[Spry Fox's (Triple Town) Dan Cook argues there are plenty of humorous games out there. Oh, and did you hear the one about the two hunters who were out in the woods...? (Reprinted with permission)]
Much of humor comes from the unexpected -- a twist, an insightful observation, a new/odd perspective. Consider the following two recent theories of humor:
- Indiana University researcher Matthew Hurley suggests that humor is an evolved response that helps up rectify gaps between our current mental models of the world and reality.
- University of Colorado professor Pete McGraw's research suggests that humor involves "benign violations" of expectations. We laugh when we can safely fix Hurley's gaps in our mental models.
This safe updating of mental models ties in rather neatly with Raph Koster's theories of fun the brain's reaction to mastery. Both the theories of humor and theories of games involve an "A-ha" moment and as such it would seem that humor might be a rich topic for whole categories of games.
Yet a common lament is that there are so few funny games.
Humor through storytelling
Dig into the lament a little further and it is specifically focused on a lack of humorous content in the form of funny settings, writing, dialog and visual jokes. "Why can't there be more funny games?" is actually someone saying "Why can't there be more games with humorous writing and cut scenes like in a funny adventure game like Monkey Island?"
This "humor-through-storytelling" is what modern audiences know and identify as the type of media that creative people create when they try to make others laugh. It pervades our culture in everything from stand-up comics to viral email jokes to television to cute sayings on birthday cards. Humor is defined, shared and critiqued in our mass media culture as a prepackaged joke.
From a game creator's perspective there are certain pros and cons to this class of content.
Pros
- Easily produced in small quantities. It is relatively easy to come up with a joke or two.
- A ready audience that enjoys and understands how to consume "humor-through-storytelling."
Cons
- From a game design perspective, a joke is consumable content much like a puzzle. You pass through the loop a single time and then the insight contained within is mastered. Once you've heard the joke, it is less humorous the next time around.
- Expensive in large quantities. Unlike an algorithmic system like Tetris or Bejeweled, the cost of producing your hundredth hour of jokes is just as expensive as your first.
- Jokes are rarely integrated with gameplay. An investment in disposable content often (though not always) means a reduction in the tuning and improving the interactive systems of the game.
Humor through mechanics
However, not all laughter within games is based of prepackaged jokes. The player's interactions with the mechanical systems of the game also can evoke laughter. This still drives the desired results, but the designer must use very different tools.
Consider the laughter that occurs in a friendly game of Scrabble or Spin the Bottle. The chuckles that occur are just as honest as those that come about when listening to a stand-up comic, but the means of creating the insights are different. Game are unique in their ability to set up systematic, repeatable opportunities to create and confront mental models. Specifically in multiplayer games, the rules of the game often deliberately encourage players to create their own time, place and group specific jokes.
Pros
- "Humor-through-mechanics," when properly executed, can create evergreen humor. Sticking a knock-knock joke into the middle of Tetris does little to improve it over the long term, though it does have some novelty humor. Asking players to play Tetris with the shapes of their bodies in a party setting is likely funny many times over.
- Builds stronger relationships between participants. When you are in a group that engages in a friendly game, you undergo a process of forming social norms. You find out who is reliable, what makes people nervous and what is acceptable behavior to the group as a whole. Laughter comes from the constant updating of your mental models of how other people should and do act in the group. In the best games, you come out with mental models of others that you are more likely to trust. And in turn, you may trust the other players just a little bit more.
- There are many folk and board games that use humor-through-mechanics. This is a rich treasure trove of proven mechanics that we can mine when creating computer games.
Cons
- Humor-through-mechanics is hard to talk about. Such humor exists within the magic circle of the game and as such is often difficult to talk about or transfer to others. There's a ritual that occurs at most game conferences in which friends play a mobsters boardgame and then when someone loses a character, the entire table yells "He frickin' dies!" in their best Chicago accent.
