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When you walk into a video-game store, you'll notice that they don't sort boxes by genre. If they did, the comedy shelves would be completely barren. Lists of the most influential video games of all time are filled with fantasies, first-person shooters, puzzle games, and sports titles. Comedies don't get even a passing mention.
Why are video games so humorless? Teenage video-game addicts are the same people who enable the careers of Ben Stiller and Will Ferrell, and game designers love to imitate movies and television shows. Still, games have been so somber that when two comedy titles were released last month—the Animal House-like Leisure Suit Larry and the Princess Bride-esque Bard's Tale—it qualified as a laugh renaissance.
Perhaps the biggest reason that games aren't funny is the difficulty of integrating comedy into game play. One of the earliest gags in arcade history came when the ghosts Inky, Pinky (Don't forget Pinky!), Blinky, and Clyde chased our hungry hero off the screen, only to return fleeing from a giant version of Pac Man. Less important than the scene's complete unfunniness is the fact that it was stashed between levels. More than 20 years later, game humor is similar in content and positioning to the lame post-gunfight wisecracks you'd find in a Schwarzenegger movie circa 1987. Comedy is typically marginalized into background sight gags and interstitial cut scenes. Even games that generally strive to be funny incorporate humor into window dressing: In Grand Theft Auto, you can sow mayhem while listening to a mock-NPR that's broadcasting a roundtable discussion on violence.
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http://slate.msn.com/id/2109202/
Should video games be funny, are some video games funny?
I found this article quite interesting as I play a ton of games and watch a ton of funny movies and TV and yet I never noticed the lack of comedy in games. Now that it has been brought to my attention, it seems to be a glaring omission. With the exception of the odd backhanded gag in Splinter Cell in conversations between Sam and Grimsdoitter, I really can't think of any funny moments in recent games.
Are we video gamers so serious and goal orriented that we can't or won't accept humour in our games?