When did cleverness become passé?
When did innuendo become unnecessary?
When did thinking become superfluous?
The joy of humor is in getting the joke. It’s more satisfying when you are mentally involved, when you must think before you laugh. If you don’t know where a joke is going, getting there is fun.
But the opposite is also true: When the journey is obvious, the reward is slight.
Al Lowe, creator of Leisure Suit Larry, wrote adventure games for sixteen years during the heyday of Sierra Online. He is currently involved in a Kickstarter campaign to raise development funds to bring back his iconic title, Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards.
I grew up loving humor. I’ve laughed at comedians from Bob Hope to George Carlin to Louis C.K. I love films by the Marx Brothers, Mel Brooks, Woody Allen. Weird, wild, and wacky is fine by me. “Anything goes” is a great philosophy … until the creators grow lazy.
Too much of today’s entertainment purports to be funny, but the humor is mostly wisecracks, put-downs, gross-out jokes, or obvious puns. What happened to cleverness? Wit? Topical references?
Of course, it’s easy to tell which sitcoms to avoid: anything with a laugh track. Producers tell you when they don’t respect you. It’s a lazy response to unfunny material.
It’s the same with videogames. For about a decade, computer games were funny. While Leisure Suit Larry was one the first humorous games, the late ’80s and early ’90s were filled with one hilarious release after another: Maniac Mansion, Monkey Island, Space Quest, Sam & Max, Day of the Tentacle, Sorcerer’s Apprentice, and on and on.
One day, it stopped. Within a year, humor disappeared from gaming. Why?
The joy of those adventure games was immersing yourself in an alternate world, one with strange, unique characters, interesting locations, and rules of logic; one filled with puzzles that forced you to think; where gameplay was based on contemplation instead of twitch; and where humor had time to be properly set up.
For the most part, those games were written by amateurs, since there were no classes on creating interactive stories. I learned to program by reading books, but there were no game design books then so I learned the only way I could: by playing the games of others, analyzing them, and then trying my best to do something similar or better. I made some beginner’s mistakes in my early games but, over the years, I learned and the games got better. Through trial and error, we created a genre.