Emotion, humour
& the last laugh
Designing for feeling: emotional beats, why things are funny, and comic timing in games
BSc (Hons) Game Design & Development
When did a game last make you laugh out loud?
Was the joke written… or did it just happen?
By the end of today you can…
Design for a target emotion
by designing its trigger, through mechanics as well as story.
Explain why something is funny
using incongruity, superiority, relief and benign violation.
Choose a form of humour
scripted or systemic, and deliver it with set-up, timing and payoff.
Check fit and test it
for audience, age and culture, then by watching real reactions.
Six stops
Emotion by design
Triggers, core emotions, arousal, mechanics
Why things are funny
Four theories, and a vote
Forms of game humour
Scripted, systemic, physical, clever, satirical
Audience & timing
Who it's for, and when it lands
One beat, one laugh
Add a humour beat, test it on another group
Wrap-up
The module on one slide
You've designed for feelings all term
Lazzaro's four keys: hard, easy, serious and people fun. Emotions are what players remember.
In MDA, aesthetics are the player's emotional responses. Designers reach them only through mechanics.
Thematic coherence: cheerful music in a horror scene breaks the spell. Tone is designed.
Lazzaro put amusement under people fun. Today it gets the whole lecture: how to design a laugh, deliberately, and how to know it worked.
Emotion
by design
You can't hand a player a feeling. You can design what triggers it.
Systems, experiences, emotions
is a system for creating experiences, based on player choices.
is a way of perceiving reality: direct, sensual, and built up through practice.
is intense but short: a transient physiological reaction to a trigger.
So the designer's material is the trigger: the moment, the rule, the sound, the timing. The emotion happens in the player, or it doesn't.
Five core emotions, five design jobs
Joy
Triumph, delight, relief, amusement.
Celeste's summit · fieroAnger
Unfairness, rivals, a cheap death. Motivating, or a reason to quit.
Shadow of Mordor nemesesFear
Threat, scarcity, the unknown, the dark.
Amnesia · Alien: IsolationSadness
Loss of something you cared for, or spent time with.
Lee in The Walking DeadDisgust
Rot, bodies, betrayal. Often paired with fear.
A Plague Tale's ratsEach one is a tool. Humour lives on the joy side, but it often works by touching the others.
GDnD wiki · FieroArousal has a sweet spot
Too little: bored. Too much: panic, and performance collapses. Players do best, and enjoy most, in between.
A laugh is a release valve. After a tense stretch, it brings arousal back down so the next peak can land.
Making the player feel it with their hands
| Game | The mechanic | The feeling |
|---|---|---|
| Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons | One stick per brother, all game. Near the end you must use the lost brother's stick to go on. | Grief, felt in your thumb |
| Papers, Please | Rules you must enforce, and too little money to feed your family | Guilt and complicity |
| Shadow of the Colossus | Huge, slow, often peaceful creatures; victory music that sounds like mourning | Doubt about winning |
| Journey | A stranger you can only chirp at, who can help you fly | Companionship without words |
The strongest emotions come from what you did, not what you watched.
Make me feel…
One sentence: which mechanic triggers it, and when. No cutscenes allowed.
Why things
are funny
Four theories. None explains every joke; each explains some.
What a laugh does for a game
Reduces tension
A breather during challenging play, so frustration doesn't win.
Lightens serious stories
Contrast that makes the dark parts darker and the characters human.
Brings people together
Shared laughter: the stories players retell to friends.
Makes it memorable
Emotional resonance means stronger attachment to the game.
Humour is a design tool with jobs, not decoration. Ask what job each joke is doing.
GDnD wiki · Humour in Game DesignExpectation, then mismatch
Humour arises from a gap between what you expect and what you get: a surprise, then a cognitive shift that makes sense of it.
Portal: serious science, impossible rooms, and an AI who reads out absurd safety notices in a calm, helpful voice.
1 · Surprise: the ending doesn't fit what came before.
2 · Resolution: you find the rule that makes it fit.
No surprise: not funny. No resolution: just confusing.
Laughing at someone's misfortune
Humour from feeling better off than someone else, often when we watch their mistakes. Hobbes called it "sudden glory".
Goat Simulator: you are the chaos. Clumsy, over-the-top destruction, and a world too absurd to take seriously.
Ragdolls, enemy blunders, a friend's fall in co-op, the Fall Guys pile-up.
Aim it at a real group of people and it becomes punching down. Aim it at goats, guards and yourself.
Letting the pressure out
Humour releases pent-up tension and gives a safe outlet for forbidden thoughts or actions (Spencer, 1860; Freud, 1905).
