Making funny video games has been one of the loftiest goals for game developers since the industry’s earliest days. It’s true that games are more frequently designed to challenge reflexes, test strategies, and get players hooked, but infusing those technical elements with humor has become a timeless art form. While humor can ultimately only be interpreted by each individual player, what follows is a breakdown of different applications of humor in games, and examples of each that delighted players.
Absurd Situations and Hilarious Dialogue
Portal 2
Perhaps the most obvious means of developing really funny games is to create really funny situations. It’s a simple concept, but it has indeed resulted in many of the games we love to talk about with our friends. Who could forget navigating the challenges of Portal 2, caught in a battle between an antagonist AI from the previous title, now effectively existing in potato form and attached to your person, and a friendly AI driven mad by his own insecurities? Silently observing their thoughts between humorous announcements from Aperture’s eccentric founder, Cave Johnson, makes for a bizarre environment you never want to leave.
Parody
Dink Smallwood
By the 1990s, the game industry had been around long enough to establish certain devices and mechanics that emerged so often they eventually became ripe for parody. Robinson Technologies proved you can make a pretty funny video game at the expense of other games with Dink Smallwood, an action role-playing game that drew heavily from titles like The Legend of Zelda and Diablo. Though Dink contains loads of great jokes unrelated to anything but itself, the game is at its best when it points out some of the sillier aspects of the games before it. In one prime example, Dink walks into the home of an NPC, who demands to know why Dink would barge in uninvited. Dink makes it clear, presumably like so many protagonists before him, he has no idea why he wouldn’t be allowed to do that.
Player Effect
Five Nights at Freddy’s
Some of the funniest games manage to make us laugh using little or no humorous content at all. While this wouldn’t have been possible prior to Web 2.0, seeing how other players experience games has become an extension of those games. In the case of Five Nights at Freddy’s, watching someone play through a jump scare and scream and jerk and pee their pants can provide much heartier laughs than just about any game by comparison. This shift toward the collective community experience a game provides is the same reason no one wants to think about Leisure Suit Larry anymore. #awkward.
Comedic Mechanics
Kingdom of Loathing
It’s not easy for a PHP-based browser game with stick figure art to compete for a gamer’s attention, but that’s precisely what Kingdom of Loathing has done for over 14 years, while certainly achieving notoriety as one of the funniest games ever. The game doesn’t accomplish any gameplay miracles, it simply entertains its players with some of the most unique mechanics ever imagined. Players choose from classes such as Turtle Tamer and Pastamancer before setting out into the Kingdom where they’ll toss turtles, wear protective chef’s hats, and manage sub-stats like Chutzpah, Beefiness, and Sarcasm.
Good Ol’ Crass Humor
South Park: The Stick of Truth
Don’t confuse South Park’s immature subject matter with laziness or its simplistic art style with poor quality. South Park: The Stick of Truth is like playing a Triple-A RPG injected with a good season or more of a genuinely funny TV show, making it stand head-and-shoulders above most funny PC games. Sometimes old-school, wildly inappropriate jokes still hit the spot, and Stick of Truth has them in spades while being a legitimately fun game. It will be a long, long time before I let my kid play it—he basically won’t be a kid anymore—but I can’t wait to talk to him about it after.
You’ll probably note that many of the games above qualify for multiple categories, and you’ve almost certainly thought of a hilarious game I didn’t list. Perhaps the greatest thing about the funniest video games is debating their merits with friends and recounting our favorite moments.
So, let’s have it: What’s the funniest video game you’ve ever played?
