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Can a Video Game Ever Be a True Comedy?

by | March 18th, 2013

Dark humor runs through Portal 2, the massively successful 2011 offering from Valve Software. The game's antagonist, GLaDOS (short for Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System), goads the player, pushing and prodding him or her along with an ever-present narcissistic, sarcastic, sinister wit voiced by Ellen McLain reading a script written by the legendary Erik Wolpaw. Wheatley, the enthusiastic sidekick in single-player mode, offers a light-hearted alternative to GlaDOS's dour musings. The pair combine to create a game that is exceptionally funny at times.


Portal 2, however, is not a comedy. The plot is dark and melodramatic, occasionally interspersed with moments of levity. But the video game, along with its predecessor Portal, is one of the funniest mainstream titles of all time. In the vast majority of games, any comedy comes as an afterthought or accidentally. Or worse as bad jokes jammed into cut-scenes or as out-of-touch dialogue that doesn't make sense given the constraints of the virtual universe that the designers spent hundreds of hours building.

The question is: why aren't games funnier? Put another way, why hasn't there been a Hangover for video games? The simple answer: If dying is easy, and comedy is hard, then creating comedy in video games is exceptionally difficult. "Comedy demands full attention in some way, and a game is always going to split your attention down the middle between the environment, the gameplay, the mechanics, and the story," Tom Bissell, a video game journalist and writer, says. "Your attention is chopped up into smaller pieces when you're playing a game." READ MORE

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