Irrelevant Rant

[Ginny]

Note: Please forgive my futile attemps to be funny.

Today I remembered after a long time what it's like to laugh out loud.
It's been a while since I did, I must say, at least by my standards (once a day at least is an ok dosage of laughter by those, and the more the merrier), probably because I haven't had a physics lesson lately.
Ah, those physics lesson, always the place to go for a good laugh. I believe it's come to the point where I expect to laugh on them, and come to the lesson with a certain readiness, and am in the mood for laughing at just about anything, and end up laughing more. So, essentially, it's an infinite loop, the more I laugh, the more I want to laugh and the more I do as a result. Which is of course always welcome.

Some people don't value homour as much as they should, or perhaps don't value laughing. Apart from proven scientific theories that laughter is good for your health and can lengthen your life (I like to think after this amount of physics lessons I'll live to be 150), which has something to do with chemicals being released in your brain, I really don't know, laughing is first and foremost, fun. Fun like nothing else can be fun. Pure FUN!
So why this long rant about FUN and laughter? Ah, that's getting me a bit closer to the point of this post.
A bit too soon for my style. I think I'll just ramble on a bit more.

So as I was saying, today I remembered once again how great it is to laugh out loud.
Sure, all around us we see amusing things, but nothing that really hits the nerve hard.
Today, while reading a thread about the new pope (and hope this doesn't offend anyone) but a humourous remark posted in that thread took me somehow by surprise, and I laughed. For real.

Yesterday i had a close experience aswell. I was walking my dog, passing the post office thing.. And what did I see on the ground nearby? A toilet seat. I'm not a fan of toilet humour (ooh, bad pun ) but that almost made me laugh. At the very least i found it weird and amusing that the toilet seat would be lying there like that.
More importantly, it was surprising. Did I mention I was surprised? I was. And that, some say, and I might too, is the key to making people laugh.

I also considered what I read in the thread today. I don't recall it exactly, and am too
lazy to check, but the remark said something absurd about the pope's name and I found it very funny. Maybe it's just my type of humour, if I can even define that. I know some people are offended by this or that type of humour, but I find just about any type funny to some degree.
However I look at it, it makes me feel lucky, as I get to laugh spontaneously at many things, and I enjoy laughing so much.

Right, what was I supposed to write about? Oh right, GAMES. Games need humour. Players need to be surprised, caught unready with something funny. But remember not to make it clash with the game's mood. Timing is of the essence. USE THE ESSENCE.. Erm. Sorry. I'm not gonna go into HOW to implement humour, mainly because I don't feel like it ^_^. You could call this an incomplete post. I'm done ranting for now.


Please post if you have something to say on the topic, or some tips for humour in games, or your own rants somewhat related to the topic, or if you think I should stop ranting because AGS games have a lot of humour ^^.

P.S. This was all partially inspired by these 2 articles:
http://www.gamespot.com/features/6114407/index.html
http://www.gamedev.net/reference/articles/article1595.asp
The other part is my mind just thinking up this starting sentence, and then I had to go with it and it led me to this great starting paragraph.... Damn my controlling mind

[Ishmael]

I can't really rant on about humour in games, as I tend to laugh at about everything that somehow distantly tries to be funny, or is not supposed to be funny at all... But I rarely really laugh so that my stomach muscles (sometimes) hurt afterwards... last time I laughed like that was a few weekends ago when a friend of mine was staying overnight. We have really fun together. Too bad that kind of humour can't be that easily transposed into games... like the Andy McCoy imitation... (he's a Finnish rockstar, a legend of sort) "Dude, are you saying that I'm in jail? Is this jail? But why is this guitar in here..?

Righto... sorry for my rambling :

[Ginny]

Yeah, that gut wrenching laughter is what I'm really on about, though non of the examples I gave caused such. Except physics lessons. Please stop me before I ramble about them. Seriously.
It would be interesting to see a game that makes me laugh like that, but physics lessons are a bad example since we laugh at the endless puns and sexual innuedos our teacher blurts out. And with real people, it can be much funnier. I think people in general are funny, but it's not in everyone's humour style to make fun of someone by say, giving them the wrong directions
However, just being crazy with my friends has the same effect. Conclusion: I laugh like a madman, about crazy stuff.

[Afflict]

So someone has to add something here, and who better than me.. well as i am once again browsing from my mobile, away 4rm home. Heres how i see it. The funny factor varies from person 2 person. Another thing will be the content plus the manner its portrayed by the artist. So to carry over the jokes or create them in adventures are not going to be the quality of comedy acts or movies.

I was watching analyze this earlier i was rolling with laughter!

So firstly know your content, then your audience. Look at who your targeting test the jokes lines with family friends and beta testers.

See the responses you get who reacts and who doesnt. Chop n change etc. You wont be able too reach all of the "targets" but he you hit 90% its good the others get in mood (during live act)

thats my ramblings on topic hope it helped you out.

[Disco]

Ah, I laugh out loud quite a bit, but usually many hours or even days after the stimulae is present. Sometimes when I'm driving I will begin to laugh uncontrollably at something that didn't strike me as exceptionally funny days before.

I am also prone to laughing at things that shouldn't be so funny. A good example is my piano class last semester. The professor was calling on us to identify key signiatures out of the book. She had us turn to one page and said "Okay, now here you have three flat symbols staring you in the face. What is the key signiature?" I suddenly turned red and was trying hard not to laugh, to the point where I was shaking. Something about "flat symbols staring you in the face" was so funny that I was doing the silent can't-make-make-any-sound-with-your-voice laughter, and everyone else was carrying on normally. Finally after about 8 minutes (no joke), I was called on and promptly asked what was wrong. I told her exactly what was causing my out of place behavior, and that had to have been the most awkward minute in my education. She did the slow "Oookaaaaaay!?" thing while the rest of the class exchanged "wtf?" glances.
That was gnarly.

Hey look! I rambled too!

[dgunpluggered]

I like humour where people share something, like a certain viewpoint.

For instance, when I made Ultimerr, my philosophy was "Richard Garriott's games turned me into a dirty thief" because all I'd do in Ultima games was just sneak into people's houses and steal their money and goods. And from that, I went about putting together the worst possible Ultima/RPG-ish game -- a game that's so wrong on so many levels that it's so right.

The key is to surprise with your viewpoint. I crammed a whole bunch of stuff that didn't normally fit into an RPG (pimps, effeminate clothing designers, a big pile of shit to grow a beanstalk out of, a film reference to Psycho, etc), thus the surprise. And I had fun trying to come up with even more crazy shit to put in that game. So much so that I was laughing out loud while making it.

The thing is, someone can't say, "Hey, this is how you be funny." -- and that goes for making funny adventures or just telling jokes. It's a self-discovery thing. You have to find out what makes you laugh. I once read a Neil Simon interview where he said he only wrote stuff that he laughed at. If he didn't laugh at a line he wrote, he'd re-write it.

But once you see the humour in something you do/see/write, you can share it with other people in hopes they'll see the humour in your view too.