{"id":1858,"date":"2012-07-31T18:25:54","date_gmt":"2012-07-31T16:25:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tale-of-tales.com\/bientotlete\/blog\/?p=1858"},"modified":"2012-07-31T18:30:48","modified_gmt":"2012-07-31T16:30:48","slug":"not-funny","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tale-of-tales.com\/bientotlete\/blog\/not-funny\/","title":{"rendered":"Not funny."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Maybe <em>Bient\u00f4t l\u2019\u00e9t\u00e9<\/em> will be the first entirely sincere game that we have made. And perhaps this is why, despite of being highly artistic, personal and experimental, it inspires a new direction towards a more accessible style.<\/p>\n<p>All of our games have had a humorous, ironic aspect. Even <a href=\"http:\/\/Tale-of-Tales.com\/TheGraveyard\">The Graveyard<\/a> with its solemn theme pokes fun at gamers&#8217; expectations and parodies the try-before-you-buy system. But adding such contrary, ironic things ends up confusing many players. And even if it amuses some, it does so on a meta level, outside of the fiction and the simulation.<\/p>\n<p>So what is the point? It&#8217;s insincere. To create something and then to mock it. Players can do this on their own if they like.<\/p>\n<p>Mixing humor and sincerity is confusing. I personally enjoy such ambiguity. But it always disappoints me when other people don&#8217;t. When they take things seriously that we added in jest. Or when they simply don&#8217;t think our jokes are funny. They are beside the point anyway. So I should just leave them out.<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t think <em>Bient\u00f4t l\u2019\u00e9t\u00e9<\/em> is ambiguous. It was made from a much more confident position than any of our previous work. The <a href=\"http:\/\/notgames.org\">notgames<\/a> community has in no small way contributed to a certain feeling of comfort I now have with the medium of videogames. I no longer feel I should acknowledge the videogame context in some way by adding ironic references to conventional game design. I just use the medium for what I want to make. And I only care about things made previously in this medium that I appreciate.<\/p>\n<p>As <a href=\"http:\/\/ghostwheel.posterous.com\/\">a wise man<\/a> once said: &#8220;Irony is for cowards.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Maybe Bient\u00f4t l\u2019\u00e9t\u00e9 will be the first entirely sincere game that we have made. And perhaps this is why, despite of being highly artistic, personal and experimental, it inspires a new direction towards a more accessible style. All of our games have had a humorous, ironic aspect. Even The Graveyard with its solemn theme pokes [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1858","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-musing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tale-of-tales.com\/bientotlete\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1858","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tale-of-tales.com\/bientotlete\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tale-of-tales.com\/bientotlete\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tale-of-tales.com\/bientotlete\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tale-of-tales.com\/bientotlete\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1858"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/tale-of-tales.com\/bientotlete\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1858\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1876,"href":"https:\/\/tale-of-tales.com\/bientotlete\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1858\/revisions\/1876"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tale-of-tales.com\/bientotlete\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1858"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tale-of-tales.com\/bientotlete\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1858"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tale-of-tales.com\/bientotlete\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1858"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}