There's Goofs in Them Thar Hills: The West of Loathing Approach to Comedy in Games

[Music] hi everybody I'm Zach Johnson I'm the creative director of asymmetric we made a game 15 years ago that some of you might remember called kingdom of loathing I was a browser-based multiplayer multiplayer role-playing game stick figure art a lot of goofy jokes and a couple of years ago a couple of years ago a few months ago forgot how long it's been a couple years ago we started working on a follow-up game west of loathing a few months ago we released it it's a lot of the same team and common a few new people brought on to make this but yeah that's that's who I am and what we're doing because talking about comedy is of one of the least funny things I can imagine doing it when they asked me to do this talk I was I kind of didn't want to and then the more I thought about it the more I didn't want to and then in February I got lucky because Tim

Schafer accidentally wrote my entire talk for me in this tweet and that's that's pretty much the that's pretty much the secret like we decided when we started making this thing that it was going to be a comedy game it wasn't gonna be an adventure game or an RPG with comedy elements but it was going to straight-up be a comedy game instead of a game with jokes in it which happens all the time this was sort of a game made out of jokes and so we didn't like consciously arrive at a bunch of bullet point lists of how we were doing this right we went when it came time to write this talk which was like wait how did we do like what was our approach to this and we kind of started with the the fundamental basis of all of the writing that happens in the game is this relationship between the narrator and the player because it's a Western RPG in both senses the the character we wanted

as much as possible for the character to just be a kind of a cipher and avatar of the player we didn't want to have they didn't have a real strong character they didn't have strong opinions about things like we wanted to write them as the the way that you want to write or the way that we wanted to write it which was sort of sort of neutral and friendly and like you can make some assumptions about them like they want to be here you know they like their parents they don't like being annoyed or beaten up or whatever but for the most part and just let the player kind of inhabit that character but the narrator and so this is nothing super novel I think if you looked up narrator in the dictionary it would probably just say this but the narrator is me and and rif the other writer sort of talking to the player but what's cool about that is that it allows us to just kind of treat the narrator as a character and because we've been doing this for so long it's a character that we've been developing for 15 years and having the entirety of the sort of non

spoken text in the game be a dialogue between us and the player in the form of the player character has a lot of advantages in in terms of being able to just cram jokes into literally everywhere like every piece of text you see in the game whether it's in the options menu item description exposition about what happens when you open a door or whatever it's all this character that you get used to and so literally every piece of text becomes the opportunity for us to at least try to be funny it's a real quantity over quality kind of approach but it works because it you know if you have a game with four jokes in it and one of them is bad your game is only 75% funny if you have a game with a thousand jokes in it and 250 of them are bad then your game is 75% funny the narrator as a sort of like honest character and honest reflection of who we are as writers also lets us be a little self-deprecating about stuff which is a fantastic way to cover up fundamental flaws with your

game act like they're on purpose and like they were we meant to do that because isn't that funny you don't want to overdo it but honestly because of the way the game looks people come in with a set of expectations that is not this is gonna be this amazing sweeping epic thing right and so it's okay to be a little goofy about it because it is a little goofy like it's not it's not about being the biggest video game that it can be it's about sitting around with us now in a fun conversation having the narrator talk to the character as its own character lets you also you don't want to tell the character you don't wanna tell the player character how they feel right but what you can do is say wow that was pretty scary huh that's saying you know well if that had happened to me I would be pretty angry right now how do you know how do you feel about that and it lets you it lets you convey emotion and opinions about stuff without undermining the players ability to inhabit the player character and the other the nice thing about that is when it's so silly it also doesn't

have to be consistent like if the narrator likes ketchup if when it's funny for the narrator to like ketchup they can not like ketchup later if it's funnier for them to not like ketchup depending on what you're trying to do with ketchup typically in interactions between the player and the narrator we have the we have player as kind of a straight man and the narrator just sort of messes with you and you push back against it and that's where a lot of the humour of that interaction comes from every once in a while and I think I do this a little bit more than RIF does I like to give the player the opportunity to be the sort of annoying kid brother that just kind of repeats everything that the narrator says until the narrator gets really aggravated and you move on from there but for the most part when the entire game takes place in this kind of jokey buddy-cop sort of conversation between the narrator and the character just the default means of exposition for what's happening and the game becomes an opportunity for for comedy and also sometimes so there's a moment in the in the prologue of the game where we introduce the sort of minor equivalent