There's a glimmer of humor in retelling the story. However the actual game (complete with the appropriately Steve-esque GMing) lets you be there, as a participating member of that bizarre microculture. You don't merely laugh at the joke, because to a large degree, in a humorous game you are the joke. We are trained to communicate through mass media, and game humor is inherently intimate and personal, not easily communicated for the benefit of others.
Predictions
Neither humor-through-mechanics nor humor-through-storytelling is in anyway superior to the other. However, due to structural difference in how they are crafted and consumed, we'd expect to find each technique to find its own distinct sweet spot in the landscape of game design.
1) Traditional consumable humor is most likely to be found in games that make heavy use of traditional consumable evocative content. So it makes complete sense that the most common uses of humorous content would involve the following:
- Puzzle-style adventure games
- Cutscenes
- Micro moments of feedback (a bird hitting a pig...hilarious the first time around)
2) There are many other mechanisms for generating laughter in games that are not traditionally recognizable as "humor." Instead, they are laughter-generating systems. Some examples might be the game of spin the bottle played by teenagers. Or Twister, which generates a steady stream of hilarious insights via a systematic exploration of personal spec. Or Pictionary, where ambiguity due to lack of skill creates "A-ha" moments.
3) There is little language for talking about humor-generating systems because their output is so heavily localized and ephemeral. Bad jokes about mobsters don't survive their conversion into consumable media. Until very recently, we lacked the tools for transferring and selling social systems. To a large degree, we still lack the language or interest.
Until there is a broad recognition that there is such a thing as humor-though-mechanics, the lament that there are so few funny games will continue to be mindlessly and incorrectly repeated. Funny games exist. We just need to stop insisting they must look like Monkey Island and start realizing they can look a lot more like friends playing a game and laughing together.
Humorous games that rely primarily on mechanics (and people!)
- Twister
- Magicka
- Transformice
- Two-player Lemmings
- Spin the Bottle
- Most drinking games
World's funniest joke (according to American men)
Two hunters are out in the woods when one of them collapses. He doesn't seem to be breathing and his eyes are glazed. The other guy takes out his phone and calls the emergency services.
He gasps: "My friend is dead! What can I do?" The operator says: "Calm down, I can help. First, let's make sure he's dead." There is a silence, then a gunshot is heard. Back on the phone, the guy says: "OK, now what?"
One comment is that all given examples of "humor-through-mechanics" rely heavily on social interaction: of course we can only agree that most social games naturally have a potential for humor, but I think a good gameplay can do more than just providing funny situations for players to interact. Here are some examples:
- When you throw things around or destroy things with magic in Black & White (sadistic laughter counts as laughter!)
- The awesome replay feature from Super Meat Boy, which displays at the same time all of the attempts to finish a level: especially fun after a hard stage where you died 30 times before finishing it
- Most of Portal 1 - While the 2nd episode relies much more on story-telling, most levels of the first game can get you at least a smile when discovering a new game mechanic... Or even when just having fun with portals, like with infinite falling loops.
I'll give a try at adapting the researcher's quote for game humor: "Humor based on game mechanics is an evolved response that helps up rectify gaps between our current mental model of a gameplay and its capabilities".
I'm glad you mentioned Magicka. I think the key to its (mechanical) humor is the unintentional effects of spell combinations. Friendly fire, beam crossing, and the fact that a mistake is likely to kill you along with your partners, somehow produces humor. I don't think it would be funny if your mistakes only hurt your partner or if the results were intentional: example: shooting someone in the back in Left 4 Dead isn't funny at all.
So I guess the formula boils down to, unintentional effects plus shared consequences. Very interesting.
I'd say catastrophic consequences, the same action flick satire of everything exploding with no reason, the chain event of falling desks in the library.
I'm thinking and discussing a lot about that topic lately.
One of the best excamples for humor through mechanics I can think of would be the 2D Plattformer "Spelunky" by Derek Yu. It's randomly generated levels are able to create unique funny and unexpected situations (chain reactions, loosing control and getting killed in a fancy way or surviving in situations you expect your character to die), until the player learned and mastered all the different mechanics.
