Why aren't developers creating comedies work best in games?

i thought sam and max was pretty hilarious ..strider1983

Yeah definitly. And you can bet both Vampyre Story and So Blonde will be hilarious

The funniest games I've played were the Mario & Luigi Superstar saga series. Some of the things in it were hilarious, but only Nintendo fans andnerds apply.

Phoenix Wright was pretty funny too, but the animations.

Chris Rock had a quote a while ago, and it's about movies, not games, but I think it applies. It went something along the lines of (and I'm paraphrasing) "When you're doing dramatic work, critics and fans will give you points for effort. With comedy, there's no A for effort. It's funny, or it isn't."

Any comedy writer will tell you that writing a successfully comedic story is an intensely difficult, and often frustrating experience. That's coming from someone who does comedy professionally. Game developers, by and large, aren't comedians. Hence why comedy in gaming is rarely attempted, and so often falls flat when it does. Often when games are funny, it's because outside writers are brought in, ala The Simpsons game and the like. Because let's face it: just because a dev team might have a few funny guys on it, that doesn't mean they can write jokes or have any sense of comedic timing. In fact, most times they flat-out don't.

Obviously there are those rare gems that remind you comedy in gaming is not only possible, but potentially plentiful. Tim Schaefer is an obvious pick, but there are others. The guys behind Portal, for example, and the current Sam & Max team seems exceedingly talented as well.

Again, comedy is just a challenging undertaking, possibly more so than standard dramatic fare, and it seems like most game developers aren't necessarily up for the task at this point. Here's to hoping that changes eventually.

Comedy is by far my favorite genre of film, so it's always bothered me that gaming has never quite gotten it right. There are a few exceptions, as is mentioned above, but for the most part, comedy and gaming haven't gotten along. If you look in blockbusters you'll see the basic genre's of film: action, horror, drama, comedy, etc. I think developers have hit on most of those genres (some more then others) but there's not a chance that when browsing for game on gamespot, I'd find a section titled comedy.

I know most developers aren't comedians, but I can't see why a development studio should have a kick ass team writing great stories but not have people making funny scripts. I think companies should hire outside talent to produce AAA comedy games. There's no reason the comedy genre gaming can't be as big and successful as in telivision and film.

I don't think the industry will change until some big developer goes off on a limb and spendis a ton of cash on a game centered around comedy, in order for things to change. The chances are dim but I hope to God it happens.

Just wanted to mention Radiata Stories. This is a wierd game because the first half of it was pure slapstick and comedy. Than at the mid point, the game starts to get all serious, which was extremely wierd, started to preach, have mature themes, etc. It suffered from a identity crisis.

I wonder what the developers were thinking when making this game. It's obvious that the writers didn't know how to craft a comedy ora drama and at the end, the game became so garbled that it was just unsatisfying.

I think it was one of the weirdest JRPGs I've ever played. The game looked cool and had wonderful graphics, but the story was just bizarre. I think, IMO, the game could've been a solid effort and better IF the devs. stuck with the comedythroughout the whole game.

Why they got all melodrama and serious is beyond me.

Well, Psychonauts was a quality comedy game. So was almost the entire Sierra and Lucasarts adventureback catalogue. That Harvey Birdman thing looks funny as hell also.

I don't know what to think about comedy games. The above examples prove thatthey can work, while being challenging and fun to play. On the other hand, if most game writers can make a mess of a simple story, we can't expect them to create good comedy.

Comedy is very challenging to write. The difficulty lies in getting people to think it's funny. Telling most of the stories in games today doesn't take too much, since oftentimes they aren't a big issue. Developers don't need to put too much effort into the writing, since most genres can excuse a bad story. But when a game attempts to be funny and fails, it brings down the overall experience. Sitting through mindless dialogue full of failed jokes isn't fun at all.

It's not so much that developers don't want to, it's just that comedy is difficult. Many games right now tend to focus more on the gameplay itself and give little (or at least lesser) thought to the story, dialogue, and characters. If you compare the stories in games to those in film and literature, there are very littlethat are really any good.

