Featuring comedy through ludonarrative elements of video games

While humor exists in some shape or form in many video games, unlike in film and literature, comedy is not considered an established genre of its own in video games. One of the challenges in defining what constitutes comedy in video games, however, is in identifying the elements that contribute to such comedy, particularly with the inclusion of interactively as a fundamental aspect of video games. In this paper, we use the concept of ludonarrative—i.e., ludic (gameplay-related) and narrative (story-related) elements—as the basis for analyzing comedy in video games. We categorize the existing methods of incorporating comedy into ludonarrative elements of video games into three primary and five secondary methods, which we refer to as comic enhancers. We also illustrate the use of these methods through examples of existing video games, and provide a summary of our analyses and their implications.