Abstract
The chapter unpacks ‘interactive gags’: an approach to the design of discrete jokes in digital games. Where humorous scriptwriting can be appreciated without the player pressing buttons or the game system ‘knowing’ that jokes are being received, interactive gags ensure active, attentive participation. These player-cued comic events follow a triphasic ‘setup–trigger–payoff’ structure in which intentional input is what sets off the punchline. Using a stepwise account of how humans perceive, cognise, and react to comic entertainment, it is shown that interactive gags’ resistance to common sense conceptions of comic timing is not perforce a problem: whether visual or verbal, interactive gags’ regulating force is best understood as a back-and-forth exchange of information and agency between player and game.
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Notes
- 1.
To be clear, the extent of my premise is simply that all cultures—indeed, practically all humans—are capable of appreciating humour.
- 2.
If the player–character’s lockpicking skill level is over 40, the player will instead be informed that their nose is now ‘open’.
- 3.
Owing to the unpredictable movement of NPCs, not all players will encounter all three gags as described.
- 4.
In ten-pin bowling, a ‘spare’ is when a player’s second-bowled ball knocks over the remaining pins not felled in the first throw of their turn. It’s a strikingly good pun if you’re in the right frame of mind.
- 5.
Folk theories/lay notions of comic timing are epitomised by the aphorism or factoid that the secret to good humour is ‘all in the timing’ . Attardo and Pickering (2011) collect quotes that stress the apparent importance of timing while highlighting the difficulty of pinning down what it is. (“The only thing that’s certain about comic timing is that it’s essential to being funny”; Dean 2000, 125; “timing is everything”; Klages 1992, 13.) Attardo (2014) reflects in a later interview that “[w]hen we started out [with the 2011 study], we thought that this folk theory of timing was correct” (MacMillan 2017).
- 6.
The gag can be enacted in as little as 0.2 seconds (measured from gameplay footage captured at 60 FPS). YouTubers who hesitate, taking approximately 1.2 seconds or more to play out the segment, don’t seem to find the joke any less amusing.
- 7.
Where I use ‘input’ to refer to the player’s modification of the game’s internal state machine via a control interface, Grodal uses the word to describe the (human perception of a) comic stimulus.
- 8.
While not outrightly offensive, Attardo and Pickering’s (2011) stimulus joke falls short in this regard.
- 9.
Proponents of benign violation theory might respond that baby animals ‘violate norms’ by paradoxically inviting adoration and ridicule. While this is just about plausible, such a charitable interpretation seems to be precluded by the authors’ phrasing and stipulations.
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Murphy, D. (2022). Press X to Punch(line): The Design and Cognition of Interactive Gags. In: Bonello Rutter Giappone, K., Majkowski, T.Z., Švelch, J. (eds) Video Games and Comedy. Palgrave Studies in Comedy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88338-6_3
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