"The binding of Isaac" by Edmund McMillen would also be a good excample, even though the suprise elements in this game (at least in my opinion) don't line up as well as in Spelunky. But it's a very good game anyway.
Also, "Dwarf Fortress" by Tarn and Zach Adams often created intresting and funny situations, maybe the funniest and most intresting (at least the "deepest") situations i've ever experienced in a video game. But I think a lot of roguelikes are able to create such kind of humor (Minecraft also was very funny sometimes. It's a little bit like Dwarf Fortress but much simpler...)
I also like the quote "...humor is an evolved response that helps up rectify gaps between our current mental model of a gameplay and its capabilities" a lot. It gives me a completely new point of view on that topic. I'm going to read more about it.
The reasons that you say Spelunky is funny are very similar to the reasons that I think the 2D Worms games are so funny. Some of it is deliberately funny, like flying sheep in superhero capes or concrete donkeys, but most of the humour comes from a combination of the game's physics model and bad aim on the part of players. It's hard not to laugh when you throw a grenade to deal the last few damage to an opponent's worm, only to mis-judge your aim and have the grenade land right beside an explodable barrel in between two of your own worms, killing them by sending them flying off the level. I think that's one of the things that makes Worms a game that's fun to play even when you're losing - something funny happens almost every game.
Ragdoll physics have a high possibility for mechanics based humor. This can be a bad thing if the game is trying to be serious or dark (Demon's Souls) but quite funny otherwise (launching a dead enemy 100 feet up into the air in Titan Quest for example).
I alaways enjoyed playing Halo because of it's physics engine. You can't help laughing when you finally shoot that banshee out of the sky, only to watch in horror as the wreckage slams to the ground on top of your friend's head. Not to mention getting killed by a grenade propelled traffic cone.
Space Alert is mechanically hilarious is a very intentional way—both the panic it induces and the way that discovering what catastrophes that panic caused is done entirely retrospectively–which is set up nicely (if a bit ham-handedly) by the satirical, Starship Troopers-meets-Paranoia tone of the training manual.
Paranoia : table-top RPG with a seriously funny theme, brilliantly absurd situations and settings that leave room for the player to invent their own absurd behavior. If anyone is unfamiliar, highly recommended. Thanks for mentioning, Jesse.
I personally think humor should come in small doses. I started to cringe during Sam & Max episodes waiting for the inevitable joke every time I clicked on an object. That doesn't mean I don't think it has it's place in games and I mean the story telling kind. There are plenty of places authors could let off a little steam by adding some humor in the dialog and it would be appreciated by game fans, I'm sure. Especially because so many games are so dark and overly serious. Young Frankenstein was one of the funniest movies ever done in my mind.
"Indiana University researcher Matthew Hurley suggests that humor is an evolved response that helps up rectify gaps between our current mental models of the world and reality."
"humor involves "benign violations" of expectations."
--
The above theory descriptions just dont feel right to me (*ahem* although I haven't bothered to read their research). They seem to be answering "what do we find funny" as opposed to "what is humor."
There's just so many examples of humor that have nothing to do with gaps in mental models or violations of expectations. If a person slips on a patch of ice your first reaction may be "Oh my are you alright?" And as soon as you see they are, you laugh (in a genuine way, not a sneering one). It is a way communicating to them "Don't be alarmed. Everything is alright. I'm not going to take advantage of you while you're in a vulnerable position."
Humor is a way of communicating peace, affinity, good intentions, warmth and safety. By expressing levity you are telling the audience it's ok to relax, let your guard down, unwind and relieve stress. Humor affirms friendship or fellowship. Through it, you take a step towards developing a more intimate relationship with the audience. Humor can welcome a player deeper into the game. Humor can help round out your game's personality and make everything feel really polished. I think this is important to understand because it answers WHY should we care about having humor in our games beyond merely invoking a laugh because people like to laugh. It tells us what we're trying to achieve by using it and therefore provides some guidance as to when and where to use it.
