The Killing-It Fields
A lot of video games can make you laugh. But only South Park: The Stick of Truth, says a Tonight Show writer, can make you funny.
By Mike Drucker
Illustration by Victor Kerlow
IN REVIEW:
South Park: The Stick of Truth
(Obsidian Entertainment)
Here’s a made-up quest: You’re a waiter who has to deliver a banana cream pie to a very stuffy old man. The pie takes up three pounds of your inventory, but that’s okay. You can carry about 150 pounds of pies in your backpack before you walk slowly like people do when they have heavy backpacks.
You have four actions available to you, pie carrier:
1. You may throw the pie at the stuffy old man’s face.
2. You may eat the pie in front of the stuffy old man.
3. You may lay the pie on his table and let him enjoy his meal.
4. You may leave with the pie and continue on the main quest to find your father.
Which do you choose?
You’ve got some good funny options in front of you. Some seem a little boring. But laying a pie on someone’s table and letting them eat it is funny in its own way — especially if you just watch. You’d have to watch to know he enjoys it. That’s “creepy funny.”
And that’s the big, sucky part about making a funny video game: choice. You can give players lots of funny choices, but they might skip your hard-earned jokes. Or you can make a hilarious story that hits all the comedic beats, but the humor is going to amount to a commentary track on an otherwise straightforward game.
Even Kid Icarus: Uprising, a game for which I helped write the English-language script, was more of an action game with funny commentary than a comedy you interacted with. My job at Nintendo on that game wasn’t much different than my job now as a writer on The Tonight Show: I write jokes and people say them. The audience can laugh, but they can’t really interact. Unless they muted the flying angel Pit, which, listen, I totally understand.
The Portal games face the same problem. Both Portal and Portal 2 are hilariously written — and include jokes far better than anything I could ever write — but the game and the narrative are not interwoven. I rarely felt like my puzzle-solving had anything to do with my harassment by the robots in each game. Both the jokes and the puzzle-solving are outstanding — that’s really worth mentioning again — but they never felt connected.
That’s what makes South Park: The Stick of Truth remarkable. It’s the funniest game to ever allow the player to participate in the comedy. The game is funny and you get to be funny and that makes it more funny. It’s the best straight man simulator of all time. Even a straight man—or woman or whatever; it’s an outdated term—is funny because he or she gets to respond genuinely to the situation.
Giving the audience choice makes comedy harder. When Will Ferrell says that “Milk was a bad choice!” in Anchorman, it’s funny because he — obviously — made a choice that most people wouldn’t. But Ron Burgundy didn’t make the choice thinking it was funny. His character made the choice because that’s what his character thought was a good drink to have on a sunny day and then something unexpected happened.
I know this looks like I’m splitting hairs.
But if Anchorman were made into a video game, most designers would either make the milk choice a mandatory accident (you pick up a bottle of milk and it’s consumed at a funny moment) or something to be decided to do (you pick up a bottle of milk and you can drink it in during the hot day scene).
The problem with the first is that it removes comedic agency. You’re not getting to be funny so much as moving a cube to a special spot and then listening to someone tell you a joke. The problem with the second option is you see the joke coming. And you might not be doing what the designer thought was funny, so you don’t get a response from the system.
This happens a lot in Western role-playing games like Fallout, where you might be given a choice that you think is funny but the game takes seriously. Or a choice where you want to be serious, but the game has entered a “funny moment” with a wacky character who will say something silly no matter what. Both are immersion-breaking.
South Park: The Stick of Truth handles this by giving you a series of comedic choices that all fit and work within the framework of an established world. There is no “funny choice” and “serious choice.” It’s a role-playing game in the most literal sense. You’re a South Park character. You don’t even need to know South Park to feel involved in the universe. I’m only a semi-regular viewer. I’m sure I missed jokes.
(Whether it’s a good role-playing game in the traditional sense is up for debate. I can’t tell you how many pixels are in the graphics folder or how many sound bits are saved onto the mega drive. I’m also gonna write “#GamerGate” here so this article comes up in more search results. You’re welcome, Matter.)
In Western role-playing games, you typically start off by designing your hero. It’s a common joke among players — you spend more time designing the look of your character than you spend actually considering the choices that character will make. Three hours to create an elf with green hair, half a second to decide whether that elf and her hair will help save a burning village.
South Park plays off that by giving you the same great choices and — of course — the ability to name your character. Yet after Cartman asks for your character’s name, he dismisses you as “Douchebag.” And that’s your name. All that effort and you’re still slotted into the game world how the designers wanted you to be.
It deflates the character creation process and the tradition of “the chosen one” in games. Because if you like movies where a character is “the chosen one,” then you should play literally every single game where someone holds a sword. No matter what you look like, no matter what your race is or the backstory you choose for characters to respond to, you’re still, generically, “the chosen one” or the “Dovahkiin” or some warrior legend.
Throwing out the choice in South Park is what makes it funny. The straight man has been deflated. You (and your character) act in the way you’re expected. You make a character and that character’s authority will be respected. And then you’re “Douchebag.” The game excels at that. You think you know what you’re choosing, but something else happens to overturn the table.
The indie hit The Stanley Parable does something similar. Although its merits as a game are vehemently debated — there’s a civil war among gamers about how many bullet wounds you need in an interactive entertainment product before it can be inducted into the genre — it generates its comedy by introducing a narrator who responds to every player choice. If you don’t leave the room when The Stanley Parable starts, the narrator makes fun of you for not leaving the room. If you follow an achievement’s direction to jump a certain number of times, he will ask you to keep jumping just to see if you’ll do it. There’s no real story to speak of. The game is really more of a meta-commentary on how we blindly follow directions in (seemingly) interactive media.
Both The Stanley Parable and South Park make you feel like you have a choice, even when you really don’t. It’s a little like one of those cow-hugging machines, but without the slaughter at the end.
The surprise of a joke in both games works so well because you’re set up as a straight man within the universe. You’re not the wacky character in South Park. You’re not random or weird. You’re set up to be the normal one (as far as normal can be in South Park). So when the world changes on you, the joke works even better. Because you were just doing what you were asked.
South Park: The Stick of Truth isn’t the first funny role-playing game. There are lots. I probably forgot yours. But unlike A Bard’s Tale or Cthulhu Saves the World, the humor in South Park doesn’t come at the expense of the world. The game engages player choices humorously while remaining a cohesive whole. That makes the jokes less random. It’s not a game that is funny. It’s a comedy.
And that’s what makes South Park succeed. Well, that and it’s funny that there’s a job class called “Jew.”
Presented by Matter
Follow Matter on Twitter | Like us on Facebook | Subscribe to our newsletter
