Dear Player: Ludic Humour

The tentacle will have its day

Game mechanics can make us cry with sadness, cower with terror and cringe with guilt, but we tend to overlook the tears we shed with laughter. As a legacy of consumer technology, with categories based around mechanics, game design and reception has taken a different approach to genre than film and literature. In The Medium of the Videogame (2001) Wolf made the case that game genres should be defined by interactivity rather than iconography, and her survey of game categories charted around 42 genres, few overlapping with other media. From puzzle to action-adventure, and the number has done nothing but grow since, but are we losing something by labelling games by their mechanics and not by their themes or concepts? What might games have to say about other artforms if we grouped them by the ideas they forward rather than the way they play? At a popular level horror has become a lasting category, and the power of tragedy in games like Dear Esther and This War of Mine has been given a lot of critical attention, but little time has been devoted to understanding comedy in games. Indeed, ever since Aristotle comedy has been given short shrift in comparison to the seriousness of tragedy. In looking at what I’ll term ‘ludic humour’ I want to reflect on the translation of genre between media, and consider whether games as a medium offer unique opportunities to comedians.

Genre has often taken a backseat for games because of their reception, but also because of some of the properties of the medium – the effect or illusion of collaborative and emergent plot events. Games’ famed and loosely understood ‘interactivity’ has perhaps been off-putting to genre-writers in many instances – unpredictable players can ruin the formula of a genre, make the serious silly and the pathetic bathetic. Many large titles contain multiple genre choices, the potential for romance or detective work, but many types of narrative translate oddly or incompletely into games. Amy Hennig’s writing for the Uncharted series grappled with the problems of omniscient narrative, common in movies, when it came to convincing the player to fall into a trap. Why would a player fall for the antagonist’s bait if a cut scene from the enemy’s perspective informed them that this was a bad idea? To experience a Shakespearean Tragedy the reader has to be aware of both sides of a miscommunication but unable to resolve it. They wish they could just tell Othello he was being manipulated or show Juliet that Romeo was on his way – in a game, where we can alter the narrative, either we would avert the tragedy or else feel like our agency was being unfairly limited by artificial constraints. In comedy games, players faced with some sketch material or scripted jokes might might ruin the punchlines you set up, or feel like they’re passively standing by while the other characters perform the scene. Perspectives on genre which come from old media assume a passive audience, and so it can be hard to imagine what genre means in a collaborative and emergent narrative.

[Obligatory video-game visual pun: fulfilled]

The affordances of a medium can also set an audiences expectations and values. The example of comedy highlights how we’ve come to expect some passive and predictable genre conventions: most old media humour is scripted, predetermined - either sketch or stand-up. Interactive and emergent humour – improve - is seen as niche, unreliable, experimental and lacking in ‘finish’ or ‘polish’. Outside of live performances which allow audience participation, improv’ has had relatively little exposure – on TV and in film, comedy doesn’t have to be collaborative or live, so why leave it to chance?

The scariest part of toxic waste is that it gives arms to... arms.

Early games, to grossly generalise, inherited this preference – scripted humour, humour as content, was the order of the day in the 1980s and 1990s. However, comedians have always known that play and mirth are deeply structurally related - improvised comedy is a smorgasbord of games where humour comes from collaboration and reacting to the unexpected. I want to suggest that now we are seeing the latter stage of a trajectory in humourous games transitioning from early text games (with humourous scripted content) to ludic humour (with humourous improvisation in the form of mechanics).

In the history of comic games, for a long time, humour was tied to the adventure genre – with absurdist and punning games such as day of the tentacle and Monkey Island. Here visual gags and text were relied on for the comedy – content drawing on cartoons and humourous IP. As the genre declined, comedy in games became relatively marginalised – the object of flash games, and game jam experiments, their fresh humour often being diluted for wider appeal as and when they got developed and published by larger teams. For a long time, humour in the mainstream was either still front loaded as textual content, or left as cheats or glitches from which players could make their own emergent humour.

Then along came Portal and QWOP in 2007 and 2008. These games popularised the idea that interface and mechanics could articulate humour, and that humour could emerge from play, rather than being pre-determined. The great writing in portal also pointed towards new affordances in game engines for making self-aware games capable of in-jokes, and tripping up the players’ expectations. In Portal the form of the puzzle, mechanically and narratively, articulated humour by establishing a concept and then breaking it down, encouraging lateral thought. The punchline, often had you mechanically break the logic of the system you were trained in ‘outwitting’ the game. QWOP, by contrast, was a game about running a race with an extreme awkwardness of inputs. By making a simple task complicated side-scrolling movement became a complicated balancing act of moving limbs and joints one at a time like an ineffective puppet master. Unpredictable humour pointed out that absurdity can be found in overthinking anything. Emergent humour and self-reflexive humour – often twinned – have characterised a lot of the most effective comic games since.

But why do these things amuse us, why and how do games generate mirth? There are different theoretical questions we can ask about humour in games: why do we find things funny, and what does mirth mean? Daniel Dennett and Matt Hurley approach the first question from a scientific and analytic perspective. They take an evolutionary hard-line, arguing that mirth and humour result from the process of mental debugging – working out where a predictive model of the world went wrong costs a lot of mental resources, and the body incentivises us to check our line of thought for errors with the pay-off of laughter. But if that’s the case, then why are maths corrections rarely hilarious, and why do we enjoy call-backs and repeated jokes?

