A version of this article appeared in the August 2008 issue of Game Developer magazine.

Darker!  Deeper!  More serious!  These were the marching orders given to the Shadowbane writing team.  The world of Aerynth was a brutal world, appropriate for our PvP-oriented gameplay, with a backstory of politics and treachery spanning centuries.   And to be honest, even as a developer I would be hard-pressed to remember the names of any of the major NPCs.  What I do remember is that we had a combat ability called ‘Hammer Time’.

Beyond the Leisure Suit Larry series, there is no substantial comedy genre in video games – at least not like in film or TV.  And there are good reasons for that – funny his hard, especially in a genre where you don’t control the rhythm of the narrative. Still, you don’t have to be in it just for the yukks in order to add moments of levity to your otherwise serious games and virtual worlds.  The proof that it works can be found in our megahits – how many times did World of Warcraft, Guitar Hero and Grand Theft Auto make you laugh?  These aren’t explicitly comedies, but all games with hardcore audiences that used comedy with surgical precision to enhance the experience.

The Appetite for Amusement

Do players really want levity in their gameplay experiences?  I’d say ‘yes’, judging from what players do with our games once they leave our hands.   A lot of people might be watching videos of raid strategies and speed runs, but those are hardcore flicks, for hardcore audiences.  A lot more are watching the fan-made flick “The Internet is for Porn”, “Red vs. Blue” and “Halo Human Pyramid”.

Gamers are making significant time investments into these games, so much so that these games are significant parts of their lives and self-identity.  When players create and consume humor in our spaces, it validates that investment, and assures them that there are other people like them.  When they share these moments with people who aren’t playing the game in question, they are assuming that laughter is a game principle that will transcend the boundaries of the game. We should foster this as much as we can.

Immersion and Cadence.

But too many designers are all too worried about breaking immersion.  They want to create dark and dangerous worlds, where every moment is a life and death struggle, and one wrong decision can be the end of everything.  Oftentimes, this is to help heighten the perceived consequences of failure- to help hide the fact that you’re one reload away from being back into the game.  This doesn’t stop many developers from making experiences that are all too grim and oppressive. A 10 hour game without a joke is 10 very heavy hours for players to endure.

Movie makers have a much more nuanced view of immersion, and they leverage humor to make it work much better than we do. Humor in cinema is incredibly important to providing some sort of emotional release, even in tragedies and especially in action films.  Good directors carefully map out the emotional cadence, almost like a roller coaster ride, alternating between tension and release.  The comic relief character’s problems or the hero’s one liner is instrumental to keeping the audience engaged.

Filmmakers can do this well because they have total control over the rhythm of the game they’re making.  Some designers claim that games can never do this as well – interactivity by its very nature grants the control of pacing to the player.  To counter this argument, I point to the Game of the Year awards that Portal won.  Valve did a masterful job of delivering moments of humor, and did it just at the right times, with most jokes being a reward for success, offering cathartic release and a real sense of progress.  Play the game with the sound off, and the game’s almost not worth playing.

Adding Character

Bruce Willis blowing up elevator shafts in Die Hard was pretty cool, but it’s the “Yippee-ki-yay, Mutha$&%*%” that made him the badass.  Cheesy one-liners exist not just because they’re fun – they also humanize the character, making him easier to empathize with.  Action movies where the hero says nothing are oddly antiseptic – and kind of creepy.

With Duke Nukem being a very successful exception, most games avoid giving the main character a personality, so the player can more easily project himself into the hero’s shoes.  But even if you buy into the blank slate hero theory, there’s no excuse for most of the other characters in the game world.   Most games I see have completely generic macho marines, completely generic psychopathic mercenaries, and completely generic and offensively stupid damsels in distress.

You don’t need to turn the game into a comedy.  No one wants Lost to be a 3 Stooges routine, but how tedious and unwatchable would it be without Hurley?  Similarly, HK-47 and Minsc are probably the two most popular characters in Bioware’s storytelling-based RPGs.  Both roles act as comic relief, offering levity as a pause – and a refreshing reward — between long periods of combat and more serious storytelling.

