AFKGamer is quickly becoming my favorite blogger written from the perspective of a gamer. Why? He eschews the theoretical and talks about them from a really tangible point of view. No ant farming here, he just wants to tell us why we all suck.

Today, he talks about humor. He notes:

I came to a realization that some of the best stuff in MMOGs is the nonsense. Not like nerf nonsense, but fun nonsense … the meaningless fluff. The goofy proc’ing weapons, the illusions, the animated emotes, the weapon graphics: everyone wants them and will pay top gold to have them.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve tried to communicate this to designers. These people LIVE in your world. It is their equivalent to Cheers, the corner bar. They spend thousands of hours. Even if you have the most gripping gameplay in the world as opposed to a mind-numbing grind, it starts to get dull. Your players start to CRAVE new input.

Humor gives them something to talk about. Even if it’s bad punnage to the nth degree, they will relate to it. Remember: your audience is probably a geek audience, which means they think that Monty Python and the Holy Grail is the Best. Movie. Ever.

But no. Most designers resist it. They don’t want to ‘cheapen’ the game with humor. They’re afraid it will ruin the atmosphere. But it doesn’t ruin it, it just changes it’s temperature.

People like to laugh. What’s more, they’ll forgive an awful lot of other problems if your game makes them laugh. The best way to do that, of course, is to create tools that allow players to entertain each other – ‘fluff’, as AFK says. Even better, it gives them something to talk about other than what’s NOT working in your game.

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