Why video game humor is special

24.01.2011
It's a tough feeling for games to evoke, but when they're able to do it, the capability of games to make people laugh is one way how the medium reaches out to them on a human level. Rocco Botte, one of the founders of game-focused humor group Mega64 explains the phenomenon in our latest editorial.

I go to a lot of conventions. I think I've already started this article off with an understatement; I either attend, or exhibit at, conventions all year long. No matter how disparate the crowds may seem, one constant remains among every event-people dressing up as fictional characters. And of this subset of attendees, I find an increasing majority dressing up as, or advertising, just about every joke ever made in a video game. Whether it's people gallivanting around as Team Fortress memes or trying to awkwardly tote a Companion Cube around, you can bet that just about every humorous moment in a video game is going to be run into the ground, over and over again.

I'll be the first person to tell you: I'm sick of it. It's tired. I've heard every cake joke ever written in human history, so I'm pretty qualified to say that. I started to think about what could be causing this trend-why do people cling so tenaciously to any joke a video game makes? I think it's pretty clear that it doesn't happen as much with other media; we all know that the funniest comedic device in the past 10 years of film was 2006's The Prestige, in which Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman put on hilarious fake beards and maim each others' hands and pets. And what happened there? I didn't see anybody at any conventions rocking sketchy facial hair and knocking over booths.

So why do we get so much value out of humor-infused games like Portal? What makes a memorable joke in a game so much more powerful than in a book or a movie?

In showing up repeatedly to these conventions, I sort of worked out an answer. And to get it, all I had to do was talk to anybody at all about video games. Standing around in our Mega64 booth all day leads to hordes of folks wanting to pick our brains about our favorite games. Although my answer will always remain the same (Yoshi's Island, as I seem to be the one man lacking enough critical ear matter to endure Baby Mario's crying), it's always incredibly interesting to hear what most affected other people in the world of video games.

There's just no definitive answer as to what the perfect gaming experience is. The candidates couldn't be more across the board. Some say waving your hands around at a fake raft is the ultimate way to play a game. Others say the moment they saw the giant eel in Mario 64 was a religious experience. There are people who've been moved to tears by text adventures. The spectrum is, very bizarrely, infinite.