Schopenhauer, Kant and many others have opted to explain more of the ‘what’ than the biological ‘why,’ in a way that’s more helpful for discussing the social meaning of mirth.  They iterate on the following popular model: mirth results from the sudden apprehension of absurdity or incongruity. It’s a strong framework, and it copes better with explaining why the relatively banal correction of a maths problem is less than belly-aching, and why unexpected repetition might continually be funny. Henri Bergson even sees this ‘absurd juxtaposition’ as always the odd conjunction of the living and the mechanical which perfectly suits the field of games – exploits, glitches and lets plays. These models also interestingly help us understand humour and horror as two-sides of the same coin – when something suddenly doesn’t make sense it either terrifies us or titillates us. Jump-scares and atmospheric horror play on this, and we’ve seen an explosion of horror games in recent years, but where are their humourous complements?

Monkey Island and Jazz Punk provide two great examples of older and more recent ‘humour-as-content.’ Monkey Island plays heavily on the sudden apprehension of the absurd, and was deeply self-aware for a game released in 1990. Along with a heavy dose of visual puns, fourth-wall breaking disclaimers were given to player through text, while the contrast between what could be seen visually and what could be read textually created a range of scripted jokes. Behind a stage curtain the player was faced with the regular form of point-and-click interactions - Use x on y – except with an absurd series of hidden objects – use walrus on comb etc.

Jazz Punk too, contains a wide range of scripted jokes – from pastiches of cold war spy language to hommages to old games. It has a Quake-style mini-game set on a wedding cake. It has a frogger/crossy-road mini-game where you repeatedly force a frog to sustain injury by convincing it to cross the road. It’s promotional trailer even tapped into a crazed nostalgia for a cyberpunk FMV that never was – you should check it out. At heart it’s all Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas meets Austin Powers. Both these games exemplify humour-as-content

Jazz punk montage!

For Humour-as-form, however, we’d better consider the lineage of Portal and QWOP. They were released in 2007 and 2008 respectively, and they revolutionised the way we subvert player’s expectations of environments and bodies in collaborative and emergent ways. Portal in essence made level design mechanics into a kind of humour in itself – all its jokes are about subversion, curiosity and the sudden absurdity of playing with space. Valve has a long legacy in both scripted and emergent humour from TF2 to Left for Dead, and the trade-off between expendable test subjects and irreplaceable cake in the Portal boardgame show that the company can author a wide range of absurdities. The source engine, as a preferred medium for the modding community of the 2000s, also became a haven for experimental design – Stanley Parable and the original Octodad being the two extremes. The source engine was great for simulating a banal kind of realism great for satire, and wacky physics, great for everything.

Don't judge.

In QWOP the player controlled the limbs of an athlete independently, leading to physics-y wackiness of a two-dimensional variety. Crawling and scooting tended to be more effective than sprinting as the player raced to keep everything in the air like a performer spinning plates. Surgeon simulator and Octodad are its spiritual successors, making the awkwardness of the interface the core motor of mirth. Octodad, and its sequel ‘Dadliest Catch’ are both brilliantly funny and heartfelt – you play as an octopus pretending to be a human husband, and you move each elastic limb awkwardly and individually. From visual jokes where you dress up as a shark to pretend to be a human in a shark-costume, to the mismatch of text and image with the use of interpretive octopus subtitles, to straight jokes, Octodad blends various modalities of humour. Your wife tells you: ‘There are just so many unanswered questions, like when the printer ran out of ink and you just MADE SOME MORE,’ while you busy yourself trying to contort your way around an arcade of water-gun and hoop games. All this critiques and poke fun at issues of playing with an avatar in a game, what it means to role play, and even what it might mean to struggle with an invisible disability or a non-normative body. At its core, emergent humour stems from the interface, where you can co-operatively, or independently, control Octodad’s limbs – ruining his wedding or cartwheeling away from an enraged ichthyologist. Humour comes not just from the content here, but from the awareness of possibility, the space where a system collapses into chaos. This is where games can shine - humour-as-form – and in the emergent mirth of gameplay mechanics, games like Portal and Octodad can point us in the direction of a dynamic, ‘ludic’ type of comedy.

Humourous games stand at the forefront of collaborative and emergent narratives, and designers are continually probing the ways in which makers and players can share in the creative and improvisational process. But what’s next for unpredictable and absurd story-telling? If many of these games we’ve discussed allow spaces for emergent humour or horror through the confabulation of players, game systems or AI, might we find procedural text in future games, as well as procedural assets or spaces? The online Library of Babel crystallises what is horrifying, or hilarious about Something like No Man’s Sky – the vastness of probability. Based on a Louis Borges story of the same name, it uses algorithms to create an infinite number of texts and indexes them. Some contain whole words, some whole sentences, and occasionally, by chance, you can run into an entire book – one already written, or one yet to be made, or one which only a machine could devise. Like a thousand monkeys with a thousand typewriters, this procedural author has already turned out Shakespeare’s Othello, as well as tonnes of gibberish. The Library of Babel is a map of textual possibility which begs all kinds of philosophical questions about narrative, discovery, invention and projection. And sometimes, just sometimes, it comes up with a glorious truth:

Dr. Merlin Seller