Humour in Game Design

Summary

Humour in game design is the deliberate use of comedic structure, timing, and tone to shape player experience. The course treats humour as a serious design problem rather than a decorative extra: it can reduce tension, make moments memorable, support social interaction, and widen emotional range, but it is highly dependent on context, audience, and cultural fit. (course lecture series, see source-player-psychology-lectures)

Key ideas

• Humour is contextual: The same gag can feel playful, cruel, awkward, or meaningless depending on when it appears and who it is aimed at.
• Multiple humour theories apply: the course highlights four main theories rather than one universal explanation.
• Comedic form matters: Games can use slapstick, situational comedy, satire, absurdism, dark humour, or witty dialogue.
• Humour has design functions: It can lower tension, reset player emotion, improve memorability, and encourage shared laughter in social play.
• Audience fit matters: Age, personality, mood, culture, and inclusivity all affect whether a joke lands well.

In practice

Game humour usually works best when designers ask three practical questions:

1. What emotional job is the joke doing? Is it relieving tension, reinforcing character, punctuating failure, or inviting shared play?
2. What kind of humour is it? Physical comedy, absurd contrast, satire, and dialogue humour all rely on different presentation and timing.
3. Who is it for? A joke that works for one player group may alienate or confuse another.

In production terms, humour is often distributed across:

• animation and physics exaggeration
• writing and line delivery
• encounter design and surprise
• interface copy and feedback language
• social systems that create shared comic situations

That means humour is rarely owned by one discipline alone. It is usually a collaboration between writing, animation, audio, UX, and systems design.

Evidence

• the course presents Incongruity Theory as humour arising from a mismatch between expectation and reality, producing surprise or a cognitive shift. This maps well to sudden reversals, absurd objects, and playful mechanic twists. (course lecture series, see source-player-psychology-lectures)
• Superiority Theory is described as humour from observing the mistakes or misfortunes of others. In games, this often appears in enemy blunders, ragdolls, or recoverable player failure. (course lecture series, see source-player-psychology-lectures)
• Relief Theory frames humour as the release of pent-up psychological tension. This helps explain why jokes can work after difficult encounters or in otherwise serious stories. (course lecture series, see source-player-psychology-lectures)
• Benign Violation Theory combines transgression with safety: humour emerges when a norm is violated in a way that still feels harmless. This is useful for thinking about dark humour, parody, and exaggerated failure states. (course lecture series, see source-player-psychology-lectures)
• Where the theories come from. Superiority: Hobbes’s “sudden glory” (Leviathan, 1651), with roots in Plato and Aristotle. Relief: Spencer, ‘The physiology of laughter’ (1860), and Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905). Incongruity: Kant and Schopenhauer, and Suls’s (1972) two-stage incongruity–resolution model, in which a joke works when the listener resolves the mismatch. Benign violation: McGraw and Warren, ‘Benign violations: making immoral behavior funny’, Psychological Science (2010).
• The lecture material also stresses diversity of expression: slapstick, situational comedy, cultural satire, absurdist comedy, dark humour, and witty dialogue are presented as distinct forms with different audience expectations. (course lecture series, see source-player-psychology-lectures)
• The lecture series emphasises cultural sensitivity, inclusivity, personality, and age appropriateness, suggesting that humour design is partly a problem of audience modelling rather than joke writing alone. (course lecture series, see source-player-psychology-lectures)

Implications

• Humour can support playtesting because it often depends on timing, surprise, and audience reaction that designers cannot predict perfectly on paper.
• Comedic design should be tested like any other system: what one group reads as playful, another may read as annoying or offensive.
• Humour is especially valuable in games that need emotional contrast. A well-placed joke can stop tension from becoming exhausting.
• There is a clear failure mode: humour that ignores tone, culture, or character coherence can damage trust more quickly than a neutral design choice.

Open questions

• How do designers preserve comedic surprise in replayable systems where players learn the structure?
• Which forms of humour travel best across cultures, and which depend heavily on local knowledge?
• When does humour deepen a serious game world, and when does it undermine the intended tone?

Practice

Write and test one comic beat. Choose a short moment in a game you are making or one you know well: a failed jump, a shopkeeper’s line, an item description, an enemy’s reaction to the player. Write the beat as a line of dialogue, a short animation description or an interface message, built on one of the four theories on this page. Before testing it, write down the theory it uses, the emotional job it does (relieving tension, reinforcing character, punctuating failure, inviting shared play) and who it is for. Then try it on three people separately, without explaining it, and record their reactions.

Success test:

• you can name the part your theory needs: the expectation and the reality it contrasts (incongruity), the misfortune (superiority), the tension released (relief), or the norm broken and why it still feels safe (benign violation)
• your notes answer the three practical questions in In practice above
• at least one tester’s reaction is recorded in their own words, including any part that fell flat or felt uncomfortable
• you make one revision, to timing, wording or target audience, and note why

Extension:

• write a second version of the same beat in a different form (for example slapstick instead of witty dialogue), test both on the same people, and compare which landed and with whom

Self-test

1. Explain incongruity theory in one sentence.
2. What does benign violation theory require besides a violation?
3. Why might a joke straight after a difficult encounter work well, according to relief theory?
4. Name three design functions humour can serve in a game.
5. Why is humour rarely owned by one discipline in a game team?
6. Why should comedic design be playtested rather than judged on paper?

Answers

1. Humour arises from a mismatch between what the player expects and what happens, producing surprise or a cognitive shift.
2. Safety: the norm must be violated in a way that still feels harmless.
3. Relief theory frames humour as the release of pent-up psychological tension, and a difficult encounter builds that tension.
4. Any three of: reducing tension or resetting player emotion, making moments memorable, encouraging shared laughter in social play, widening emotional range.
5. It is spread across animation and physics, writing and line delivery, encounter design, interface copy and social systems, so it usually needs writing, animation, audio, UX and systems design to work together.
6. Humour depends on timing, surprise and audience reaction that designers cannot predict perfectly, and what one group finds playful another may find annoying or offensive.

Related

• source-player-psychology-lectures

narrative-design · character-design · playtesting · emotion-in-game-design · presence-and-immersion · player-centric-design · fun-as-learning