1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF FEBRUARY 4 | HUMOR IN GAMES
Dark Farce: The Perils of Self-Aware Video Games
Cover Story: What good is satirizing bad design when it merely leads to more bad design?
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fter decades of fumbling around with the ins and outs of this new, unknown medium, video games finally became fully aware of themselves. Developers started to recognize the flaws in different tropes and started to address them, improving the fundamental designs of their games in the process. But some don't just see an opportunity to push genres forward with their games alone. They also see their peers making the same mistakes over and over again as well as how ludicrous these deeply-ingrained design flaws are when you shine a light to them. But most importantly, they see the humor in this folly. It's a shame, then, that many developers fall into the trap of committing the same sins as the games they're skewering.
Humorous satire already enjoys a storied history in all forms of media, including literature (Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn), film (Dr. Strangelove), and television (South Park). For centuries, creators held qualities they found undesirable up and magnified them to ridiculous proportions, leaving audiences chuckling as they mull over what makes these things undesirable. And though these observations are often made to facilitate humor, most satirists also aspire to the ultimate goal of affecting real change.
The prospect of a keynote discussion at the DICE Summit between Gabe Newell and J.J. Abrams seemed intriguing enough. After all, the two are some of the biggest names in their respective fields, Newell being the co-founder of Valve and Abrams being one of the most prolific producers and directors in Hollywood over the past decade. The conversation the two had on stage today was interesting enough, but the most noteworthy bit came in the form of a revelation that the two sides could collaborate on a game, as well as a movie based on Portal or Half-Life.
Newell explained that the talk was a rehash of conversations the two have had previously, Gamasutra reports. It centered around the strengths and weaknesses of storytelling in film and games. Because of the linear nature of film and TV, Abrams said that "games in many cases are far better than movies in telling story," although he did later note the problem with game characters who are "empty vessels." Newell, meanwhile, took issue with the lack of agency in movies; he showed a clip of the Abrams-produced film Cloverfield and quipped about how he'd like to be able to put down the camera "and f***ing run." Abrams countered by pointing to the problems that can arise with telling a story when players are free to run around, doing whatever they want.
1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF FEBRUARY 4 | HUMOR IN GAMES
Small Words, Big Impact: Humor in Borderlands 2
Cover Story: Gearbox's Anthony Burch discusses the art of peripheral text.
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or a game writer, the coolest job has got to be writing lines for the hero or the hero's sidekick. Far less sexy is the job of authoring email messages, signage, mission text, UI blurbs and NPC/grunt dialog -- all the things that fall under the umbrella of "peripheral" text. It seems many writers and development teams fail to seize the opportunity these modest snippets of text have to offer, and the result is a surfeit of nondescript, homogeneous games cluttering up store shelves. But what about when a developer gets it, when they understand what peripheral text can really do for them? Then you get a game like Borderlands 2, a title that linguistically-speaking, forces its competitors to eat its slag-flavored dust.
Now some people, upon hearing the words "good writing" might think I mean games should strive to be the interactive equivalents of War and Peace. That's of course, ridiculous since games aren't passive entertainment, and good writing isn't necessarily proper and polite. (If that was true, today Quentin Tarantino would still be just some creepy guy working in a video store.) The writing in Borderlands 2 might be crass, crude and decidedly un-PC; nevertheless it's a brilliant example of quality writing.
1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF FEBRUARY 4 | HUMOR IN GAMES
Satirical Edge: The Humor of Platinum Games
Cover Story: A look at the (sometimes) successful satires of Japan's wildest action titles.
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latinum Games has a reputation. It's the ker-azy action game studio. Sex witches! Gun-toting soldiers that do rockstar slides around battlefields on their knees! Dudes with chainsaw arms, and chicks in spiked bustiers. Wild brawlers that pit players against space gods while they ride motorcycles and missiles through space. Bayonetta, Vanquish, Anarchy Reigns, MadWorld; these are the last bastions of hardcore Japanese design. So goes the consensus at least. Atsushi Inaba, Hideki Kamiya, and the studio's collaborators like Shinji Mikami make flamboyant action games, it's true, but to think of them as pure purveyors of action is to do them a gross disservice. Platinum Games is, first and foremost, a satirist. Its satire lacks subtlety, and sometimes its creators' fetishes overshadow the comedy, but make no mistake: Platinum Games is pretty damn funny and its failures are often as interesting as its successes.
The studio's satirical work actually started will before it was even founded. Prior to opening in 2006, Platinum's core crew was making games for Capcom as the studio called Clover. Its very first game was actually a loving spoof of both Capcom and the publisher's audience. Viewtiful Joe, directed by Kamiya and produced by Inaba, was a sidescroller that recalled Capcom's 1980s and '90s classics like Mega Man and Demon's Crest. Rather than an earnest anime-tinted adventure like those games, Joe was about a fanboy whose superpowers came from breaking the fourth wall of drama.
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