The Evil Dead trilogy has a good mix of fright and humor that is constantly reminding the audience that all is in fun. Don't be too scared.
A skeleton walks into a bar. He orders a beer.... and a mop.
(Dan - if you're allowed to repost your article from Google+, i'm allowed to repost my comment ;)
i have a couple of problems with your examples here. You lift up "Boggle while drunk", and a particular house rule or in-joke of Mafia players. Neither game was designed to be funny; these are emergent behaviours you're describing. By the same token, Skyrim is a humourous game. There's no need to shout. (Skyrim) i'm a teetotaler myself, but i imagine ANY game is funny when you're drunk (enough).
There are far better examples of games that were designed to be funny, without using "consumable" humour. Here are a few good examples off the top of my head:
- Balderdash
- Apples to Apples/Cards Against Humanity
- Headbanz
- Time's Up
Really, most physical party games are designed to be funny, although they're arguably consumable because many rely on cards with consumable information. Still, the content is relatively inexpensive to produce.
There are examples of mechanics-based humour (by design) in video games, too:
- QWOP
- Lemmings
- Stair Dismount
... but there are two problems here. 1. The laugh is short-lived. QWOP is funny, but you can eke out an hour, max, of laughs from that game ... more if you share it with friends ... but it's got the comedic staying power of, say, a funny YouTube video. 2. With something like Lemmings or Stair Dismount, unless there's a video capture feature, the moment that you laugh at is unique to your experience and can't be shared. The advantage of consumable, scripted humour - the kind you find in The Secret of Monkey Island - is that it's shareable, repeatable, reliable, and most importantly quotable.
Two guys standing at the watercooler remembering the moment in Monkey Island 2 when you pick up the bloodhound and stuff him in your jacket are going to have a MUCH better time laughing together than one guy trying to explain to the other a particularly zany pratfall in Stair Dismount. It's far easier to rally around a Simpson's quote or Carlin's 7 Words you Can't Say on Television than it is to rally around the guy who rides his bike off the roof of his house on YouTube, no matter how funny it was to watch.
All that said, one of the very best mechanic-designed-to-be-funny video games of all time was Acrophobia. It was a multiplayer game with a Balderdash-like scoring system. Players see a randomly-generated acronym, like TYFFG. Everyone has a minute to type in what the acronym could stand for, and the group votes for their favourite. With the right people playing, the game was hysterical, by design, AND it avoids the problem of repeatability, because you could always repeat a particularly funny acronym at the water cooler to get someone else genuinely laughing (and not just laughing to be polite).
i know you're a big fan of cheap, easy content, but when it comes to humour, i much prefer the expensive, consumable kind for the advantages it provides: it's quotable, reliable and shareable, it lends itself far better to sequels and spin-offs, it extends well to other types of media, and i think it's much more relatable to mass audiences than mechanics-based humourous games like QWOP.
The 2 funniest games I have played this decade have to be Giants : Citizen Kabuto and Armed & Dangerous
and they generate humor through both their writing and their game world including weapons and enemies. Interestingly enough they are both by the same developer Plant Moon
Excellent article, Dan. Thank you. Combining these ideas with some of Guy Hasson's articles gets one thinking about situations more than dialog specifically, to get past the 'heard it once, been there' problem of humor through storytelling. And perhaps that perspective is a means to turn our common player agency vs authored content problem into an opportunity : let the player live in an absurd situation for a while, experiment and play. Plenty of notable games have succeeded at this in the past.
Again, i'm uncomfortable with calling humour through storytelling a "problem". Is Seinfeld's stand-up routine a problematic or less valid form of humour than jumping around in a bouncy castle, because you've "heard it once, been there"? Human beings THRIVE on stories, and we tend to delight in the repetition of static content.
