![]() ![]() Maybe it’s not essential, but there’s a reason every single joke told at CPAC is “I just flew in from the gender neutral washroom, and boy are my arms triggered!” Hollywood’s not exactly perfect on the representation front, but look at the writing rooms for successful shows and you’ll probably see a different look than at most game studios. If you have to design by committee, having more perspectives will better your odds of shaping jokes until they’re weirder and sharper and better. Comedy is about looking at the world in weird ways, like asking what would happen if Cormac McCarthy wrote Garfield again even though we’ve already moved on from that. Every person who writes jokes for World of Warcraft owns a “sarcasm now loading” shirt and wonders how Fuller House manages to stay so fresh.īut the more common problem is a mundane one a lack of different perspectives. At worst, that lack of diversity leads to odd comedic misfires, like when Duke Nukem Forever launched with bizarre, atonal rape jokes, or how Blizzard still hasn’t discovered forms of comedy beyond bad puns and sexual innuendo ripped from vaudeville routines. It doesn’t help that game developers are still whiter than BYU in a snowstorm, although that is changing. That joke you chuckled at the first time quickly becomes a joke that makes you want to rip your hair out. So why are we still stuck with the same problem? Is God punishing us for the time nerds looked at Portal’s many jokes and thought “What if we screamed ‘The cake is a lie!!!’ at each other for five years”? Well, imagine replaying a frustrating level several times that has a joke. In an article that praised the 1984 Hitchhiker’s Guide game, sentences like “Teenage video-game addicts are the same people who enable the careers of Ben Stiller” feel like they’re from another epoch, but the piece still isn’t wrong when it says comedy is a low priority in game development. This isn’t a new observation the BBC explored why games struggle to be funny in 2014, and Slate complained about the problem all the way back in 2004. Screen Rant’s “ 10 Funniest Video Games of All Time ” included a Simpsons game and two South Park titles, so yeah, there’s a clear shortage of games that most people agree are funny. There’s nothing wrong with a licensed title, but existing media properties do a lot of the heavy lifting for game comedy. Shutterstock Ha, ha - another winner from Laffy Taffy These games have larger budgets than some nations, yet it feels like they’re outsourcing their comedy to Laffy Taffy. Or play a gritty game like Gears 5 and the supposed comic relief character might deign to say “Well, that happened” after you defeat an enemy who showed up with a slightly different gun. Take Destiny 2, a gajillion dollar game with jokes that sound like they’ve been cut from Chuck Lorre sitcoms for being too hacky. But whenever a game tries to make me laugh, odds are it falls flatter than a pancake run over by a steamroller. There are so many cool video games out right now that quitting my job and ignoring my loved ones still wouldn’t give me enough time to keep up with them all. Get the best of Cracked sent directly to your inbox! SIGN ME UP For more ComedyNerd content, and ongoing coverage of the funniest video game ever, the Iran/Contra Affair, please sign up for the ComedyNerd newsletter below. Welcome to ComedyNerd, Cracked's daily comedy Superstation.
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