Gamasutra - Features - "Funny, Me? On Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude and the Search for Humor in Gaming"

Funny, Me? On Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude and the Search for Humor in Gaming

Most games that seek to amuse rely on familiar gameplay mechanics with a healthy sprinkling of mini-cinemas and voice calls to provide comic relief (Simpsons Hit & Run for example). For Magna Cum Laude, it was always our intention that the game would be a "true comedy"; our vision points dictated humor first, gameplay second. We wanted our humor to take center stage, which meant a heavy reliance on dialog, but long cinemas can get awfully frustrating for gamers who wait impatiently for them to end, controller in hand, anxious to regain control of their destiny. There is also the problem of replayability. Typically most adventure games offered a linear story and puzzles with specific solutions. We play them every couple of years for old time's sake after enough time has passed to make them new again, but rarely do we play them over and over and again seeking fresh experiences- there are none.

Tom Smith, our Design Director, worked with the other project leads to come up with a solution that I suspect and hope will be built upon by similar games in the future. Instead of static dialog trees with limited options that invariably draw the same responses from NPCs, Tom turned speaking to other characters into a gameplay mechanic, one which allows you to control what comes out of Larry's mouth in real-time and offers a myriad of things for him to say at every point during an conversation.

The mechanic itself bears some explanation, because although we instantly fell in love with it as an unique way to turn passive dialog exchanges into gameplay, it also made our lives a living hell, greatly adding to the amount of dialog needed for our game (we ended up with over 90,000 words).

At the beginning of each designated "conversation game" (MCL has 49 of them), the user-interface prompts the player to navigate a small sperm through three lanes of traffic, each filled with special conversation icons. These icons, when hit, will cause Larry to say something either appropriate or inappropriate. Many of the things Larry says are concatenated together in "mad lib" fashion. For example, during one exchange with a belligerent arcade game, the player can guide the sperm towards one of three conversation icons, causing Larry to say ONE of the following: "That's right! You're scared! Scared because you're loosely based on a movie that stopped being cool in 1983!" OR "That's right! You're scared! Scared because you know you'll spend the rest of your life hanging around second-hand convenience stores like this one!" OR "I mean c'mon tell me. When's the last time a kid bothered Sweet Lou to break a buck around here huh? What maybe 1986?" Immediately afterwards, the sperm will be confronted with three more conversation icons, causing Larry to say ONE of the following upon impact: "I mean really. No one likes side scrollers anymore! They suck!" OR "You couldn't make money in a laundromat!" OR "I mean look at you! You've got stains on your screen, cigarette burns all over the place. You're a damn disgrace." In each case, any of the phrases chosen second can follow any of the phrases chosen first, and the entire exchange will always make sense. In addition, you could play through this part of the conversation three times and not hear Larry repeat himself.

It is worth noting that without CRI Middleware's ADX sound engine, this would have been very tricky to pull off. Timing, as they say, is everything, especially in a comedy. Although the phrases that comprised Larry's lines were written so as to end with natural pauses, the concatenation had to be perfect or our conversations would sound stilted, all humor lost. Critics have noted how relatively natural our dialog sounds.

We had successfully put our dialog center stage by making it interactive, as well as added replay value to the game, but doing so increased the difficulty involved in writing our scripts exponentially. So we began our first foray into writing a buttload of dialog for a comedy. Much blood, sweat, and tears were shed over the ensuing 18 months, which we now refer to as "wisdom"; some of which I offer you here free of charge so you will like me better.

Throughout the project it was very unclear what boundaries we could cross and still maintain a "Mature" rating. Lots had changed since Larry Laffer was on the scene, and because Magna Cum Laude is a PS2 and Xbox title, we not only needed to avoid an "Adults Only" rating but Sony and Microsoft would have to approve our game before it shipped for their consoles.