Games haven't quite gotten to the stage where the vast majority of developers will give a good deal of thought to the writing. We're getting there, but we haven't quite arrived yet. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see some more variety in the market. I'd love to see some great stories in the market. But developers don't seem to have gotten there yet.

comedy is extremly hard to write, just because ther are so many elemnts to it. Games will have some difficulty portraying pure comedy due to the lackof realism in the characters- half of the joke is what is unsaid, the eyes, faciel expressions and the (evil) comic timing. Get these wrong and a joke which could be superb falls short and should crawl under a rock.

To be funny you have to work with people who are professionally funny- that means hiring comedic writers, who specialise in the area. But even then, there are other problems to writing a GAME which is funny. Not everyone in the world has the same sence of humour. I for one, find Portal OK- its dry but it isn't anything i would smile about, but i have a friend who always has to supress a laugh when paying it. Like wise, i find Ratchet and Clank awesome, but he thinks its the worst script he has ever heard.

Also, comedy is very regional- sure, some people dont fall under the catagory of their "stereotyped humour", but some places in the world have verrry different humour styles to others. For example, Britain is percieved to like very dry, dark humour such as Extras, The Office as ell as outlandish humour which takes the mic out of any other nation, including itself. America is percied to have very direct humour with a punchline that sends you on the floor in fits- thats why the US version of the Office is not successful in the UK.

So, if your going to write a comedy game, which will cost thousands to produce, you would want a wide audience to like it. However, the chances are it will fall into a niche, where your audience is very niche who will apreciate your niche jokes and overall the nicheness will be niche.

One of the biggest hurdles facing comedy in gaming is a natural clash between a basic element of comedy and a basic element of gaming.For something to be funny thematerial needs to stay fresh. The problem with that is a lot of gaming elements require repetition (types of weapons, types of enemies, sound effects, etc.). So when some games try to pull off a game that is centered around ahumorous premise like Redneck Rampage, the jokes get old after 5 minutes because you've seen them all and 15 minutes into the game the things that made you laugh at first just become irritating.

Comedycan work in games. It worked in the classic PC adventure genre (i.e. Space Quest, Leisuresuit Larry, Monkey Island) because the story kept progressing, and you really didn't have any kind of filler like random battles like console RPGs do, so as long as the player could progress at a reasonable pace, the jokes could keep coming. As far as modern games go, mini-game centric games can pull it off with varying degrees of success like Raving Rabbids and Warioware because like with the adventure games you don't do any rehashing. You just move from one game to another, and hopefully you find something amusing about most of the mini-games. Modern RPGs could probably do it too, but that's one genre that tends to get very pretentious for some reason, so heaven forbid making a game that's meant to be funny. But FPS, fighting games, and several others will never be able to pull off more than an occasional joke due to the natural repetition required.

It's not that comedy writers in videogames are any less successful proportionately speaking than the dramatic writers. It's just that there's far fewer games attempting to be funny.

The other problem is that games are inherently built around repetition and limited abilities, whereas comedy requires constantly moving on to new things. This often leads to games that have funny writing and acting that has to fight against unfunny gameplay. There are ways to get around that, and graphic adventure games, a genre that has an invisible interface and mostly involves action/reaction gameplay, is an example where the gameplay itself can be funny, which is why that genre is proportionately more successful at comedic games than other titles. Above all, most games just don't design themselves, from the ground up, to be humorous, instead relying purely on the script. The ones that are built to be comedic, from the mechanics up, are far more successful.

Sam and Max is flat out not funny out all imo. Cliches stupid jokes!
If TeamFortress 2 had a single player i bet it would be one funny game already that at the start of its release TF2s multiplayer was quite hilariousbluebusiness

Sam and Max is anything but cliched. In fact, the script is quite conscious of cliches, and takes time to point them out and mock them. It's a rather bizarre criticism.

This game was actually funny. It was a complete comedy that was made to make you laugh.

It was a parody on RPGs and all the cliches. Some of the jokes were really hilarious and made me chuckle a bit. Here are some jokes:

• For example, when you steal a treasure chest from inside a woman's room, the narrator of the game starts to ask you, "Why are you stealing the poor woman's treasure?" Than the main character responds by saying, "It's there for me to take it, right?" That was pretty funny.
• Another joke was at a dungeon, the main character points out the lever that opens up the door. Than he says, "Why do they always put the lever on the outside? Shouldn't they put it in the inside so I can't get in?"

These were some of the jokes. The game purposely made fun of every RPG cliche in the book. And it was voiced by Cary Elwes so it was acted well.