When I was 10 or 11, my father brought home two games for our IBM PC. One was Microsoft’s Flight Simulator; the other was Infocom’s Zork I. It took him a little while to explain the concept of a text adventure, and I wasn’t convinced. I figured I’d give it a try but was much more excited about the graphical game.
In the ensuing years, I played every game Infocom ever published at least once, almost all of them more than once, and many of them dozens of times. (And like music fans moving from vinyl to 8-track to cassette to CD, I’ve bought and rebought the games many times over.) I subscribed to The New Zork Times before a certain other newspaper got all tetchy and it was renamed The Status Line. I was a full-on Infocommie, a fangirl long before I ever learned the word. And incidentally, I played Flight Simulator once and then never again.
My entire gaming career has been an attempt to recreate the imaginative magic that interactive fiction engendered. From Myst to World of Warcraft, I’ve sought out the sense of adventure into which I was immediately immersed upon starting up an Infocom game. The Myst series came rather close, but a more conspicuous lack of humor would be hard to find, and even the most serious of the Infocom games were very funny at times, let alone the comedy titles. (There is still a thriving interactive fiction community, and the browser-based RPG Kingdom of Loathing puts a similar emphasis on writing, puzzles, and humor over a graphical experience.)
I’ve always remembered a certain “action sequence” from an Infocom game: a description of a roller-coaster ride in Sorcerer, the second game in the Enchanter trilogy. The sequence has no significance to the story other than to provide color and depth to a carnival area of the game, but I’ve never forgotten the way the verbal description evoked vivid, even visceral memories of the best roller coaster rides I’d ever been on.
That sequence was written by Steve Meretzky, a prolific and versatile contributor at Infocom. While he provided devious puzzles that completely suited each genre, be it science fiction or the Zork universe, and also successfully brought a darker sensibility to games like the dystopian A Mind Forever Voyaging, it’s impossible not to associate Meretzky’s name with the humor for which Infocom was famous. He is probably best known for co-writing The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy game with Douglas Adams, along with creating the comedy classic Leather Goddesses of Phobos and the sci-fi puzzler Planetfall, which featured the unforgettably funny and touching character of Floyd the robot. He has graciously accepted his role as game-culture hero, if his appearance in MC Frontalot’s video for “It Is Pitch Dark,” a paean to Infocom, is anything to go by.
Meretzky has continued to integrate humor into games like his Spellcasting series and The Space Bar. He was very kind to share some thoughts with Newly Nerfed on this subject.
Humor in Games
by Steve Meretzky
There’s not enough humor in electronic games. There are several reasons, mostly revolving around a self-replicating order. Most games treat their subject matter incredibly seriously…after all, ridding the world of Nazis and zombies is serious business. Most budding game developers arrive in the industry with an imagination colored by this limited landscape. “I loved Halo…and I want to write a game that’s exactly like Halo! Except I have this great idea for a new kind of flamethrower…”
Game industry execs compound the problem. They are an amazingly timid, visionless group, and can’t risk their development dollars on something that isn’t almost exactly like one of last year’s hits. So if someone comes to them with a game that’s humorous in tone, they look at last year’s lineup of hits, and slowly their brains come to the conclusion: “Uh, none of these hits was humorous in tone…so games that are humorous in tone don’t sell well…so, uh, you can’t have any money to develop this game.” They’re not very different from the book publishers that Douglas Adams once told me about; people who would say to him, “Hey, remember that book you wrote last year, that sold so well because it was nothing like anything that had ever been done before? Well, write us another exactly like that.”
Of course, there are shining lights in the darkness, such as Portal and the games of Tim Schaefer. And humor is such a strong performer in other media — film, TV, live performance, etc. — that I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before it breaks through the Neanderthal-manned Maginot Line of game industry execs. Until then, just do what I do, to turn both fortune cookie fortunes and bad game dialogue into something more entertaining: add “…with no pants on” to the end of every sentence.
