I think in comedy, zaniness is the easiest thing for anyone to attempt. That doesn’t mean it’s easy to do well, no easier than any other kind of comedy. But for the majority of people, making any other kind of comedy requires craft that may be beyond their reach.
I’m mostly talking about pop culture today, not zaniness in IF in particular, where most of us are older, and there are the parser-particular issues you folks have already described. But the YouTube videos that fill our world are wall-to-wall people trying to get your attention with (a) clickbait, then (b) zaniness. Zaniness has become the most common mode, both to use and receive, for anyone who lives somewhat on the internet. I think that’s also why middling zaniness is so common in middling games.
I definitely think there’s something in this idea of zaniness being a kind of default mode. I remember that was a (valid!) criticism of Calm, one of my earliest parser efforts. It had a bleak postapocalyptic setting but there was a lot of “screwball” humour too: Jenni Polodna said it was “like Simon Pegg remade Children of Men”.
Apocalyptica can definitely be intentionally wild and wahoo like in the Gamma World RPG, but when the author hasn’t really given any thought to the mood they want to instil, they can end up with these unintentional tonal mismatches, and undermine their own work.
I think parser games in particular lend themselves to zaniness both due to mechanics and due to established convention.
When players can type anything, many will type nonsense. Even if the game itself is serious, even if it only responds with an error message, it now has a moment of absurdity plonked down into the middle of it. And if a game rewards silly commands with a unique response, that incentivizes the player to keep typing silly things.
Historically, certain silly commands have been ingrained into the culture surrounding the medium. A lot of players will automatically type XYZZY as one of their first commands, for instance. This is an almost-inevitable injection of “zaniness” into the text, whether the game benefits from it or not.
It’s an uphill battle to push back against these player impulses. Easier for games to just roll with them instead.
Parser meta-snark also kind of permits a bit of humility and acknowledgement on the author’s part by allowing them to lampshade something that might twiddle someone’s suspension of disbelief.
>PUT COATRACK IN BACKPACK
Oh. You want to insert that ten pound bit of furniture into a two-pound bag. Wonderful. While that’s logistically impossible in the real world, this is a game and I’ll allow it: After several minutes of sweaty gymnastic physical labor and some elaborate swearing and less-than-constructive argument among yourself and all inventory bits involved (the hurt feelings will eventually be resolved during professional counseling) you finally manage to offer some genuine supportive encouragement and gentle love-language to facilitate the entire coatrack fitting entirely into the backpack in denial of all laws of physics. Nice job!
While I think there’s a place for serious games, I find myself gravitating towards the hey-we’re-having-fun category. Real life is serious enough, I go to games to relax.
In fact, this is a mild criticism I have with modern IF. More than once I’ve looked at a list of grimdark comp winners and thought: I don’t want to play any of this. Sure, they’re excellently crafted, but why do I want to play something so dark?
I do this with movies. Gritty, dark and serious reality-based dramas: You’ll never catch me watching those. Horror and apocalypse movies work because they are still a form of escapism and fun. Being scared can be fun, but being depressed never is. I think this is why I lost interest in The Walking Dead after a while: When it became more about how crappy people can be to each other than about the undead things shuffling around.
Huh. Can you clarify which comps you’re talking about? I only went through the last 9 years of IFComp and Spring Thing before I got bored, and… all but two of the IFComp winners are the usual lighthearted puzzlers. If you go down the top 5 there are some dark ones, but they’re in a distinct minority. Spring Thing skews a little more serious but even there, comedies and straight adventures or mysteries pretty well outnumber anything else.
IFComp
2023: Dr. Ludwig and the Devil
2022: The Grown-Up Detective Agency
2021: And Then You Come to a House Not Unlike the Previous One
2020: Tie between The Impossible Bottle and Tavern Crawler
2019: Zozzled
2018: Alias the Magpie
2017: The Wizard Sniffer
2016: Detectiveland
2015: Brain Guzzlers from Beyond!
Spring Thing
2023: Protocol / Repeat the Ending
2022: Bones of Rosalinda / Fairest
2021: Fish & Dagger / The Weight of a Soul
2020: 4x4 Galaxy / Hawk the Hunter / JELLY
2019: Among the Seasons / The Missing Ring
2018: Illuminismo Iniziato
2017: Niney / Bobby and Bonnie / Guttersnipe: Carnival of Regrets
You know, I’m sort of reluctant to offer a bunch of examples, because I don’t want the authors to get discouraged. I wouldn’t want one of my games to show up on someone’s “I found this game depressing” list.
Some games are written so the author can talk about mental illness, often through the lense of their own experience. I think there’s a lot of value to that - seeing someone else’s perspective promotes understanding.
Perhaps my recent experience is shaded a bit. This week, I was playing an acclaimed game from a few years ago, and it suddenly went VERY dark; unexpectedly so. (Though I might be slow on the uptake here, I was avoiding spoilers so I didn’t read many reviews.)
I write depressing games and so I know for sure they are showing up on this list for many people. I think those of us who write depressing games know it. This is not to say you need to list anything if it it makes you uncomfortable; it’s just that those of us who write dark shit tend to know we do. My games are not for everybody, for sure.
I am obliged to agree with all of the above, not least of all because my avatar is Guybrush Threepwood stuffing a Great Dane into his inventory. I also enjoyed a similar gag in Simon the Sorcerer where he pulls out a whole ladder from his pointy hat (Simon’s magical powers were seemingly limited to having infinite carrying capacity).
As I noted in my blog article on this, I think Monkey Island can get away with a significant amount of zany humour because it’s resting on the solid bones of a pirate adventure story. Each game has a real plot, characters who want things including a villain, stakes at play. There’s a lot of silliness to the humour, it doesn’t have that unpleasant sarcastic meanspirited edge that mars Simon the Sorcerer (or worse, those Deponia games), which makes it more charming.
Unlike the totalising zaniness of Superhero League of Hoboken, you can immerse yourself in the world, it’s not just a puzzle-box littered with banana peels. Having decent characters is probably doing most of the heavy lifting here. There’s a similar dynamic I think at the heart of the appeal of a lot of the light comedy adventure games that have won the IFComp.
I noticed while playing this year’s IGF games (visual novels and narrative indie games), that a great number of them were about pandemics, climate disasters, exploitative capitalism, and/or the end of civilization.
This is not a surprise. People are thinking about this stuff right now. It’s scary. It’s current topics. You may want to deal with the scary stuff by playing games that are about anything else, and that’s valid, but you have to understand that some people think the other way.
As one of the people who is mentioned indirectly in the Neo-Twiny chirp, and someone who writes grim games in general (Protocol, etc.), I am confused by your asking of “Do authors nowadays think they need to make a dark game for it to be worthwhile?” – do you think authors look at the state of the world and find themselves and their work not to be reflective of it? Some people turn to humor. Some delve into the darker aspects. Others still simply want to make a game. All IF is worthwhile, dark or not – authors are still engaging with the act of creation, and that’s enough.
In my opinion, if you don’t like grim games, I recommend you seek out games that fit your idea of what you feel IF should be and leave those who choose to write and enjoy “grim” games alone.