Job Simulator: the dull office job, but you can throw the stapler at your boss and make an absurd sandwich.
Tension built by the game: a quip after the boss. Rules from real life: break them where nothing breaks.
Every death gets a new line from the characters back home. Failure becomes a small reward.
Wrong, but harmless
Something seems wrong (a violation) and safe (benign) at the same time. It combines incongruity and relief.
Untitled Goose Game: you break every social norm in a tidy English village, and nobody is really hurt.
Which theory, and does it land?
Your character dies in a hard platformer. The death animation is a tiny, dignified bow.
Funny · incongruity + reliefA grand gesture where you expect failure, at the moment tension peaks. Cheap failure keeps it benign.
An NPC from a real country speaks only in an exaggerated accent, and is the butt of every joke.
Not funny · superiority aimed at real peopleA violation that isn't benign for the players it targets. Punching down.
You can pick up the shopkeeper's radio and drop it in the canal. He keeps searching for it, muttering.
Funny · benign violationA norm broken, nobody hurt, and the NPC's reaction is the payoff (Untitled Goose Game territory).
A guard says the same joke every time you walk past. All 40 times.
Funny once · incongruity wears outThe surprise is gone by the third time. Vary it, or let it become a callback on purpose.
A horror game's monster slips on a banana peel during the first chase.
Depends · toneRelief, but it kills the fear the game spent an hour building. Funny in a parody; a break in a horror game.
Two players carry a sofa up stairs with wobbly physics controls. Both fall down the stairs, with the sofa.
Funny · superiority + sharedEach laughs at the other, and at themselves. Systemic, so it's never quite the same twice.
Forms of
game humour
Diversity of expression: six kinds of funny
Six forms, six games
Wordplay, sarcasm, a self-aware narrator.
The Stanley Parable
Absurd events and unexpected outcomes in the world.
Portal
Exaggerated movement, clumsy physics, falling over.
Human: Fall Flat
Parody that critiques society, consumers, politics.
Grand Theft Auto V
Nonsense, played completely straight.
Katamari Damacy
Taboo or morbid themes, to provoke or challenge.
South Park: The Stick of Truth
Scripted humour and systemic humour
Dialogue, cutscenes, item descriptions, a narrator.
- Timing you control
- Reliable, polished
- Wears out on replay
Monkey Island's insult sword fighting: the joke is the combat system.
Physics, AI reactions, rules colliding, other players.
- The player is the comedian
- Never quite the same twice
- You can't guarantee it
Untitled Goose Game has a dedicated honk button.
The best comic games design the toys and let players tell the joke.
GDnD wiki · Emergent DesignBad controls, on purpose
Octodad
An octopus pretending to be a dad. Every tentacle is a separate problem.
Human: Fall Flat
Floppy arms, one per trigger. Climbing is a negotiation.
I Am Bread
A slice of bread trying to become toast, one corner at a time.
QWOP
Four keys, two thighs, two calves. Running is impossible.
These break Week 4's mapping deliberately, but keep feedback clear and failure cheap. That keeps the violation benign.
Jokes you have to work out
Wordplay, irony and puzzle logic. The rubber chicken with a pulley in the middle.
The rules are words you push around. Change WALL IS STOP and the punchline is a rule.
The narrator reacts to your choices, and to you refusing them. The joke adapts to the player.
Clever humour rewards the player for getting it: a small fiero, and the theory is incongruity's second stage.
Satire: GTA V's Los Santos
Lifeinvader
A Facebook parody about invasive tech and corporate greed.
Cluckin' Bell
And Burger Shot: fast food with absurd slogans.
Jock Cranley
A stuntman turned politician: sensationalism, caricatured.
Blaine County Radio
Talk radio poking fun at rural conservative ideology.
Satire only works if the player shares the reference. It's the hardest humour to localise.
Audience
& timing
Who it's for, and when it lands
Who is the joke for?
Cultural sensitivity
References and puns rarely travel. Localisers often rewrite jokes entirely.
Age appropriateness
Younger players: slapstick and simple wordplay. Older: satire and irony.
Preferences & mood
Quiet, wry humour or loud, chaotic, multiplayer comedy.
No one left out
Avoid insider jokes and divisive targets. The goose annoys everyone equally.
Punch up, not down. Aim at the powerful, the absurd, the player character, or yourself.
Set-up, beat, payoff
Trigger on arrival
Fire the payoff when the player looks or reaches, not on a timer.
Hold the camera
A second of lost control frames the punchline. Use it sparingly.
Rule of three
Twice to set a pattern, the third time to break it.
Vary repeats
A line pool, not one line. Or make the repeat a callback.
