News: Why Video Games Are Having a Harder Time With Humor

[News Bot]

Kotaku is running an opinion piece discussing why video games are having a harder time being funny as they've shifted away from text-driven adventures and toward graphics-intensive environments. "As technology improved, things began to get more serious. With the rise of 3D technology a strong focus was put on making games look good, delivering a more realistic — and often darker — experience to the player. Cartoonish comedic games became more of a novelty than the norm. Few titles, such as Rare's Conker's Bad Fur Day for the Nintendo 64, fully embraced humor." The article also talks about how the trend could soon reverse itself. LucasArts' Dave Grossman said, "As the games get smarter and start paying attention to more things about what the player is actually doing, using that ability not just to create challenges but to create humorous moments will be pretty cool. Eventually I expect to be out of a job over that."


Read more of this story at Slashdot.

[BlkRb0t]

So true, never seen any funny games of late.

[Dee]

Probably because it is a lot harder to be funny. It demands a creative and intelligent script. And honestly, most games don't have much of any script at all.. even less intelligent ones.
Any gamer can write a "cool" script for a game today.

For a fun script a real writer need to be employed.

[Dee]

It could also be due to tradition.. No one thinks about jokes when they think about computer games. Same with developers.

[BlkRb0t]

Originally Posted by Dee

It could also be due to tradition.. No one thinks about jokes when they think about computer games. Same with developers.

That might be the reason why, but I remember Sam&Max games and Monkey Island games which were funny and as well as good games. Also Portal was a bit funny and Penny Arcade was too, but not many titles like that.