of a morality system we have where there's this guy sleeping outside of a outside of a cave that you're supposed to arrest them dudes in and you can decide whether you want to just kill him while he's sleeping and the narrator kind of pushes back against that because we don't want it to be easy for the player to get into this sort of like oh I'm a cold-blooded killer because we didn't really want to write a lot of stuff to support the player is a cold-blooded killer because that's less funny so you get a lot of opportunities to be talked out of murdering this kid and the thing that I noticed which was which was weird is that when we were demoing this at PAX and stuff every time somebody went through that they did it with this huge grin on their face the entire time and I'm just sitting there at first thinking no I I thought we were gonna remove this from the game because this is not funny like this is like trying to warn you that the stuff that you are doing is not on tone with what we want you to do but people just loved it and so I think as a result of that we ended up doing a lot more kind of stuff where the narrator argues with the player and just sort of tries to get in the way of stuff it's not it's

it's hard to tell when to stop doing that because it's gotten annoying but you were usually not there when people are playing so we don't really care it also allows you to break the fourth wall without it being super obnoxious like we try to do it sparingly because it's you know you just don't want to you don't want to get too we don't with the player to constantly be acknowledging that they're in a video game we don't really want the narrator to constantly be acknowledging that it's a video game but sometimes it helps there's there's there's the kind of in fiction way where so there's a series of spittoon in the game that are really gross to get into and I remember I wrote the I said the first one in there and I and I told riff okay write this there's gonna be six or seven of these and they should get grosser and grocer as the game goes on and he wrote the first one so gross that I had no idea how he was gonna move on from there but what he did was the thing that turned out to be one of the things that people liked the most about this which was that it turns into this weird series of kind of arguments

between the player and the narrator where the narrator gradually just starts acknowledging like look I don't want to save this like I don't want you to do this I don't want to have to describe this stuff to you and it's cool just because by the time you get there you've gotten used to the voice of the narrator and so the fourth wall breaking becomes you know just like a little bit of a surprise the thing that I like about it and this is not funny at all but it also lets you do things like there's a hat that you can find that's kind of hidden in the prologue that unlocks a really hard combat mode and you can't get away from it and the narrator can just tell you that and the the thing that I sort of feel like was the the best use of this was at the end once you've finished the main storyline of the game and you can click the thing to like get the ending cutscene it just tells you this is not gonna change anything about your character or the state of the world you can just watch this cutscene and then you can leave and do something else and even come back and do it again like you don't you don't need to save you can't save but I wish games sort of had the

confidence to let you know stuff like that because there's nothing more annoying to me than getting forty hours into some RPG and then not knowing that I'm about to do something that means I should have saved drafter revert to an hour ago biggest advantage is that when everything that we write in the game has this voice that is trying to be funny writing it is not a chore cuz it's great like we just get to write jokes all day and what could be better than that obviously it's work I mean you make games you know that even the fun parts of it are work but it is nice that essentially everything that we do becomes at worst a puzzle that we have to solve to figure out a way to make some boring thing funny how do we make the graphics quality options funny and then that was another thing that was like a few to work and then people loved it it also the fact that we had to do it this way sort of talked us out of the idea of having some kind of codecs that you would unlock encyclopedia entries about

stuff we we were sort of worried moving from kingdom of loathing to west of loathing well this game has animation and the combat is like stuff's moving around we're not gonna have enough opportunities to write stuff we should add some structures that let us just just put a bunch of text in front of people and I'm really glad that we didn't do that instead we found other little cracks to put it in and I don't think anybody's gonna criticize west of loathing for not having enough writing in it so that's good so this is gonna be longer because there's a lot of stuff we don't do because the game is made out of comedy the reward for the player for doing everything is more or less just gonna be more jokes like you walk into a room you see that it has five objects in it you know that you can probably click them to at least get an attempt at something funny maybe just a pun whatever we don't want the systems of the game to get in the way of that we don't want to make you feel bad by blocking you from finding this stuff so I mean we did

