'The Looker': The Art of Parody Against the Menace of Goofiness

[Music] how many of you here have personally witnessed a total eclipse of the sun to stand one day in the shadow of the moon is one of my humble goals go s in life the closest I ever came was years ago the last time the path of the eclipse cut across the continental United States of course I formed no memory of this event as I crawled around in the grass with my pacifier and my sippy cup how could I have I was only 22 years old at the time but fortunately history has a way of repeating itself and if you are patient and put yourself in the right place at the right time you may just get

a chance to do it all over again in June of last year I released a game called the looker it was a direct parody of 2016's the witness the looker was well received and it garnered the attention of hundreds of thousands of players who have given it over 97% overwhelmingly positive reviews on Steam like its inspiration it's a firstperson puzzle Sol game set on an enigmatic Island full of mystery but unlike its inspiration it is chock full of novelty puzzles on the- nose intertextual references and tast Tastefully constructed weener jokes as I released the game I wondered idly why Video Game parodies were typically so rare little did I know all of this had happened before in 1996 six developer par

interactive released a pointand click parody of mist the famous contemplative puzzle game that was itself a direct inspiration for the witness the game was called pissed piss was a proper full-blown parody with all the big budget bells and whistles and incorporating a decent amount of full motion video Remember full motion video the development Studio boast an experienced team of writers and actors all under the opes of the Grammy Award nominated parodist and comedian Peter Bergman but parody is a slippery slope down which many a fine mind has slid to its Doom the clip I am about to show you is from that game if you value your peace of mind cover your ears now

yes I am the king of the game and I have many [Music] secrets are you still here can't you see that I'm brushing my kitties a man no no a king needs his privacy therefore we I mean I declare myself private no private your eyes do not deceive you this John Goodman needless to say pist has enjoyed a very mixed reception in the sense that some reviews are negative while other reviews are devastating PC Gamer calls it quote as funny as a wire pipe cleaner up the penis tube end quote how can such a promising project leave behind such a disappointing Legacy

in a world where the looker a game with no budget and little experience receives the highest honor that Metacritic users have to offer a 7.7 out of 10 the problem with piss wasn't lack of budget it wasn't lack of experience and as any big Labowski fan can tell you it wasn't lack of talent either now the problems of piss along with a lot of other recent comedy games are actually very con and mostly structural as such I will do my best to tell you what I've learned about comedy and parody through the process of developing the looker and highlight some of the core appeals and fundamental pitfalls that determine whether parody resonates with players or ultimately Falls flat to begin with parody is a form of scripted humor that delivers content for the player to engage with this is to say its content comes from a definite author oral voice and not from emergent

gameplay a game with emergent humor like quap is funny but what emerges from the gameplay mechanics generally cannot serve as parody because it doesn't have any plausible authorial intent parody and its evil twin satire both primarily function by subverting expectations in one way or another there are two ways of doing this exaggeration and inversion exaggeration involves taking a distinctive element of the source material and exaggerating it to comical proportions inversion on the other hand involves taking a distinctive element of the source material and switching it out for its opposite between these forms of subverting expectations exaggeration tends to seem more critical than inversion after all isn't it bad if something is ridiculous when it's missing and isn't it sorry isn't it bad if it's ridiculous when it's taken to its logical conclusion and isn't it good

if it's ridiculous when it's missing looking at parody this way can provide a pretty decent heris for understanding what might be critical and what might be flattering you could even use this lens to very neatly categorize satire as a special case of parody in which expectations are consistently exaggerated rather than inverted but this breakdown is a little too neat and it's not very reliable ultimately I think the real difference between parody and satire is its function its objective which is a lot harder to nail down and it can seem very different to different people in my view satire is the use of humor for the sake of commentary whereas parody is commentary for the sake of humor when I released the looker the most surprising thing about its reception other than the fact that there was one was that people's enjoyment of the looker seemed to be independent of what whether or not they liked the

