作者：Dan Cook

多数幽默都源自意料之外的元素——悬念、深刻观察及新鲜/古怪视角。看看下面两个最新的幽默理论：

—印第安纳大学研究员Matthew Hurley表示，幽默是修复我们当前关于世界和现实的思维模式缺口的进化反应。

—据科罗拉多大学教授Pete McGraw的研究显示，幽默涉及对期望的“善意违背”。当我们得以顺利修复心理模式中的Hurley缺口时，我们就会发出笑声。

Laughter from dadirridreaming.wordpress.com

此心理模式的稳固更新内容同Raph Koster的将大脑对于掌握内容的反应过程变得富有趣味理论相匹配。幽默理论和游戏理论都涉及“哈哈”时刻，就此来看，幽默似乎成为所有游戏类型的丰富主题。

但不幸的是有趣游戏并不是很多。

基于故事叙述的幽默

人们的抱怨声主要集中在游戏缺乏以有趣背景、陈述、会话及视觉笑话形式呈现的幽默内容。“为什么不能有更多有趣的游戏？”这其实是指“为什么没有更多游戏融入有趣探险游戏《猴子岛》中的幽默陈述和过场动画？”

此“基于故事叙述的幽默”是现代用户所熟悉的内容，他们将此当作创意人士试图让人们发笑的一种媒介类型。这遍布于我们的文化中，从单口相声到病毒式邮件笑话，从电视内容到生日卡片的有趣话语。幽默在大众媒介中被视作预先包装好的笑话。

从游戏开发者角度来看，这类内容存在一定利弊：

优点

*能够轻松创造出少量内容。我们很容易想出1-2个笑话。

*有现成用户喜欢及清楚如何消费“基于故事叙述的幽默”。

弊端

*从游戏设计角度来看，笑话是类似于谜题的可消耗内容。用户一次性穿过此循环，然后把握包含其中的内容。只要你听过此笑话，下次再听到就会觉得没那么好笑。

*批量制作成本依然很高。和《俄罗斯方块》或《宝石迷阵》所包含的算法机制不同，制作第100个笑话的成本和制作第1个笑话的成本一样高。

*笑话鲜少植入玩法中。对这种一次性内容进行投入通常也意味着，开发者对调节和完善游戏互动机制的投入会相应减少。

基于机制的幽默

但不是所有游戏笑点都是基于预先包装好的笑话。玩家同游戏机制系统的互动也能够带来笑声。这依然能够带来预期结果，但设计师需要运用不同工具。

想想出现在《Scrabble》或《Spin the Bottle》这类友善游戏中的笑声。游戏所引发的笑声同单口相声演员引发的捧腹之笑同样真挚，但它们达到此目标的途径大不相同。游戏的特别之处体现它们创造机制的能力，以及它们能够反复创造和挑战思维模式。尤其是在多人游戏中，游戏规则通常刻意鼓励玩家创造自己的时间和位置，将特定笑话分组。

优点

*“基于机制的幽默”若运用得当，能够创造长久的幽默感。将敲门笑话融入《俄罗斯方块》中，虽然其中包含某些新鲜的幽默元素，但长久来看无法完善游戏。不过如果让玩家在聚会中以自己身体的形状玩“俄罗斯方块”屡次三番依然趣味横生。

*同参与者建立稳固的关系。当你同其他群体共同体验一款友善游戏时，你就会经历创建社交规范的过程。你会发现谁值得信赖，什么让大家变得紧张，什么对团队而言是能够接受的行为。笑声来自于你持续更新关于他人在团队中应如何表现的思维模式。在优质游戏中，你会形成有关他人的值得信赖的心理模式。反过来，这会让你更相信其他玩家。

*有很多业内人士和棋盘游戏采用基于机制的幽默元素。这是既有机制的宝贵财富，我们在制作电脑游戏时可以充分运用。

弊端

*基于机制的幽默通常只可意会不可言传。这类幽默存在于游戏魔法圈中，就此来看往往很难进行谈论或向他人传达。多数游戏会议都有这样的惯例：好友共同玩暴民棋盘游戏，当有人失去一个角色时，桌上所有人士都会用一些本地口音大叫“他死啦！”

