Real stakes require a real world, regardless of how much humor characters use to cope with it.
I've written several funny games over the ages (some of which were actually released!)
I feel comfortable saying that I'm relatively good at it.
In answer to general public demand*, I am going to share my accumulated wisdoms on the subject.
*By which I mean 1 person.**
**Hi Steve!
So, here goes...
[BRACE YOURSELF FOR WISDOM.]
The key to writing a funny game is to make it serious.
Wait, what?
PREPARE THYSELF, YOUNGLING, FOR WE ARE ABOUT TO ENTER THE REALM OF DEEP THEORYCRAFT.
Game humor exists on a spectrum.
On one end, we have "action movie with some one-liners."
On the other, there's "complete and total farce."
Games that market themselves as funny tend to lean towards the second and focus on gameplay premises that are inherently ridiculous. (Most lol-so-random streamer bait falls into this category.)
Personally, my interests lie away from this end of things for a couple of reasons:
1. I just don't particularly care for that flavor of humor, perhaps because it sometimes serves as the refuge of people who aren't actually that funny.
2. Parody games, in particular, are often dismissed by publishers, who see it as a tactic used by games that "weren't good enough to be a real game."
3. Once you cross the line into complete farce, it is almost impossible to have any narrative stakes. The absurd situations in a farce require a reality that doesn't really function according to rules – there's no room for causality when reality itself spends its entire time bending over backwards to create the next farcical encounter.
This can be very funny – I've definitely enjoyed (and written) the occasional farce. However, doing this more or less turns off the audience's suspension of disbelief: this is no longer a real world about real people, it's a farce about farces. In this kind of setting, it's very, very hard to make your audience concerned about threats, struggle, or drama involving your characters. "But here at the finale it actually matters and I actually want you to care!" is a hard trick to pull at the end of the story where causality and consequence have been repeatedly demonstrated to not exist.
The great struggle (at least for me) is that farce is the natural direction that gravity pulls: we want goofy gameplay, and so we create ridiculous narrative situations that shatter the suspension of disbelief in order to create it. We get our gonzo game moment at the cost of teaching the player that the reality of our setting is a joke and nothing will ever matter.
Back when I first started working on Defender's Quest, I made a little rule for myself:
Situations are serious. People are funny.
Or, to quote the late, great Chuck Jones:
“A comedian is not a person who opens a funny door – he’s the person who opens a door funny.”
One of the things that I enjoy about action comedies is that, for the most part, action always has serious stakes – real bullets are flying, and real bodies are hitting the floor. To cope with this insanity, our increasingly unhinged characters become increasingly funny.
When Mel Gibson gets chained up and tortured with a car battery in Lethal Weapon, the stakes are entirely real. The audience cares.*
If the exact same scene played out in Hot Shots Part Deux, we might laugh, but no one's going to be sitting on the edge of their seat, biting their nails, desperate to see if Charlie Sheen is going to get out.
*My 80-year-old grandmother spent the entire Lethal Weapon torture scene unable to look away while gasping, "That's just not nice! People shouldn't do that! " ...When Mel finally broke free and strangled his torturer to death with his manacles, she actually started shouting. I believe her exact words were "That's right! That's what you get! We don't like you!"
The world is a pressure cooker. Humor is what people use so that their minds survive.
The key thing here is that characters – even truly ridiculous characters – are using humor as a coping mechanism while they still grapple with serious problems seriously.
I think this is something that Marvel movies frequently forget: funny characters don't interrupt and derail serious situations to be funny, they are funny as they handle serious situations, because that's the only way to keep your mind – and the audience's suspension of disbelief.
And of course, once you've established a serious world with meaningful stakes, you can play around a little bit.
Defender's Quest had a whole level dedicated to fighting man-eating sheep.
But more on that next time.
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