Comedy games are a tough genre that hasn’t really been cracked yet. Sure, they are a lot of games which are comedic and many style themselves are ‘comedy games’, a rare few actually achieve the status of being both a great game, as well as a funny one. Like with the majority of comedies that have come out on the silver screen which are just people telling jokes to camera, rarely do self styled comedy games actually use the mechanics and idiosyncrasies of games to tell their jokes. More often than not, a comedy game is just a game telling you jokes, rather than using the game itself to construct a joke and make it funny.

The problem is that many opportunities to tell a joke in a new way are missed by many games. Take Borderlands 2 for example, which basically just assaults you with references and memes to make you laugh, rather than using the game systems to make said jokes. Yes, they may do a quest where they take the piss out of Dark Souls by having you fight a red phantom or have you in a secret area where you shoot Creepers but you could just as well have them in a film and the ‘jokes’ would still work. There is nothing unique to the way that the joke is told, they are just showing you something that audiences may know and expecting to get a giggle from the sheer fact that it is there. It is exactly why Duke Nukem Forever is painfully unfunny, as it just has a Master Chief helmet in the background and expects you to laugh at just the fact that it is there, rather than making an actual joke.

It doesn’t making references to other games can’t be funny, it’s when comedy games solely rely on this type of humour to get all their laughs. You can only tell a joke so many times in the same way before you start to become tired. South Park: The Stick of Truth is an example of a game that does use game systems to make jokes, as well as making references and crafting hilarious set pieces but stick to hacky ‘gamer culture’ schtick in order to get easy laughs. You have the great joke of naming your character, for you to be only called Douchebag throughout the adventure, lampooning the whole idea of character creation in RPGs yet you have a whole plot point be about Nazi Zombies. We get it, Nazi Zombies were stupid and trying to make a joke out of it in 2014 is just lazy writing.

That is why many comedy games do not age well. So many of them are busy satirising the latest fad within triple A gaming or some recent event in the gaming world, that many of the jokes will not stand the test of time. You go back and play Conker’s Bad Fur Day and while the Great Mighty Poo is still hilarious, many of the other big set piece jokes fall completely flat. Again, you could quite easily watch a Let’s Play of the Stick of Truth or Conker, or just put the jokes in a different medium and they would still work. Nothing is inherently funny about playing the game and you probably won’t enjoy the experience as much the second time round, due to you having experienced all the gags.

Please. Don’t make meme games. I can’t handle how dank they are.

When games use their mechanics to construct the gags, that’s when you get experiences which will continue to be funny for years to come or if you pick it up again. It isn’t even that difficult, it just requires you to think about how you can make a joke besides saying or writing funny things. An incredibly silly example is in Sonic and All Stars Racing Transformed. I know explaining a joke is the best way to make it not funny but hear me out. When you go into the options screen and turn down the announcer’s voice, he yells ‘No!’ as you turn him down and then thanks you if you turn him back up again. A very simple gag but it uses the inherent absurdity of being able to toggle the volume of separate channels within an options menu and makes a joke about it. Drawing on the absurd nature of games as systems or subverting tried and true elements of the experience of playing games is a great way to make memorable jokes. The Stanley Parable is a masterclass in how to make a funny game by drawing on the ridiculous nature of games and player choice to make a series of gags. Portal 2 does it very well when Wheatley tries to get Chell to talk back to him and even though they aren’t all funny, Kojima’s numerous 4th wall breaks through the Metal Gear Solid series show how having a game be self conscious about it being a game can lead to very memorable situations.

Then, you get stuff like Surgeon Simulator, QWOP or Goat Simulator. These take the ‘use game mechanics to tell jokes’ idea and then run with it until the joke is buried 6 feet under in a lovely casket. The problem here is that they only have 1 gag and once you have got over the initial ridiculousness of trying to open someone’s head up by flailing a hammer about or seeing the antics a physics-defying goat can get up to, there is rarely anywhere else you can go besides making things more and more surreal. You can try and poke fun at other genres or whatever but you’re scraping the barrel so much that you’re through to the wood. Also, there is a certain element of cynicism to the joke simulator, that they are just made for Youtubers to mess about with and to make easy cash by churning out something intentionally buggy or poorly crafted. There is the whole notion of multiplayer sandboxes which just give you the tools to make your own fun and create something humorous yourself. This can sometimes fall into the same trap as joke simulators, where too much emphasis is put on making easy gags rather than creating a decent game where comedic situations are a possible outcome.

The comedy game genre is still something that needs work, as developers need to balance just writing funny things with using the unique aspects of video games to make players laugh. Some are getting there but too many go for the lowest common denominator whilst trying to make jokes and just end up creating an experience which barrages you with references in a desperate attempt to seem funny. Just no more meme games. No more.