Can Gameplay Be Funny?

A fine line separates ‘fun’ from ‘funny,’ and DeathSpank attempts to deliver both in its active play elements. Killing unicorns (in itself an absurdity) is a stiff challenge in DeathSpank, and from a purely ludic perspective, the game makes it fun. DeathSpank delivers enough useful loot, incentivizes leveling up, and offers combat sufficiently addictive that it strikes the Diablo-fun chord its creators clearly wanted.

But…you’re killing rabid unicorns in a whack-job wonderland of pastels and storybook visuals (and those pathetic gingerbread men I mentioned). Clearly, these add a demented comedic dimension to the challenging combat. So is DeathSpank’s gameplay comedic? I say yes, most of the time; though I realize nothing is more subjective than humor.

I see Abbott stretching here to convey the humor in the game’s interactivity. Pruning dialogue trees to find jokes is funny, but perhaps it’s not the humor itself, any more than turning the pages in a book of jokes is? In Abbott’s example, you are at least focusing the search for jokes, stringing your character through a verbal chain of gags. But is the play itself funny? I feel like what I did in DeathSpank — what I triggered with presses of buttons and was therefore gameplay — was less funny than what I saw, what I heard and what I read.

Gameplay as humor is hard. I wonder if slapstick is what we need, if, to have humorous interactivity you need more Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton in your character movement. I’m not sure. This is a tough one.