witness I found this confusing why would the witness's critics show up for a rousing tribute to something that they didn't like or on the other hand why would its admirers show up for a blistering biting satire of something that they hold so dear the answer I found was this that the central appeal of parody is not the endorsement of a positive or A negative view of the source material but rather the feeling of validation that the player gets from realizing that they were not alone in seeing it that For Better or Worse somebody else saw what they saw too and when I would see a twitch streamer laugh at a joke in the looker they would often throw back their head and say that's so true most of the really impactful moments in the game tend to come from these references to under noticed or underd discussed characteristics in the source material these moments offer the player a chance to relive that

experience and to relieve some of the tension that they've been carrying around for so long these moments actually wouldn't even necessarily get the kinds of big Bodacious belly laughs that some of the more absurd jokes might get but making people laugh isn't the only thing that parody is good for as nor McDonald put it it's one thing to make people laugh it's another to make people smile if you look carefully at the looker you will find that the majority of the humor comes from one specific type of expectation subversion beos the sudden juxtoposition of the lofty and profound with the commonplace and completely pointless this is what made the witness such a good subject for parody the witness is a very reserved and contemplative game every time you solve a puzzle or learn something about what it has to say the game draws you further into a state of unresolved

reflection encouraging you to think ever more deeply about what its themes and its design imply most of the conversation around the witness also uses this tone which has only served to ratchet up the tension even further popular online video essays about it have tense and enigmatic titles like the unbearable now and a great game that you shouldn't play to me the witness and its surrounding discourse was like the first half of a roller coaster even the title of the witness has several interpretations Each of which Intimates a piece of its deeper meaning the title of the looker on the other hand barely even has one interpretation and it is so indecently literal that you must avert your eyes in the dread of awe this sense of bethos is the main engine of humor throughout the looker and it would wouldn't work if the

witness weren't so distinctive people like the witness because it brings them to such singular Heights and people like the looker because it drops them so pointlessly to such depths consider the following quotation for a moment the journey is more important than the destination but without a destination there can be no Journey these words may have been written hundreds of years ago by William Shakespeare but I found that the same is true true of parody when creating a parody it is poisonous to treat humor as the goal in and of itself this is a major misconception that will completely sync a parody because humor is not the goal the goal is to relate to the audience over the source material and humor is what naturally arises from that process this confusion is kind of like an is a versus has a confusion in software engineering developers go aiss

by thinking that parody is a form of humor that has references to the source material this is backwards really parody is a creative take on the source material that has jokes in it for example you should never think the evil thought to yourself I've come up with a joke how can I slot in references to the original game or genre a much better thought would be something like I noticed something interesting about the Original Gamer genre I'll bet other people did too how can I represent that in a funny way another major confusion that developers run into when trying to make a good parody is leaning on the shallow trappings of parodies that have gone before and trying to imitate them this is probably best Illustrated at the end of piss piss ends with a big theatrical musical number called I'm piered the lyrics contain a few shallow references to miss but it's mostly just John

Goodman listing off the reasons why he's pissed deadend jobs consumerism his girlfriend smashing his hoochie coochie lamp Etc you start to figure out pretty quickly that the point is not to parallel Mist but to follow in the footsteps of broad burlesque vaudvillian parodies or farces with over the toop blowout musical numbers at the end like Blazing Saddles or The Rocky Horror Picture Show P's Creator Peter Bergman had his roots in the theatrical comedy world and obviously he had a firm handle on what parody meant there but as a result the game ended up see seeming a lot more steeped in Show Business than in gaming uh and this did not seem to resonate with players it seems to be a common complaint with piss PC Gamer writes it's not actually a game it's simply a series of rendered slides and sequence

the director Quenton Tarantino has said that when you are trying to present a new Twist on something familiar whether it's a stock character or a movie genre it's still necessary to quote deliver the goods that fans of the original text or genre enjoy and expect when I mentioned this to my older sister she rolled her eyes New York and told me that all film students have already heard this a million times but it Bears repeating one more time because the same applies to games in keeping with this rule the looker needed to succeed not only as a funny comedy game but also as an interesting puzzle game in its own right during development I never stopped looking for gameplay ideas that I thought were interesting given the design constraints since a core appeal of the witness was the creative reframing of its puzzle mechanics it was important for the looker to reframe its own puzzle mechanics in as many ways as possible possible it had to tell its jokes