Failure, valleys and tone
Make dying funny or rewarding, not just costly. Hades' characters comment on how you died.
Jokes after a peak, not during it. A quip after the boss; silence in the chase.
Humour that serves the theme (Undertale, Portal) deepens it. Humour against it breaks it (Week 4).
Undertale makes you laugh for hours, so the moments it stops joking hit harder. Humour and sadness share a stage.
Fix the guard who tells the same joke 40 times.
What's in the line pool? What conditions pick a line?
When should the guard speak, and when stay quiet?
Can the 40th time become a joke of its own?
One beat,
one laugh
Add a humour beat to a game you've designed. Then test it on real people.
Design one humour beat
- Your Week 3 reward system, or
- Your Week 4 concept, or
- Any mechanic from this term's tasks
No game to hand? Use The Last Lighthouse.
- The job it does (relief, contrast, social, memory)
- The theory and the form
- Trigger, set-up, beat, payoff
- Who it's for, and who it could hurt
Then perform it for another group, without explaining it first, and count what happens.
Five steps, about 50 minutes
| Step | Time | Do | Record on the sheet |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 · Choose | 5 min | Pick the game and the moment that needs a laugh: after a failure, in a valley, at a reveal | The moment, and the job the laugh does |
| 2 · Design | 15 min | Theory, form, trigger, set-up, beat, payoff. Scripted or systemic? | The beat as a short storyboard (4 boxes) |
| 3 · Check | 5 min | Benign? Within the tone? Who could it hurt? Does it survive a repeat? | Audience and risk notes |
| 4 · Test | 15 min | Perform it for another group, cold. Swap. Count their reactions | Laugh · smile · groan · nothing |
| 5 · Revise | 10 min | Change one thing: timing, target, form or theory | What you changed, and why |
The Admiral: a gull, three times
| Moment | Act II, straight after the tense reveal that the old keeper is alive. The player is trying to relight the lamp. |
| Job | Relief: bring arousal down before the storm-night climax. |
| Theory · form | Incongruity (rule of three) and benign violation · situational, then slapstick |
| Beat | 1 A gull lands and steals the matches; squawk. 2 It does it again, and stares. 3 It drops a lit match into the lamp, which roars into life. Camera holds 1.5 s on the gull. |
| Audience | All ages, no words, no cultural reference. The target is a bird, and the player's dignity. |
| Risk | Undercuts the reveal? Placed after it, never during. Repeats? It happens once per playthrough. |
What did their faces do?
Before → after
Perform it, as it is now.
What happened the first time, cold.
One thing you changed, and why it worked (or didn't).
Everyone else: name the theory you think it uses.
Five things to remember
Design the trigger, not the feeling. The strongest emotions come from what the player did.
Four theories: incongruity, superiority, relief, benign violation. Name the one you're using.
Scripted jokes are reliable; systemic ones are replayable. Give players toys.
Know your audience, punch up, and fit the tone.
Set-up, beat, payoff, and test it cold. Count faces, don't ask opinions.
From players to feelings
“Our beat got … laughs. Next time we'd change …, because ….”
One sentence each, before you leave.
Ekman, P. (1992) 'An argument for basic emotions', Cognition and Emotion, 6(3–4), pp. 169–200.
Ekman, P. and Ekman, E. (2016) Atlas of Emotions. Available at: https://atlasofemotions.org.
Freud, S. (1905) Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. Translated by J. Strachey (1960). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Hobbes, T. (1651) Leviathan. London: Andrew Crooke.
Lazzaro, N. (2004) 'Why we play games: four keys to more emotion without story'. XEODesign.
McGraw, A. P. and Warren, C. (2010) 'Benign violations: making immoral behavior funny', Psychological Science, 21(8), pp. 1141–1149.
Schell, J. (2008) The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses. Burlington, MA: Morgan Kaufmann.
Spencer, H. (1860) 'The physiology of laughter', Macmillan's Magazine, 1, pp. 395–402.
Suls, J. M. (1972) 'A two-stage model for the appreciation of jokes and cartoons: an information-processing analysis', in Goldstein, J. H. and McGhee, P. E. (eds) The Psychology of Humor. New York: Academic Press, pp. 81–100.
Yerkes, R. M. and Dodson, J. D. (1908) 'The relation of strength of stimulus to rapidity of habit-formation', Journal of Comparative Neurology and Psychology, 18(5), pp. 459–482.
Further reading on the GDnD wiki
Player Psychology: a synthesis of frameworks
Neurochemical Engagement (the arousal curve)
Surprise · Fiero · Rhythm of Play