Zany tone in IF?

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This may be a reflection of how I think more than anything, but I sometimes wonder if cracking a joke when the world isn’t great is a good idea. It almost feels like it’s belittling the plight of so many peers I know. I still make jokes once in a while, but I have to respect people who need to keep it serious and dour.

As for the actual topic on hand, I tried to write a zany Inform game after writing several bleak Twine games. I had this idea of a Neo-Confucian scholar in the Song Dynasty who will always transform into a slime with every turn he makes, kinda like Aisle but sillier. It was going to be my Single Choice Jam entry. I actually didn’t want to pigeonhole myself as the Depressed Southeast Asian Twine Creator Who Writes About Family Trauma, so this was my attempt to get out of it.

Unfortunately, a writing project I was in for months got cancelled and I was just not in the mood to write something zany. I closed the project because I was too glum about it. Some people can definitely work past it, but I can’t. The cancellation was too much a setback and I needed to reassess what I wanted to do. I ended up writing the bleakest family trauma story of them all (Chinese Family Dinner Moment). Woops.

I like my brain to be happier for a second because I do enjoy writing absurdist stories. But sometimes, I can’t really restrain my gloom and doom. It’s hard to read posts like this that end with “Sometimes you just gotta be silly” without feeling hurt. It would be easier if there was a miracle command like > go zany, but I didn’t want to betray my own feelings and torture myself into writing a zany parser game I would have bad memories about. Imagine if that game was popular and my experience was just dread. That dissonance would’ve been too much.

I’d like to write something zany, but I gotta be mentally prepared for it. I don’t think it’s that easy to allow myself to “be silly”. I’m sure I’ll make a silly game in the near future, but I’d like to first have a life with fewer mental shocks.

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I appreciate serious games, grim games, depressing games, dramatic games, etc. Just to chime in as someone who is, well, not exactly anti-zany, but zany-fatigued to some extent.

I enjoy playing lots of comedy games. I write comedy myself. But it can get old when everything is XYZZY-fied. Like putting the same ketchup on every dish. Sometimes it even feels like this is a requirement. Players will type XYZZY, so you’ve gotta code a response, right? And that steers the game forcefully toward zaniness. (I’m using “type XYZZY” as a stand-in for all the hi-jinks that players usually attempt, like singing, kissing, licking, and so on.)

Of course, you don’t have to code a response. I often don’t! If players get generic error messages for typing XYZZY in my games, that’s not an implementation oversight. That’s on purpose. But it is an uphill battle to take this approach. The battle’s not always worth it. I can sympathize with authors who get exhausted trying to climb that hill.

At the same time, I also think comedy is one of the more effective ways to deliver a serious message. People drop their guard, and then you can slide in! But comedy comes in many flavors, not just zany.

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And that’s ok, too. There’s really no need to police what people write, happy or unhappy.

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I think we’re moving into a conflation of Dark Subject Matter and a particular type of game/work that has emerged, that aren’t necessarily the same thing.

I guess I’d still point to my review of I’m Fine, and my talking about it, as me articulating the issue about as best I could (see topic Extremely Sad And Personal Games - Extremely personal and sad games - #11 by severedhand ).

These are all IF. How gamey are they? Some are, some aren’t. In calling them games (which we’ve all been doing throughout this topic) it’s hard to unload yourself from certain gamey expectations. If I find that, like in the case of I’m Fine, I’d find it pointless to review it as a game, then I’m unlikely to want to play it. I expect this is the kind of experience posters are referring to when they talk about a lot of dour games. There are more games with this particular nature appearing in IFComp. IF the question is, what can I do with unmediated nihilism, or someone else’s largely unmediated pain, I can’t review it. I’ve tried enough times. I’m not saying all such games are out at that position, because they’re not, but it is a spectrum.

One of those obvious disclaimers - I don’t think anybody should be writing anything or in any way they don’t want to write. It sounds too stupid to say it! But we all have to accept that whatever we do won’t be for everyone, whatever our turf. Overtly or unleaveningly depressing material is inherently a stronger bounce-off than most other kinds, probably for the positive reasons of looking after one’s own mental wellbeing. That’s human nature.

Au contraire, if you write ‘that kind of game’, and want to call it a game, you can probably view it as progress that nobody in this topic ever referred to it as anything else than a game. That would not have been the case a few years back.