through the gameplay itself and not just through animations or novelty multi media assets or cutcenes as I mentioned earlier the main tool of parody is the subversion of expectations this is something that is easy to do once but it's very difficult to do over and over again for a joke to land there has to be a sense of contrast let me tell you a story one time when I was very small my older sister and I were watching a movie it was a kids movie so the main character got out of quite a few scrapes by tickling his as salant until he was incapacitated this went on until he came across a hired bodyguard who was completely unfazed by the tickling I turned to my sister and asked why he wasn't laughing she paused the movie and explained to me me that bodyguards Secret Service and all other

manner of Security Professionals all had to undergo a secret training exercise they take them into a room and tickle them and they laugh then they tickle them more and they laugh more and they keep tickling them and tickling them unrelentingly they tickle them pain coloring the laughter where Joy should have been and they tickle them she said Gra until it isn't funny anymore this is what you do when you put a bunch of jokes all in a row the players shouldn't see the punch line coming a mile away ideally they shouldn't even see that a punch line is coming a mile away if a player can be sure that a joke will come it will have a lot less impact when it does so you have to remain unpredictable and break up the flow in order to bring the players expectations closer back to B

Baseline recent comedy games have been falling short in this regard due to some overly simplistic assumptions on one hand I've seen a lot of forum posts and advice from experienced game developers telling new developers that comedy Games should be whacky the graphics should be carony and the gaml should be fun and frivolous on the other hand there's also a c Counter Culture of games that employ poorly drawn or out-of-place elements to play up the post factor but funny or intentionally low-effort content still requires contrast to be effective quote where this is not kept in mind there is no true humor but only an infernal clamor and ranting Sir Francis Bacon the looker has been called a post but it can only get away with having janky elements by supporting them structurally with other elements that

provide a sense of contrast for example the witness has very elegant and forgiving feeling puzzle screens with a pleasing minimalistic visual design the looker inverts this by having drastically inelegant Bare Bones scribbling around on Microsoft Paint looking puzzle screens and instead of having an original abstract puzzle design they are all mazes just mazes that follow the same gameplay rules as a chili kids menu or a field of corn however these crummy looking puzzle screens are couched within a world that is relatively High Fidelity and does actually somewhat resemble the witness this helps to remind the player of some of the original games gravitas and reset some of the players expectations closer to Baseline if the looker hadn't included some high effort content to offset the low effort nonsense it would have gone stale like a bad stick of gum

and Fallen dead slain by the tireless armies of goofiness there's also a major general principle that I need to mention not because it's Unique to parity it isn't but because it is extremely tempting in a work of parody to violate this principle by accident you should always respect the player's time under all circumstances and maintain a decent payoffs per minute average whether those payoffs come in the form of jokes genuine challenges or just chill exploration and reflection [Music] time it's easy to violate this principle by trying to make a certain point or strike a certain tone like one of exasperation for example if in the witness there are several laser cubes

when one is activated it turns on orients its laser toward the target and then turns it on it does all of this really really slowly I hadn't heard anyone talk about this before so I decided to put a laser cube of my own in the looker you may notice a couple of extra steps obviously the looker exaggerates the slowness of the laser but instead of subjecting the player to a full minute and a half of uneventful animation to make its point the looker still finds a way to hold the player's interest by presenting several gratuitous steps in the activation process so it still is actually delivering payoffs and respecting the players's time even when it's pretending to waste it it is important to keep player motivation in mind too parodies are based on scripted content and if players like your game they won't don't want to miss anything fear of missing out and

