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.
I think it's because we're still learning what video games are. Just as the news battles on and on about whether they're kids' toys or tools of violent porn destruction, we as players are still trying to figure out what games are really evolving toward. We're at a point where games aren't over-saturated in the way that movies are, and we aren't quite as consistently "expecting" something. (Although that cat thing in The Last Guardian is going to die at the end-we're all on that same page, right?)
While the decline in innovation in movies causes them to try superextra-hard to impress us, games aren't there yet! So when a video game tells a joke or makes us laugh, we consider that to be a really special moment-we were engaged in a new experience of play, and it really didn't even need humor. But you gave it to us anyway.
The reason we have so many people clinging to jokes from video games is the same reason we have so many people spray-painting their heads to look like Sephiroth at anime conventions-video games reaching out to us in a human way, whether humorous or dramatic, just feel really special to us. We can never forget it. We're at the point in videogame history that the film industry already encountered in the early 20th century, when it realized it could totally give us compelling stories and character arcs instead of just showing us trains crashing or chimps trying to bake a pie.
Lest you think video games have reached their creative plateau, keep this in mind-the format is still maturing. And who knows what kind of adult it's going to become?
So the next time someone tries to tell you their 500th joke about cake, don't groan- smile at the fact that video games are growing up. And then kick them in the nuts, hard.
Rocco Botte is an actor, writer, and producer of the show Mega64, which can be found at and .