stuff like putting really good gear in all the spittoons which are not hard to find and they're not hard to get through right we just kind of wanted the we kinda wanted the game to not be particularly challenging we added an optional hard mode just in case but we needed to stick to the core this game is made of jokes and so we don't we didn't want to do adventure game kind of puzzles where if you we essentially decided well we didn't start out making an adventure game actually because none of us really like adventure games that much because of this kind of stuff but it gradually dawned on us that we were accidentally making an adventure game so then we were kind of stuck in it and so we decided all right if there's a puzzle that requires a needle as its solution we don't want the player to live in a world where there is only one needle and if you didn't find it you can't get get past the puzzle so we just decided to put a needle in every haystack there are occasional hard puzzles right there's some there's some math puzzles there are some like you know weird more and Braille stuff hidden in some of the

stuff that Kevin put in but they're either so out of the way that people aren't gonna feel bad about missing them or we put in some kind of just brute force like you can eventually get a stat high enough to just skip this and it's fine I had a brief aside that I was gonna that I'm gonna skip combat the system like this is definitely the weakest part of the game and we all know this right and if we didn't know it a bunch of reviews told us the system is great and flexible and it's capable of doing a lot of cool stuff but we kind of just didn't we ran out of time and we ran out of money and so we ended up with combat not in fantastic shape and we decided well at given that that's there's not really any way to make this super funny just on its own and it's not we don't have time to make it super satisfying let's just make it really easy people will like that I thought that would be a happy face at the end there but it is a sad face but and it's

important when you find something that contradicts everybody and makes you feel better about yourself that you put it in a bigger font I think that making the combat easy and just getting it out of the way really served our goal of making the game be a game that is about jokes let's see in a video game like this there's gonna be a bunch of stuff that you have to do over and over and over again and like moving between areas on the map in this game is the thing that happens all the time and so one of the things that we had to do was write a tremendous number of random encounters so that that stuff didn't get repetitive and the pretty early on we realized that the scope of what was gonna happen in random encounters had to go way down so that it was essentially just writing we had thought that maybe random encounters would be like a room that you went into was some stuff that you could interact with but that got that would have taken way too long so we ended up able to cram like 200 of them in there because a lot of them were a lot of them were somewhat formulaic but like three different crates that you open with

three different jokes that's three different jokes it's a game about jokes so that counts as three encounters segue it's important if you don't have a segue to just say segue so you know there's supposed to be one there and I'm doing a another talk about our tool chain and the design post-mortem for west of living tomorrow in the main conference so I'll get way more into this there but the the tools that we built on the back end and the engine that was built on the front end were really optimized to just let us cram as much stuff in there as quickly as we could and that was very important to avoiding our petition to being able to get all those random encounters in there to to being able to just maximize the text so that there were just as many jokes as possible so that one of them was funny and then we win the color blind mode is a joke that a bunch of reviews picked up on a bunch of people just you know thought was funny and what was cool about that is that the amount

of work that it took to add that option to the game was literally typing this into a text bucket that we had and it added the option and every system in the back end of the development tools for this stuff was like that everything just made it as easy as possible for us to do stuff before we talked ourselves out of it another important axiom and what I mean to say here is that because the game is about jokes often a joke is better than a good thing that's harder to make than a joke we we had to sort of big towns in the game and I had I wanted there to be gambling minigames in both of them and it didn't really have a good idea for either of them and so like the poker game in the opening opening towns saloon like I agonized over it and I put it off and I put it off and I put it off and then I did all

this work making this system that it just it's not bad exactly but it's just not good it was a bunch of work it didn't I probably could have just emitted that room from the saloon and nobody with me would have known that there was ever supposed to be anything there and I didn't even know what was supposed to be there so it would have been fine to just omit it but it was a bunch of work resulted in this thing that was not particularly not particularly interesting to anybody just it's nobody talks about it I knew from the exhaustive research that I did watching HBO's Deadwood several years ago that in in Deadwood Farrow was a card game that was more popular than poker so we decided in the bread would camp that we would have a version of Faro I especially didn't have an idea for that so what I ended up doing was like that what if this is just a game where you name as many pharaohs as you can and how you do just determined is is determined by how well you can lie to the other people that are playing and that works