completionism can become major factors sauren Johnson famously observed that given the opportunity players will optimize the fun out of a game some of you may be tempted to roll your eyes San francisc and tell me that every game designer has already heard this a million times but it's completely true and not completely obvious this observation still applies when the object of the game is to take in all of the interesting content that the game has to show you if players are led to believe that they might find morsels of good content by hunting around everywhere their trust that you know what you're doing will lead them to waste a ton of unfun time hunting for it it's not their fault for wasting their time it's the designer's fault for teaching them too in parody your license to subvert expectations is very far-reaching and it will become tempting in to subvert some expectations that are actually

loadbearing and indispensable to the game's structural Integrity the most important set of expectations that is typically not suitable for subversion is the input output grammar of the game in order to maintain clear input expectations from the player their action space should always be clear while developing the looker I thought about making certain objects in the world secretly interactable by clicking on them in an homage to older pointand click type games this would have subverted the expectation that only puzzle screens are interactable it might even have made for a funny joke however it would have accounted for very little payoff relative to the immense structural damage it would have caused the game making the player suspect that it might be useful to spend time hunting for more interactable objects the players fomo will compel them to interrogate literally L every object for a good payoff the same goes for an idea

like including a false wall with an Easter egg behind it the player will instantly start to slam into every wall in the game scrabbling around in the dirt for one last desperate scrap of content it's also important to uphold certain output expectations from the player if the player does something that they're supposed to do they will expect something to happen in order to tell them that it's time to move on to the next thing if this is not communicated they will feel like they're missing something and will not and they will waste time looking around before supposing that is time to move on the looker never tries to subvert this output expectation but unfortunately it did still managed to break this rule after finishing all the puzzle pages in a particular book in The Labyrinth an achievement pops up and the player is now supposed to be armed with the knowledge that they need to finish a similar puzzle elsewhere in the game because the purpose of this book is to

teach the player a puzzle rule through trial and error when it's completed it just starts over again from the beginning in case the player wants to test their conclusion further but this also deprives the player of the feedback that they've come to expect from the game so they persist in trying to look for more clues sometimes they solve the first few puzzle Pages again to see if something's changed but eventually they give up and move on feeling unsa ified hopefully by now I have demonstrated that parity relies on structural elements to support its fundamental appeal good parody makes use of humor that grows organically from a central relationship with the source material it does not start with humor and then attempt to justify it with references from The Source material good parody is a creative Twist on a worker genre that still has to as Tarantino put it deliver the goods that

fans show up for in the first place and make good on its core promises good parity remains unpredictable and takes the time and effort needed to regrow the game's sense of tension and contrast before harvesting it for a joke and good parody respects the player's time it is careful not to in a fit of giddy exuberance damage the input output grammar of the gaml and it is careful not to hide content in such a way that players will feel compelled to waste time looking for more for those of you who may want to make a parody yourselves I have one more piece of advice parody is something that you have strong feelings about and make a game that you would love to play make yourself laugh don't appeal to the multitudes by jumping on a hot Trend but appeal to someone who is just as interested in the source material As You Are if the stupid joke that you spent 10 months on lands with them then all of it

was worth it one more thing before I go in April of 2024 there will be a total eclipse of the sun visible over the continental United States at that time I will make the journey to its path in order to see Nature's greatest work of parody our moon will perform the ultimate subversion of human expectations the ultimate Act of inversion as The Shining disc of our only Sun becomes the darkest spot in the sky it is safe to look directly at the sun in that moment of totality and at the same time to wonder hopelessly at the Dark Side of the Moon maybe for the first time you can be sure that everyone around you is seeing what you're seeing that you are not alone as you

ustruck cast your Clear Eyes heavenward toward the world's most magnificent pair of [Applause] balls [Applause] I have uh do I have time for Q&A okay we have a little bit of time for Q&A here okay so I just wanted to say I've been telling my co-workers that the my office has heard the shipboat uh joke like at least five times because I since I heard it I I knew that was the best joke I ever heard I was about to read it

