Humour in Videogames
I was worried that Portal 2 might turn out to be less than fantastic. I never thought it would actually be bad, of course, but the first game was so perfectly executed that I was concerned that a sequel couldn't match it, let alone exceed it.
Well, I've played a few hours into Portal 2, and, so far, it is fantastic. Almost every feature of it exceeds videogame standards. But there's one thing that Portal does, as a series (is two a series? I think that counts.) that is so far ahead of its peers as to make them look embarrassed. And that's its script, and more specifically its excellent use of humour.
The humour in Portal is great. And it's genuinely great, not great in the great-for-a-videogame sense either. There are numerous one-liners in just the first couple of hours of the sequel which caused a genuine chuckle and made me want to applaud the writers; I know I couldn't come up with material of this calibre.
The humour in Portal stands up when compared to other mediums like TV and film. I think this is possibly the only case where this has been true; even the old classics like Monkey Island and Sam and Max, the old-guard adventure games built almost entirely around humour, couldn't (great as they are) stand up next to, say, a well-written TV comedy. I think Portal can. And that's one of its greatest achievements.
It's even more of an achievement when you consider that other games are not even trying, not even in the same ballpark. Most videogame humour stretches about as far as the schlocky slapstick of Dead Rising or else introverted self-referential material, a 'commentary' on videogames along the lines of the recently un-spectacular Comic Jumper or the Mat Hazzard games.
These are examples are absolutely fine, and as examples of purely videogame-related humour they work well, but they'd wilt when compared to even the least funny comedy TV show (I'm thinking of the Big Bang Theory; that's humour so mild that it verges on the embarrassing. But it's still a whole lot funnier than Comic Jumper.)
Portal excels in the one area that videogames almost universally fail to address; genuine excellent writing, not just 'writing that's a bit better than other videogames.'
Good comedy is hard to write. Really hard. Which is probably why most games tend to skirt the subject, and that's fine. But if not for any other of it myriad achievements in the medium, Portal should be applauded for proving that a good video game and a good script are not mutually exclusive, and that humour absolutely can work in a videogame environment.
I'd like to challenge other videogame writers to step up to the plate; let's try and compete with writing outside of the industry, rather than settling for better than average for the medium. Because let's be honest, the average for the medium is really pretty low.