right that is actually kind of funny and the poker game was like 268 lines of script not funny at all the Pharaoh game was 89 lines of script and we also ended up with this random Pharaoh name generator' that I'm hoping to license to Campo Santo for in the valley of gods they haven't gotten back to me yet so riff the other writer he's the one who does all of the almost all of the NPC dialogue because when I read an NPC it's usually me with with some sort of weird vocal tag and an errand they're not willing to run so I asked him hey pretend you have a list of things that you do when you're writing an NPC and tell me what those things are so that I can put them in this talk so first thing he talked about was the voice of the NPC and what they would sound like if they were talking like do they have an accent do they drop h's do they clip G's at the end of words do they say or or going on further from that how much of that can

we put in before it becomes too annoying to read does it even work in text because one thing we absolutely were never going to do was vo so we needed to make sure it wasn't annoying to actually like be able to imagine what the character sounded like for major characters we had these really short and it's important presentations to add a lot of text on a slide that's one thing I've read we wrote this sort of short Bibles about what kind of you know like what's this character like what did they sound like and those doing those early because these are these were like the the partners that you can take with you so there were going to be hundreds of conversations with these guys another thing to determine about them is generally just a mood which determines like alright what's the sort of overall flavor of the jokes that you're gonna get from these guys an important thing about them that I would never have thought about actually until RIF pointed this out was like essentially how much of the players BS is this character willing to put up with because that kind of determines whether the humor of the interaction comes from something that's

funny about the NPC or some or the sort of resistance of the NPC to what the player is trying to bring to the table a few other random things like you know imagine what they look like and then it's easier to imagine them saying stuff for us that's easy because it's just a very it's very abstract right like they don't they look like stick figures and so in our imagination they can look like whatever they want what do they want maybe it's something stupid that would be funny maybe it's something weird and then you can ask them why they want that weird thing and then maybe there's a funny reason for it why don't they already have it maybe they're afraid of something that's not scary you know maybe they're too drunk or too lazy to go get it themselves that lets the player make fun of the person a little bit what are they doing when you find them especially for random encounters this is where just a lot of this sort of the stuff that I remember most as funny moments in the games is these things that I would encounter when I was playtesting that riff had written and I had never seen before and so it was cool to just find these weird characters in different parts of the world doing weird stuff how do they feel about you

interrupting them another source of like either than being annoyed with you or then being annoyed with you is funnier than them being grateful to you so we probably erred on the side of that a little bit if you have just a one-off interaction with somebody that doesn't mean - doesn't need to have any mechanical effect or anything you can often just do like a real easy thing like maybe it's funny because they can't hear you and you keep having to repeat yourself or maybe they have a weird accent err aren't from around here and so you have a hard time understanding them or maybe there's some like outrageous thing about the environment or some outrageous thing about them a sort of Saturday Night Live character and you can lean into that for the duration of a short conversation or maybe they're really bad at their job and they don't understand that they're bad at their job and that's funny like Monty Python is funny doing this makes it kind of hard to hang anything important on the character but it's pretty easy and if you're just trying to make a lot of them and it's a it's a you know nice way to make a kind of a fun interlude in in writing jokes on the internet for 15 years we've had a lot of chances to look

at stuff we wrote a year ago or five years ago or ten years ago and see how they hold up and see how we feel about them and so we've kind of learned there are a lot of examples of all of these things that I'm about to say that we don't do in kingdom of loathing don't add me we try to avoid topical stuff like this happened while we were making the game and it's funny and everybody likes it but it would be nonsense if the game which came out in August had a thing that was about this and required you to understand this right like there's just you never know which things are gonna last and it's like there's some joke equivalent to this from ten years ago maybe we'll put anything about it and if you get it you get it but we try not to we try in general with references to not make it such that it would just be nonsense if you don't get the reference like it's okay if it's a little weird but it shouldn't just be like hey look this is just remember this thing just using somebody else's joke verbatim like this was funny once and

now it's just like nothing nothing makes me groan more than just in kind of is like yes okay all right all right yes that was funny when they did it however many years ago something that we as we got older gradually got more and more felt more more strongly about is that like we just shouldn't be mean right like there's no there's no reason to the tone that we established with kingdom of loathing was basically we didn't ever want to make fun of anything that somebody didn't choose like we can make a joke about you know he's a hippie he smells bad or whatever but we kept religion out of it you know but we're obviously it's it's pretty easy to not make jokes about race when everything is a stick figure but that said we did it's like well we're making a Western hmm there are some problems with this genre that we don't really have anything important to say