-Wade

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This is the case in TV and elsewhere, but IF tends to be quite friendly toward lighter/more innocent/sillier content (this thread is full of examples). I’ve never seen a game criticized on this forum for being intended for or accessible to a younger audience. I guess I don’t see how that discussion is relevant to the thread, or how what you’re doing is different from the people you’re criticizing?

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Really? I found it easy! I’ve deliberately not been putting in XYZZY in any game, except my one explicitly silly game. Transcripts show me that people type it, see the reality of the particular game being enforced, then forget about it (okay, I can’t read their minds, but they don’t type into the notes ‘No XYZZY? You bastard!’)

-Wade

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I don’t think anyone would accuse me of being zany, but I always do the magic words and other expected parser chestnuts. I think of that as absurdism rather than zaniness. Something can be serious and still have jokes, just like life. Or serious and ridiculous, which is also like life.

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As I said, I’m using “type XYZZY” as a stand-in for a pervasive expectation of zaniness from certain players. If it’s easy for you to channel those expectations elsewhere, that’s good! I’ve struggled with it myself over the years, and I sympathize with other authors who might find the audience at odds with their games.

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Fair nuff, I just don’t know if it’s helping platform zany cartoony games by turning a thread focused on recommending them into a critique of darker/more adult games.

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Might not fit yalls definition of zany, but from recently reviewed ones (i.e. recently published games, most come from jams), I think these would apply?

Ok… so I think that’s enough for now. Most of the ones above have been published in the last year, almost only in jams (and some comps). There’s usually at least one silly entry per jam/comp I’ve reviewed since last year :woman_shrugging:
Either the premise is silly, or the writing is very funny (to me). Anyways, lots of absurd (from my PO).
So yeah…

Stay silly

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Totally understand it. It’s the “you can be silly if you wish it” tone that irritates me. The creative process can’t just be reprogrammed at will. This is the context of what I mean. Note that I have not really said anything about demanding people to like my depressing games. I’m just describing my own thought processes making a game and reading comments like that is just terrible.

Anyway, my “zany”, more lighthearted game recommendation is Rescue at Quickenheath. Cute game with some neat puzzles.

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OH MY GOSH I FORGOT THAT ONE :woman_facepalming:
It’s like the perfect (recent) example!

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Because I was reminded:

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I think this is true, which is why it’s often associated with preteens and teenagers making their first efforts at writing. I definitely went through that phase and maybe stayed in it longer than most, as is unfortunately immortalized on IFDB (though one of my ~wacky~ games isn’t currently available anywhere and I haven’t been able to bring myself to reupload it). But these days, as both a writer and a player, I’m kind of tired of the mode of IF where the main question the writer is asking at every step is “what’s the silliest, randomest, most incongruous thing I could throw in here?” It can work for me when it’s very short, like Boing!, which I did quite enjoy, but in a game that takes me more than about 20 minutes to play, the zaniness just exhausts me.

Which isn’t to say I don’t still enjoy humor and absurdism! It’s just that I prefer when the absurdity is built around a core of some real emotion or experience. A lot of things you have to deal with in life are weird and arbitrary and out of your control, like public transit or insomnia or job hunting or preteen social dynamics, and dialing up the absurdity can be a fun way to explore those things. (The actual execution of Aesthetics Over Plot only kind of half worked for me, in part because I thought it was too easy for the PC to succeed, but I appreciate what it was going for.) This kind of humor has a long history in IF, ultimately going back to Bureaucracy, I think.

All that being said, this is just a preference, not a statement that that mode of absurd humor is superior to well-executed pure zaniness. Some games that are too high on the zaniness scale for me are wildly popular, so clearly there’s something there that speaks to a lot of people.

Edit: I think the reason zaniness feels so alluring and doable to a newbie author is because (it seems to them) you don’t have to think about having a plot, a structure, themes, cohesive characters, a well-worldbuilt or well-researched setting, sensible puzzle design, any of that—you just have to keep having things happen, one after another, and as long as each of those things is sufficiently unexpected and weird, you’re achieving what you set out to do. And you have an automatic internal shield against any criticism you get, because if people are complaining that things are inconsistent or illogical, well, you did that on purpose! (Maybe it’s because I’m a bit thin-skinned that I spent so many years in the badly-executed wackiness zone myself?) But I think the most enjoyable wacky stuff does have some kind of solid throughline, whether it’s the emotional or thematic aspects I talked about above, or solid characterization, or well-designed puzzles with an internally consistent logic, or whatever else.

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