Rules regarding nudity are fairly straightforward. If you want a "Mature" rating, you cannot show full frontal nudity. Intercourse is out of the question, and breasts cannot be in the same camera shot for longer than nine seconds. Any form of nudity will get you banned from Wal-Mart and most likely Best Buy and Target as well. Dialog and adult situations, however, are another story…

Can a character talk about sex acts with animals? What about seeing someone use a glory hole? How about pantomiming sex acts or discussing the merits of doggie style versus the wheelbarrow position? All of these we did, and while most of it probably sounds more graphic than it really is, the fear always existed that we would push the game into dreaded "Adults Only" territory simply because of something we said, implied, or simulated. Unfortunately we had no idea where the line was, but we recognized that holding ourselves back because of it would be detrimental to our game. Subscribing to the theory of "the more freedom, the better", Tom gave us plenty of elbow room, encouraging us to write things even we could not believe would make it into a console game. For a safety net, we wrote alternate scenes, we had replacement dialog for every line in the game deemed a likely candidate for censorship. Most of it was never used, but the psychological freedom it gave was well worth the effort it took to write and record the "less offensive" lines of dialog.

Regardless of how talented your writers may be, they can't do it alone. Most are going to miss the mark more often than not, so how do you weed out the clunkers and keep what's left? When it comes to game design, most projects have a Lead Designer or Director who calls the shots and establishes a vision for the team. If Junior Designers stray from the path they are guided back toward the lead's way of doing things. The same system however, can be a recipe for disaster when it comes to evaluating comedy. Your Lead Designer may have excellent comedic instincts that reflect perfectly those of your target market, he/she may have a sense of humor nowhere near that of your target market or he/she may be somewhere in between. Regardless, letting one person be the filter through which all comedy is judged is dangerous. Your writers will find it very hard to be objective about their stuff, and having only one person be judge, jury, and executioner ties you to that person's sense of humor and increases the risk you will end up with crap that slips through the cracks or worse, end up with pure gold on the cutting room floor.

Early on in the writing process, we decided to abandon this method of judging our writing and opted instead for script meetings where our stuff would be tested in front of a cross-section of different personality types. We were lucky to have on the project many people we considered to be part of our target audience, and as often as three or more times a week we would gather these people in a conference room and Matt or I would perform for them. The goal was not to try and please every person in the room, but if the majority of the people laughed heartily the majority of the time, we knew we had a winner on our hands. Once a scene was deemed to have potential we would revise it as many times as was necessary, and each revision would be read in front of an "audience". This process yielded some remarkable results. There is a big difference between scenes that underwent this type of scrutiny and ones that didn't.

My experience on Magna Cum Laude has prompted me to do some research on how comedy writers of T.V. and film approach their craft. Among other things I wanted to know how they dealt with the stress of having their ego bruised when scenes they thought hilarious only twelve hours ago utterly flopped before their colleagues. I wanted to know how they dealt with feelings of possessiveness over characters or scenes that were handed off to other writers for revision. The more people I talked to about our experiences on MCL the more comforting it was to know that we were not alone. It is common knowledge that first-time comedy writers are especially sensitive to having their work rejected or altered (one Hollywood writer spoke of a colleague who pops a valium before every script review), and that while no writer can completely separate their ego from their work, the most effective comedy writers learn over time to develop the thick skin necessary to take things in stride.

We put a lot of pressure on ourselves to succeed, and this lead to more than a few moments that we would each like to forget (a broken chair at a focus testing facility comes to mind), but with each success came confidence, and with confidence the ability to fail with the same sense of humor in which we succeeded. Matt and I have learned to collaborate more and trust each other's instincts while respecting our differences of opinion. I still get nervous before pitching an idea for a scene or reading some dialog I've written to a group, but I don't live and die with the reaction I get. If something doesn't work, it can be fixed. If it can't it'll be abandoned or someone else will fix it. You'll have more failures than successes but eventually you'll hit on something that people like. Until then, don't take it personal, and don't get big headed when you do.

What is the final result of all this research, theory, mistakes, and hard work? While we lost some of the older Larry fans who missed the comedy stylings of Al Lowe, and while the final result did divide some critics (the humor was panned by Electronic Gaming Monthly and Official Xbox Magazine) the majority of reviews have been confirmation for us that we made the right decisions, at least with regard to humor. In particular, GameSpot, one of the more respected industry websites, had this to say: "Something that has impressed us about Magna Cum Laude thus far is just how funny it is. Leisure Suit Larry has always been ribald and humorous, but this game comes off as sharply written without being coarse or vulgar. It's almost outrageously hilarious at times, and the humor isn't always about sex..."

You can't please everyone when writing a comedy, and you shouldn't try. But as long as developers take care to find talented writers who can speak effectively to their audience and give them the freedom and support necessary to blossom creatively, there is no telling how far we can take this woefully underdeveloped genre.

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