Characters should never upset the tone of a game, but designers should also challenge that tone from time to time.  In my career, I’ve seen many websites for theoretical post-apocalyptic MMOs, harsh brutal worlds where society barely scrapes to survive.  And often-times, their concept art is beautiful – but oh, so depressing. If you have standard MMO play patterns, you may have players spending 10-20 hours a week in your world, until they quit or kill themselves in an emo-enduced fit of pathos. The irony is that Fallout succeeded not because it is grim, despairing or brutal – which it is – but because it is also funny, quirky, nostalgic and introspective.

Hanging the Lampshade

In Roseanne, actress Alicia Goranson played the daughter Becky until she quit her role to go to college.  Another actress took over – and one of Roseanne’s first lines to her ‘new’ daughter in the show was “Watch it, young lady. You can be replaced.”  Four years later, when Goranson returned, Roseanne’s character said “Where the hell have you been?”

Hollywood writers call this as “Hanging a Lampshade” – instead of hiding some absurd part of the premise or story, call attention to it.  A common example in shows like C.S.I. or House is pointing out how odd it is that they seem to get about one mysterious case a week.  These sorts of jokes act as rewards for long-term viewers. Also in a roundabout way, they acknowledge the intellect of the viewers.  It’s as if they’re saying, “Hey, we know this is absurd, but work with us here…”

Occasionally, you see examples of this in games.  Once, I got a World of Warcraft quest to go kill 30 of something or other.  The reason?  “I don’t need to give you a reason, do I?”  An even better example is from the victory screen of the original Guitar Hero.  If you beat the game on Expert, the game declares you a Legend, and then points out how impressive that is, given you were just playing covers.   Both jokes occur late in the gameplay experience – if either had occurred early, they risk turning off the player by pointing out flaws in the premise or mechanics.  But because they happen so late, the player sees it as a reward.

Finding the Right Tone

In the old days of Magic the Gathering, the flavor text was almost all serious, sometimes even with quotes from Shakespeare or Edgar Allen Poe thrown in.  Over time, they began experimenting with adding more humor in the expansion packs.  As an example, at one point the flavor for Lava Axe was “Meant to cut through the body, and burn straight to the soul.”  Today it reads “Catch!”

About six years ago, the Magic team at Wizards did some market research, to determine the most and least popular flavor text.  Of the top five chosen, four are jokes (One example, “An army of squirrels is still an army.”)  But then again, two of the bottom three were also attempts at humor that had fallen flat (such as the Werebear, who ‘exercises his right to bear arms’).  And to make matters more complex, some cards appeared on both lists – you can’t please everyone, it would seem.

When trying to insert humor, finding the right tone is critical.  Magic is a game world that appreciates wit.  World of Warcraft isn’t afraid to be silly.  John McClane doesn’t tell knock-knock jokes. And the jokes that Shakespeare put in his tragedies are all appropriate in a world ofintrigue, incest and murder.

Still, you can color outside the lines a little bit.  The Age of Conan team has done a masterful job of creating the grim, brutal adult world that Robert E. Howard envisioned.  Still, a lot of the quests have run together to me.  But one stood out.

A prissy noble asked me to go find his ‘princess’.  After slogging through a sewer for half an hour, I discover, sitting on a pedestal, surrounded by a very large armed guard, a Chihuahua named Princess.  I cracked up – despite the absurdity of it, I could imagine being Conan and discovering what sort of fool errand I had been sent on.  I couldn’t wait to get back to the quest NPC to hear his justification.  Was it out of tone?  Possibly, but not entirely so, and it was memorable.  And even the people that hated the joke and felt it didn’t belong would probably talk about it – and giving people something to talk about in a social space is usually not a bad thing.

In Conclusion

Game developers have a tendency to take ourselves too seriously, and more tragically, to make games that are themselves entirely too grim and pretentious. Why, I don’t know — perhaps it’s a misguided pursuit of total immersion combined with a desperate desire for our craft to be taken seriously.

But I would argue the opposite is true.  I don’t think we’ll be taken seriously as a craft until we learn to blend moments of comedy into our dramas, to master the rhythms built into the play experiences we’re building, and to occasionally laugh at ourselves from time to time.