Jokes are funny, not fun

Time for a rant about game design.

Every once in a while, someone in a game development team jokes about adding something silly to the game. Maybe a unit with an unpronounceable name, or a gun that fires teapots, or an enemy that kills you and deletes your saved game.

That's funny! It's a joke. A funny proposition. And yet far too often, someone adds "you know, we should actually put that into the game." and the designer says "yeah, this isn't a serious game, it'll be a joke".

There's something profoundly wrong here. Having a game that doesn't take itself seriously and has less-than-serious dialog in it is perfectly fine. But those games are designed in an extremely serious and rigorous fashion. Take Plants vs Zombies, whose premise is fairly ridiculous and has you planting exploding potatoes. It's a silly game. But its design isn't silly - a ton of work has gone into making every plant interesting and unique in their own way, with their cost and cooldown being balanced in a way that makes no plant ultimately useless. The designers worked extremely hard to boil the game down to its most basic essence, very carefully removing extraneous mechanics, tweaking interaction frequency and pacing through the various gimmick levels.

I'm fairly sure the PvsZ designers joked at some point about having a plant that did nothing, or did something negative. Or maybe a mini-game where you can't do anything. They never put that in the game. Why? Because while the game can be silly, the game's design cannot afford to be silly. Once game designers start making jokes to please themselves, they're ripping fun out of the game for a laugh. This is equivalent to a programmer tossing in a massive memory leak because "it'll be funny, guys, come on". They're having fun at the player's expense, when it should be the other way around.

Playing a casual game (say, Peggle) is usually easier than player a regular game. And yet designing a casual game is typically a lot harder than designing a regular game. Casual game designers do not work casually. They do not casually cobble together a game - casual games are very carefully engineered to give the player huge amounts of feedback for very little input. The point is - just because the game is silly, doesn't mean the game design should be silly.

Would you want your programmers to make the framerate dip randomly just to be funny? Don't let your designers screw up the game for a laugh.