Note the difference between "that joke's so old it has hair on it" vs "tell that hilarious story about your trip to the dentist". Repeatability preference is not unique to that type of humour ... "emergent" humour has a variable exhaustion point as well. ("okay - that was awesome, but i'm tired of winging Snausages at the dog's nose ... time to go watch some teeve.")
Humor through storytelling has a significant advantage on first run, and potentially on subsequent runs, due to the novelty they can represent and the craft of the writer. And yes, some storytelling (specifically dialog) humor gets better with some repetition, but it's tricky and not necessarily reliable.
The point was not to highlight an overall advantage of one form over another, but to point out where they differ. In this case, the two methods diverge upon repetition, where novelty is lost much more easily with storytelling repetition, as opposed to humor through mechanics, where the experience is not the exactly the same anyway.
Perhaps in the end, we could blur the distinction between storytelling and mechanics humor, by highlighting how in-game situations can be, in some ways, both.
One comment is that all given examples of "humor-through-mechanics" rely heavily on social interaction: of course we can only agree that most social games naturally have a potential for humor, but I think a good gameplay can do more than just providing funny situations for players to interact. Here are some examples:
- When you throw things around or destroy things with magic in Black & White (sadistic laughter counts as laughter!)
- The awesome replay feature from Super Meat Boy, which displays at the same time all of the attempts to finish a level: especially fun after a hard stage where you died 30 times before finishing it
- Most of Portal 1 - While the 2nd episode relies much more on story-telling, most levels of the first game can get you at least a smile when discovering a new game mechanic... Or even when just having fun with portals, like with infinite falling loops.
I'll give a try at adapting the researcher's quote for game humor: "Humor based on game mechanics is an evolved response that helps up rectify gaps between our current mental model of a gameplay and its capabilities".
So I guess the formula boils down to, unintentional effects plus shared consequences. Very interesting.
I'm thinking and discussing a lot about that topic lately.
One of the best excamples for humor through mechanics I can think of would be the 2D Plattformer "Spelunky" by Derek Yu. It's randomly generated levels are able to create unique funny and unexpected situations (chain reactions, loosing control and getting killed in a fancy way or surviving in situations you expect your character to die), until the player learned and mastered all the different mechanics.
"The binding of Isaac" by Edmund McMillen would also be a good excample, even though the suprise elements in this game (at least in my opinion) don't line up as well as in Spelunky. But it's a very good game anyway.
Also, "Dwarf Fortress" by Tarn and Zach Adams often created intresting and funny situations, maybe the funniest and most intresting (at least the "deepest") situations i've ever experienced in a video game. But I think a lot of roguelikes are able to create such kind of humor (Minecraft also was very funny sometimes. It's a little bit like Dwarf Fortress but much simpler...)
I also like the quote "...humor is an evolved response that helps up rectify gaps between our current mental model of a gameplay and its capabilities" a lot. It gives me a completely new point of view on that topic. I'm going to read more about it.
"humor involves "benign violations" of expectations."
--
The above theory descriptions just dont feel right to me (*ahem* although I haven't bothered to read their research). They seem to be answering "what do we find funny" as opposed to "what is humor."
There's just so many examples of humor that have nothing to do with gaps in mental models or violations of expectations. If a person slips on a patch of ice your first reaction may be "Oh my are you alright?" And as soon as you see they are, you laugh (in a genuine way, not a sneering one). It is a way communicating to them "Don't be alarmed. Everything is alright. I'm not going to take advantage of you while you're in a vulnerable position."
Humor is a way of communicating peace, affinity, good intentions, warmth and safety. By expressing levity you are telling the audience it's ok to relax, let your guard down, unwind and relieve stress. Humor affirms friendship or fellowship. Through it, you take a step towards developing a more intimate relationship with the audience. Humor can welcome a player deeper into the game. Humor can help round out your game's personality and make everything feel really polished. I think this is important to understand because it answers WHY should we care about having humor in our games beyond merely invoking a laugh because people like to laugh. It tells us what we're trying to achieve by using it and therefore provides some guidance as to when and where to use it.
