips don't have voice acting.

If there's any connection between games without voice acting and games that fail to be funny, it's just because almost all games from the pre-voice-acting era were A) made in Japan, and B) more or less devoid of story.

I don't think that's necessarily true, Rya, just that pure comedy games tend to be catered towards only one or two types of humour (usually the stupid-is-funny kind like South Park or Spongebob) and it doesn't work for everyone.

A lot of games, even serious ones, have humour sprinkled through them in parts and a lot of the time it works out fine because you've got a contrast between serious moments and lighter ones, so the lighter ones tend to shine a bit more and seem more unexpected (one aspect of comedy is how easily you can guess the 'punchline'. The more unexpected, even in stupid-is-funny comedy, the better the 'joke'). When every joke is fighting against a ton of other jokes, it tends to overdo it.

Take Monty Python, classic comedy at it's finest. It's often very hard to tell where the joke is going because it's completely off the wall. They build up towards one thing and lead towards another pretty often. And it works. That's why they're so quotable - because a lot of their humour is funny, silly and unexpected, thus sticks in the mind.

There's also the aspect of not really remembering many jokes even though they made you smile. They don't stick in your mind much during a more serious game, even if you were laughing at them at the time. Unless they're very very good and memorable, they get lost in the rest of the story/gameplay/etc.

And let's face it - there's precious little out there that will literally have you laughing til you bust a gut. Most of the time you give a snerk or chuckle. There are very few occasions where something really tickles your funny bone and sets you laughing, and that's the difference between someone who is a truly funny writer versus someone who can write a few humorous bits here and there.

Games are perfectly fine media-wise for making comedy, but it's a lot harder to pull off a pure comedy game than a pure comedy movie, mainly because the game doesn't have actors who can mess around with expressions, body language, speech and tone in order to give a -performance-, whilst a movie can. But it is still perfectly possible to create comedic games that makes the audience give sensible chuckles.




Also, I'm moving the thread to Game D&D, where it should have been. XD

author=Pancaek
I can think of countless games that attempt to have a sense of humor, yet I can only think of two or three games that actually manage to make me laugh. Is my sense of humor just incredibly dry, or are jokes inherently harder to pull off in video games? If the latter, why? I'm genuinely curious about this.

Dude i cant help but recommend you to play Madieval Cop, another rpg maker game but also runs on browser! ill send you an direct link to it, just 4 minutes into it will make you just simply CRACK UP
http://www.kongregate.com/games/VasantJ/medieval-cop-dregg-me-to-hell

Oh shit you guys, LockeZ is Locke again. Lock your doors.

Timing is one thing that can be funny if subverted, yes, though the situation itself being unexpected can also be a source of humour.

You can do anything you want in a game, but it helps to actually be good at it first.

author=LockeZ

author=Pancaek
The only games I've played that have actually made made me laugh are the Portal series and the Fallen London series.

You should check out:

• Sam & Max series
• Monkey Island series
• Day of the Tentacle
• Actually let's just say basically the entire catalogue of 90s adventure games by Sierra and Lucasarts, many of which also have more recent sequels

What makes many of these Lucasarts games funny even today is that their humor is timeless, and written in a way that has barely aged since the 90s. What's odd, though, is that it's hard to predict whether or not a style of humor will be remembered as timeless genius, or remembered as "a product of its time."

Portal is an interesting example in that it was hilarious when it came out, but it went through the meme grinder and has since become cringe. Kind of the same effect that Invader Zim had on me in that I thought it was the best thing ever when I was in high school but can barely get through an episode today.

It's tough to predict how humor is going to age, because we don't know what kinds of things in the future will alter what we perceive to be funny. And it feels like the best way to go about it is not to rely on tropes or jokes that are only popular and relevant in the present.