复述故事仅存在些许幽默元素。但实际游戏让玩家置身其中，成为小文化群体的参与成员。你不只是由于笑话而发笑，因为从很大程度上说，你本身就是一款幽默游戏中的笑料。我们已经习惯通过大众媒体进行沟通，但游戏幽默本身具有非常私密的特点，无法简单向他人传达其中笑点。

预测

基于机制的幽默和基于故事叙述的幽默没有优劣之分。但由于制作和消费方式存在的结构差异，在游戏设计领域中，两种方式有各自的最佳位置。

1）传统消耗型幽默通常存在于经常运用于具有情感召唤力、可消耗元素的游戏中。最常运用幽默元素的内容如下：

*谜题风格探险游戏

*过场动画

*微小的反馈瞬间（游戏邦注：如小鸟击中小猪）

2）在游戏中还有很多其他创造笑声的渠道，这些都并非传统观念中的“幽默”元素。相反，它们是创造笑声的机制。典型例子就是青少年玩家所玩的“转瓶子”。或者是“Twister”（通过系统性地挖掘个人标准持续创造欢乐时刻），抑或者是“Pictionary”等游戏。

3）可用于描述幽默生成机制的语言甚少，因为它们的输入内容非常局限和短暂。直到最近，我们依然缺乏转换和销售社交机制的工具。从很大程度上看，我们依然缺乏这一领域的相关语言或兴趣。

除非大家已广泛意识到基于机制的幽默元素的存在，否则关于有趣游戏非常罕见的抱怨仍会持续出现。有趣游戏的确存在，只是我们不可再坚持认为它们需要向《猴子岛》看齐，而是要逐步承认，它们可以像是好友共同体验游戏，一起谈笑风生。

（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转载，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

Opinion: A theory about humor in games

by Dan Cook

Much of humor comes from the unexpected — a twist, an insightful observation, a new/odd perspective. Consider the following two recent theories of humor:

- Indiana University researcher Matthew Hurley suggests that humor is an evolved response that helps up rectify gaps between our current mental models of the world and reality.

- University of Colorado professor Pete McGraw’s research suggests that humor involves “benign violations” of expectations. We laugh when we can safely fix Hurley’s gaps in our mental models.

This safe updating of mental models ties in rather neatly with Raph Koster’s theories of fun the brain’s reaction to mastery. Both the theories of humor and theories of games involve an “A-ha” moment and as such it would seem that humor might be a rich topic for whole categories of games.

Yet a common lament is that there are so few funny games.

Humor through storytelling

Dig into the lament a little further and it is specifically focused on a lack of humorous content in the form of funny settings, writing, dialog and visual jokes. “Why can’t there be more funny games?” is actually someone saying “Why can’t there be more games with humorous writing and cut scenes like in a funny adventure game like Monkey Island?”

This “humor-through-storytelling” is what modern audiences know and identify as the type of media that creative people create when they try to make others laugh. It pervades our culture in everything from stand-up comics to viral email jokes to television to cute sayings on birthday cards. Humor is defined, shared and critiqued in our mass media culture as a prepackaged joke.

From a game creator’s perspective there are certain pros and cons to this class of content.

Pros

- Easily produced in small quantities. It is relatively easy to come up with a joke or two.

- A ready audience that enjoys and understands how to consume “humor-through-storytelling.”

Cons

- From a game design perspective, a joke is consumable content much like a puzzle. You pass through the loop a single time and then the insight contained within is mastered. Once you’ve heard the joke, it is less humorous the next time around.

- Expensive in large quantities. Unlike an algorithmic system like Tetris or Bejeweled, the cost of producing your hundredth hour of jokes is just as expensive as your first.

- Jokes are rarely integrated with gameplay. An investment in disposable content often (though not always) means a reduction in the tuning and improving the interactive systems of the game.

Humor through mechanics

However, not all laughter within games is based of prepackaged jokes. The player’s interactions with the mechanical systems of the game also can evoke laughter. This still drives the desired results, but the designer must use very different tools.