The Evil Dead trilogy has a good mix of fright and humor that is constantly reminding the audience that all is in fun. Don't be too scared.
A skeleton walks into a bar. He orders a beer.... and a mop.
i have a couple of problems with your examples here. You lift up "Boggle while drunk", and a particular house rule or in-joke of Mafia players. Neither game was designed to be funny; these are emergent behaviours you're describing. By the same token, Skyrim is a humourous game. There's no need to shout. (Skyrim) i'm a teetotaler myself, but i imagine ANY game is funny when you're drunk (enough).
There are far better examples of games that were designed to be funny, without using "consumable" humour. Here are a few good examples off the top of my head:
- Balderdash
- Apples to Apples/Cards Against Humanity
- Headbanz
- Time's Up
Really, most physical party games are designed to be funny, although they're arguably consumable because many rely on cards with consumable information. Still, the content is relatively inexpensive to produce.
There are examples of mechanics-based humour (by design) in video games, too:
- QWOP
- Lemmings
- Stair Dismount
... but there are two problems here. 1. The laugh is short-lived. QWOP is funny, but you can eke out an hour, max, of laughs from that game ... more if you share it with friends ... but it's got the comedic staying power of, say, a funny YouTube video. 2. With something like Lemmings or Stair Dismount, unless there's a video capture feature, the moment that you laugh at is unique to your experience and can't be shared. The advantage of consumable, scripted humour - the kind you find in The Secret of Monkey Island - is that it's shareable, repeatable, reliable, and most importantly quotable.
Two guys standing at the watercooler remembering the moment in Monkey Island 2 when you pick up the bloodhound and stuff him in your jacket are going to have a MUCH better time laughing together than one guy trying to explain to the other a particularly zany pratfall in Stair Dismount. It's far easier to rally around a Simpson's quote or Carlin's 7 Words you Can't Say on Television than it is to rally around the guy who rides his bike off the roof of his house on YouTube, no matter how funny it was to watch.
All that said, one of the very best mechanic-designed-to-be-funny video games of all time was Acrophobia. It was a multiplayer game with a Balderdash-like scoring system. Players see a randomly-generated acronym, like TYFFG. Everyone has a minute to type in what the acronym could stand for, and the group votes for their favourite. With the right people playing, the game was hysterical, by design, AND it avoids the problem of repeatability, because you could always repeat a particularly funny acronym at the water cooler to get someone else genuinely laughing (and not just laughing to be polite).
i know you're a big fan of cheap, easy content, but when it comes to humour, i much prefer the expensive, consumable kind for the advantages it provides: it's quotable, reliable and shareable, it lends itself far better to sequels and spin-offs, it extends well to other types of media, and i think it's much more relatable to mass audiences than mechanics-based humourous games like QWOP.
- Ryan
and they generate humor through both their writing and their game world including weapons and enemies. Interestingly enough they are both by the same developer Plant Moon
Note the difference between "that joke's so old it has hair on it" vs "tell that hilarious story about your trip to the dentist". Repeatability preference is not unique to that type of humour ... "emergent" humour has a variable exhaustion point as well. ("okay - that was awesome, but i'm tired of winging Snausages at the dog's nose ... time to go watch some teeve.")
Humor through storytelling has a significant advantage on first run, and potentially on subsequent runs, due to the novelty they can represent and the craft of the writer. And yes, some storytelling (specifically dialog) humor gets better with some repetition, but it's tricky and not necessarily reliable.
The point was not to highlight an overall advantage of one form over another, but to point out where they differ. In this case, the two methods diverge upon repetition, where novelty is lost much more easily with storytelling repetition, as opposed to humor through mechanics, where the experience is not the exactly the same anyway.
Perhaps in the end, we could blur the distinction between storytelling and mechanics humor, by highlighting how in-game situations can be, in some ways, both.