"Humour in games is difficult"
GRTV: Al Lowe opens up.
Gamereactor's David Caballero is joined by industry legend Al Lowe as they discuss the re-birth of Leisure Suit Larry through Kickstarter and the state of comedy in video games.
When asked whether it is more difficult to do humourous games with sexual undertones these days, Al Lowe had the following to say:
"It's difficult to do humour in games. Period. Whether sexual or not, because in a game you have freedom to do what you want to do. That's the whole point of gaming. A bad game locks you into a path, you don't like that, you want to be able to do things as you want to do them. That's the opposite of what works in humour. In humour you want to have a known set up and then a surprise, something that changes. So in gaming it was difficult, because you never knew exactly what the person had done before, so you couldn't know how they would receive the joke. So that was the hard part of it.
I think what's happened since adventure games hit their fallow period, a few years back, what you've seen is that it's very difficult for people to do humourous games."
Jokingly Lowe concluded he had nothing to contribute to today's games, but when pressed this is what he said of the future:
"What I believed is that people have been wandering in the desert th past decade, and that they are ready for something a little different and something that will make them smile. You know, people laugh at movies, people laugh at television shows, people laugh at books - why the hell wouldn't you want to laugh at a video game."
