Funny games

If, by and large, we’ve established that blockbuster games don’t often make us laugh on purpose, Nelson Jras a perfect example. “Their fatalities are structured as a three-beat joke,” he says. “It’s comedy conveyed through animation and gameplay, and I think that was an explicit goal.” Yu suggests we should look to the biggest Japanese games for examples of big-budget comedy: “They seem to better understand – or perhaps just respect – the inherent absurdity of games and lean into that kind of comedy. Hideo Kojima, for example, is trying to tell dramatic stories about the human condition, but he gets that interactivity inherently leads to absurd situations.” Neil, meanwhile, waxes lyrical about . “It’s not meant to be a funny game, but some of those barks were epic!” she says. “I just laughed out loud – the assistant writer or whoever got to write those barks really went to town on them.”