No Funny Business

//How many Sims does it take to change a light bulb?
Writing funny dialogue and layering in extraneous comic elements is no easy task, and is often the last element to be added.  “For Ben There, Dan That! and Time Gentlemen, Please!, the script was pretty much the final consideration,” says Marshall, “it’s the very last thing that went in. All the game’s art, puzzles and code were done and dusted before writing began.” That also meant that there was no need to censor or stifle humour in favour of playability – nothing like Monkey Island 2’s tortuous “Monkey Wrench” gag that twisted the game’s reality for a lame joke. “There’s nothing that changed specifically for dialogue purposes,” he says.

“That said, a lot of what makes Time Gentlemen, Please! ‘funny’ for me is the situation the boys find themselves in, and the solutions they find to get out of it. The dialogue you lay on top of that is almost a secondary consideration – if the groundwork’s funny by nature, describing it in dialogue is a relatively easy job.”

“If the game was going to be called ‘Splosion Man then we wanted to make sure it was full of stuff that we would laugh at,” explains Twisted Pixel’s Josh Bear. “We hoped that if we laughed, then other people would laugh and we would be ok.” In the perverse world of ‘Splosion Man, hapless victims explode into a shower of meat when ‘sploded, the hero rattles off famous movie quotes and the game regularly breaks in to weird and incongruous songs. “The movie quotes and songs came a little bit later.  Once one quote or song was in the game and was funny, it spawned other ideas for quotes and songs that we thought we would go ahead and throw in. There aren’t many chances in game development where you can jump off the beaten path and try weird new stuff, so we figured what the hell, and just did it.”

But for Rhianna Pratchett, her job on the Overlord series is a little harder. Where Twisted Pixel’s Bear and Zombiecow’s Marshall are members of miniscule teams and have input and authoritative control over almost every element, Pratchett’s job title doesn’t extend much further than writer. Still, she works hard to make the Overlord games as funny as they are, and thus her duties extend far beyond writing a witty script and penning some humorous dialogue. “I work very closely with the level designers to make sure I know what the player is doing at every single point so I can make the lines and the jokes relevant to what’s happening on-screen.”

//There’s an Englishman, an Irishman and a Pokémon…
Comedy in gaming is certainly challenging, but Marshall, Bear, Pratchett and more have certainly shown that it’s not impossible, both through their games, and their insightful solutions and approaches towards infusing humour into games. So why are funny games still so rare?

“Comedy’s a difficult job,” states Dan Marshall. “It’s a hugely subjective subject, so a large number of people are going to think what you’ve done sucks, no matter what.” He explains how 99 per cent of gamers can agree that a game like Uncharted 2 does action well, but comedy is a far more polarising genre. “If you were to make a comedy game, there’s a risk that a large number of people won’t ‘get it’.”

Josh Bear agrees. “I think it is really hard – harder than making gameplay fun, or graphics look awesome.  Comedy is one of those things that seem very black or white, it is either funny or it isn’t, and some people just have no sense of humour at all.”

And they also agree that polarisation in the audience is just bad business. “It is a big risk sometimes to try to pour money into something that is so hard to prove.  Some people might think it is the funniest thing ever, while others will hate it,” says Bear. And Marshall? “In a day and age where even an amazing AAA game can flop horribly and lose a studio a whole bunch of money,” he muses, “who wants to take that risk?”

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