Consider the laughter that occurs in a friendly game of Scrabble or Spin the Bottle. The chuckles that occur are just as honest as those that come about when listening to a stand-up comic, but the means of creating the insights are different. Game are unique in their ability to set up systematic, repeatable opportunities to create and confront mental models. Specifically in multiplayer games, the rules of the game often deliberately encourage players to create their own time, place and group specific jokes.

Pros

- “Humor-through-mechanics,” when properly executed, can create evergreen humor. Sticking a knock-knock joke into the middle of Tetris does little to improve it over the long term, though it does have some novelty humor. Asking players to play Tetris with the shapes of their bodies in a party setting is likely funny many times over.

- Builds stronger relationships between participants. When you are in a group that engages in a friendly game, you undergo a process of forming social norms. You find out who is reliable, what makes people nervous and what is acceptable behavior to the group as a whole. Laughter comes from the constant updating of your mental models of how other people should and do act in the group. In the best games, you come out with mental models of others that you are more likely to trust. And in turn, you may trust the other players just a little bit more.

- There are many folk and board games that use humor-through-mechanics. This is a rich treasure trove of proven mechanics that we can mine when creating computer games.

Cons

- Humor-through-mechanics is hard to talk about. Such humor exists within the magic circle of the game and as such is often difficult to talk about or transfer to others. There’s a ritual that occurs at most game conferences in which friends play a mobsters boardgame and then when someone loses a character, the entire table yells “He frickin’ dies!” in their best Chicago accent.

There’s a glimmer of humor in retelling the story. However the actual game (complete with the appropriately Steve-esque GMing) lets you be there, as a participating member of that bizarre microculture. You don’t merely laugh at the joke, because to a large degree, in a humorous game you are the joke. We are trained to communicate through mass media, and game humor is inherently intimate and personal, not easily communicated for the benefit of others.

Predictions

Neither humor-through-mechanics nor humor-through-storytelling is in anyway superior to the other. However, due to structural difference in how they are crafted and consumed, we’d expect to find each technique to find its own distinct sweet spot in the landscape of game design.

1) Traditional consumable humor is most likely to be found in games that make heavy use of traditional consumable evocative content. So it makes complete sense that the most common uses of humorous content would involve the following:

- Puzzle-style adventure games

- Cutscenes

- Micro moments of feedback (a bird hitting a pig…hilarious the first time around)

2) There are many other mechanisms for generating laughter in games that are not traditionally recognizable as “humor.” Instead, they are laughter-generating systems. Some examples might be the game of spin the bottle played by teenagers. Or Twister, which generates a steady stream of hilarious insights via a systematic exploration of personal spec. Or Pictionary, where ambiguity due to lack of skill creates “A-ha” moments.

3) There is little language for talking about humor-generating systems because their output is so heavily localized and ephemeral. Bad jokes about mobsters don’t survive their conversion into consumable media. Until very recently, we lacked the tools for transferring and selling social systems. To a large degree, we still lack the language or interest.

Until there is a broad recognition that there is such a thing as humor-though-mechanics, the lament that there are so few funny games will continue to be mindlessly and incorrectly repeated. Funny games exist. We just need to stop insisting they must look like Monkey Island and start realizing they can look a lot more like friends playing a game and laughing together.

Some additional notes about humor

Science:

-Humor in the gaps

- Pete McGraw’s theory of humor: TEDxBoulder – Peter McGraw – What Makes Things Funny

Humorous games that rely primarily on mechanics (and people!)

- Twister

- Magicka

- Transformice

- Two-player Lemmings

- Spin the Bottle

- Most drinking games

World’s funniest joke (according to American men)

Two hunters are out in the woods when one of them collapses. He doesn’t seem to be breathing and his eyes are glazed. The other guy takes out his phone and calls the emergency services.

He gasps: “My friend is dead! What can I do?” The operator says: “Calm down, I can help. First, let’s make sure he’s dead.” There is a silence, then a gunshot is heard. Back on the phone, the guy says: “OK, now what?”（Source：gamasutra）