here but I'm going to spare you from that so I want to to wanted to ask how did that particular J joke came to be because the setup is so good the punch line is so good I love that joke so much without spoiling it which joke was it again uh the one that starts talking about a sh owner oh my god oh yeah so that's what I'm talking about with like under noticed or underappreciated parts of the source material that was a particularly distinctive audio message from the witness that really stuck in my mind for a long time so it was kind of natural that it would come out in the looker just in some form um so I found like a hook where uh it started going on for a while and I kind of like lost the train of thought with my metaphor so the way that you would approach like turning your observation into a joke like that is what's the central thing that's like

distinctive about what I found so interesting about the source material which was like the ship owner Parable and I thought like what's the dumb version of that Parable that I can tell for a joke so that's kind of what my thinking was thanks hi is this on okay um one of my favorite jokes in the looker is the firstperson shooter reference uh I think comes out of nowhere and always makes me laugh uh and my favorite part of the witness was also the firstperson shooter section um I wanted to know how far can you go pulling in like joke mechanics from other games before you get too far off of the source material if that makes sense uh so that was actually that was actually um not really really meant to be apart from the source material there's another

part that that is similar that was that I'll I'll touch on but the actual motivation for that was um uh Jonathan Blow mentioned that a lot of players this was feedback he didn't expect from players they they kept expecting like a jump scare like they kept expecting this like silent island with with nothing going on to like suddenly there was going to be a jump or a monster or like something like there was an eerie feeling on the island so I I tried to just like satisfy that with like like a ghost comes out of no like all that stuff so um that was actually the motivation behind that joke there's another part earlier on which was um it was kind of just a a reference to I'm talking about like the the pickup boxes um that was kind of just a a joke of like what's the opposite of a puzzle game it's like a boomer shooter where you're like picking up like weapons and ammo you never use it for anything anything but like you got it and it's floating there and and you're

ready thank you two more questions amazing talk uh it's finally great to find someone who likes dick jokes almost as much as I do thank you uh I wanted to ask uh just how much did you study the witness because clearly there is just so many references what is your hourly play time I'm so curious uh are you asking my hourly count in the witness uh steam uh might have had an overflow error uh I I played a lot of the witness and that's it was really just like playing the witness a lot and having that um just having it percolate in my mind a while that uh it was very natural for me to make these references and to try and like express some of these observations that I wasn't necessarily seeing observed elsewhere like it wasn't really part of the conversation but it was like an elephant in the room in my mind at least

um so uh yeah the there were some particular Parts especially the art style where I had to do a lot of like side by side comparison and really try and like nail that in order to get the contrast between like we're in the witness but also like things are going in a very non-witness Direction um so yeah I had to do all kinds of stuff of like uh just tabbing into the the witness and then tabbing into the unity editor just to be like okay is this close or the color is close like is that all working so that was kind of my process interesting you poor soul thank you uh hi um I was wondering based on your portfolio which I just Googled um most of your work is pretty like your previous work is pretty straight laced and like serious from what I could tell so I was wondering what kind of pushed you to jump into the comedic cess pool

great question um it's a very comfortable cess pool um what inspired me to do that was actually I was making like uh at GDC I've seen like all these people who are presenting their uh fiveyear seveny year I put my whole self into that game game uh like this is the ultimate game and I'm G to start it right off the bat um and sometimes that works and sometimes uh you realize that level design takes a really long time and you start to uh run into some realities of how how much bandwidth you actually have as a human um that's what happened with me I was working on like a like it's going to be like Skyrim and Dishonored and it's going to be all these things in one and then I'm going to put Mass Effect on it uh and with you can turn back time with braid like uh it was going to be all all those things and then I was like I kind of got some of

the mechanics working and then I was like oh I have to do level design I have to do audio design I have to make a game so it got ridiculous and I started like kind of thinking of other ideas like what's the dumbest idea I can think of it's like well the answer is the looker that was the dumbest idea I could think of so I kind of like had these ideas that like a few things made me laugh and then um they just like uh started accumulating in my mind until I was like oh I think I should make a prototype of this and then I got to kind of like cheat on my main project with that this like other project that was more fun and interesting and uh it ended up holding my attention a lot better thank you all right I think that's all the questions we [Applause] have