about right and so we were a little worried that by just completely omitting the genocide of Native Americans from the from our game that we would catch some heat for maybe whitewashing it but then it turns out when you make a dumb comedy game nobody seems to care about that so I guess we dodged a bullet by thinking about that more than anybody else ever did when and this this is just a little a little rougher in general and I'd like I couldn't quite figure out what I was gonna say well this slide was up and I still don't know so I'm eager to find out what we kind of determined in in kingdom of loathing that we're not making fun of things that people didn't choose and like well people don't necessarily choose their religion and people don't necessarily choose their politics and so I kinda what I like to think of is say a seventeen year old kid raised in a conservative household

playing a game that's warm and and funny and comes from a place where you know we're all we're all we all think of ourselves as right-thinking progressives but so does this kid this kid doesn't know you know and then suddenly he gets to some specific political thing where we say hey kid turns out you're an and he had no idea and now the entire message is just kind of wasted on him as opposed to just being like ambient leave the right stuff as opposed to actively sort of aggressively aligned against the wrong stuff that said this is a very cowardly approach to politics and I kind of just have to own that and that also was a very bad choice for where to end the talk so you might you might have questions like about the cake for instance and whether it's true or not there's mics there hi I

just want to say as a comedy writer I'm really excited to talk to you because just a year ago my comedy partner accused me of stealing the name of my killer guitar from his stab bat from kingdom of loathing but I was wondering about I write games that are not funny but I put funny in them what kind of feedback do you look for do you even look for when you're play testing how funny is it is it you know it does anybody say that's not funny and you take it out yeah the question is is how how we deal with and how we look for

feedback about about the actual comedy aspects of it and you know we kind of don't like we've been we've been doing it the same way for so long but like our voice is what it is and the players are kind of either here for it or they're not and it's like it's like if somebody comes up and criticizes the graphics like I don't know what to tell you buddy like like you either you can either put up with this and see it for what it is or you can't there every once in a while there will be some internal argument about whether like I will it's usually me I will put in a joke that says that's that's something that doesn't make kind of doesn't make any sense and so many people will report it like thinking it's a typo or a bug that Kevin will just constantly exhort me to change it that when you drink a cup of coffee in this game it says like let's say your character's name is Susan it says you drink the cup of joe and your reply is my name's Susan which I think that's

funny because the insinuation is that you've stood what the narrator is saying and think that the narrator thinks that your name is Joe but then if that's the case then why did they put it in this weird sentence that and it got reported as a bug a bunch of times but I just sort of insisted yeah right because it just looks like a typo right if you don't if you don't and it's not like it's not like a totally reasonable joke to get right like what you're getting about this is that it's just sort of a weird thing that doesn't make a ton of sense but I always ended up sticking to my guns on those things I don't think we changed a single joke as a result of feedback you know this so uh so I noticed in the podcast you whenever some player asks like to ask you guys to make a joke like a clothing pun you guys iterate and try and try again to find the right one so how do you guys know when you're you find the right funny either you get tired of looking or you find one that we just all sort of agree

like okay that's it we're done like it's usually pretty clear if you found a really good one and it also becomes clear if you're not going to find a good one so you just kind of stop basically stop wherever you were when you realize that you know might have been better to back up a couple to a slightly funny everyone but who has the time so you mentioned in the talk that you shouldn't let gameplay get in the way of humor if you're trying to make a just a straight up comedy game and also that you sort of made the comedies e'er to not make it get in the way of the comedy do you think there are any notable experiences in your time developing games where the gameplay or the mechanic worked like extremely well in service of the humor that's hard to say actually I seems like the kind of thing I should have an answer for but I but I think I don't you know we we just try to make that the default mode but it doesn't ever I don't think there's any

moments where the game becomes really transcendently a comedy game like something like like jazzpunk is another game that I would say is just definitely a comedy game and there is given that they are a first-person shooter I think it is easier to turn tropes upside down then then our thing where it's just like it's always gonna be you're walking around in a room having conversations about stuff so it's really more just here's a bunch of standard delivery for jokes than it is like we did something weird and expensive on the technical side but you know I mean I guess like the Norton when he throws the anti-virus into your eyes and it messes up the screen like that's the thing right that that's like oh now everything looks really annoying until I figure out how to solve this quest but I'm reluctant to draw attention to that because while I think it's funny that's kind of a joke on the player rather than

a joke at the player so sorry yeah no 30 minutes thanks everyone