Humor about massively-multiplayer online games, or computer and video games in general, is notoriously an insider's art. Barely a month goes by without a pretentious independent artist or cartoonist taking a shot at the creators of PvP or Penny Arcade about the extent to which their strips require a knowledge of gaming or geek culture to be funny. My personal sounding board, aka my spouse who rigorously abstains from all knowledge of games and gaming, nevertheless finds both strips pretty amusing with some frequency.
But even I wouldn't dream of asking her to look at some of the truly insider humor that comes from MMOGs, even when it makes me laugh uncontrollably. There's a kind of "emergent humor" that comes from players that's some of the best evidence about what players can do creatively with game content--in many ways, a better example of player "authorship" than self-conscious role-playing or tinyplots of various kinds.
For example, the guild website for the World of Warcraft guild Twelve Prophets made me laugh out loud many times, but especially the February 24th entry on an army of girl gnomes with pink pigtails descending on Horde territory. It's probably impossible to explain why the whole thing is so funny if you haven't played the game, though I suspect anyone watching that particular event would have understood the humor, the absurdity of the image.
World of Warcraft is a game that particularly invites this sort of whimsy, given the many small, fine touches of humor placed in the game by the designers themselves. However, there are certain forms of "emergent humor" that pop up in most or all MMOGs. Character and guild names are a great example. Yes, sure, there are plenty of dullards who insist on naming their characters with some variation of "Legolas" or "Aragorn", but there's also lots of people who come up with clever allusions or puns--some of which are doomed to eventually be ferreted out by GMs and changed, others of which survive such scrutiny. For example, the World of Warcraft Horde guild that I saw the other day called "My Little Pwnies", which is truly funny but only if you know both l33tspeak and children's culture.
A lot of in-game humor comes from amusing juxtapositions of gameplay mechanics and the performativity of players. Clever use of emotes, or of an /emote command; unusual or unexpected actions, sometimes combined with technical accidents; or use of chat channels. I came across this transcript of "pirates" conversing with a GM over an anti-perching policy while reading through f13.net the other day: I thought it was brilliantly funny but I'd never really expect anyone besides hardcore players to see it as such. A lot of player-generated humor is also external to game worlds themselves--there's a genre of schaudenfrade-type humor focusing on especially stupid or clueless players who reveal themselves as such on game forums, for example.
Like most MMOG gameplay, this kind of humor is largely ephemeral. Every once in a while, someone does something so brilliantly subversive and well-timed that it sticks in the memory permanently: Rainz' assassination of Lord British at the end of the Ultima Online beta test, for example. But I also find this is one of the most stable aspects of my experience of playing MMOGs, the constant flow of humor and subversion that creatively reuses the developer's content--or sometimes struggles against it. As with a lot of creative play and behavior in MMOGs, I sometimes feel a bit sad at its impermanence: it quickly vanishes beyond recall, just as most of the experience of play, good and bad, does.
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