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Punchline Behind the Hotspot: Structures of Humor, Puzzle, and Sexuality in Adventure Games (with Leisure Suit Larry in Several Wrong Places)

2021; Wiley; Volume: 54; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/jpcu.13011

1540-5931

Veli‐Matti Karhulahti, Krista Bonello Rutter Giappone,

Comics and Graphic Narratives

I view interactive fiction in its present stage as an immature medium capable of artistic development. [We] are at the beginning of what could be an explosive development of interactive fiction [and while] games like Adventure do not yet have a generally accepted name … “Adventure games” might win out in the long run, much as “Kleenex” is used instead of “facial tissue.” (Buckles 6–9) [Adventure games] do not resemble games like Donkey Kong, Space Invaders, or Pac-Man, which require good hand-eye co-ordination and quick physical reactions. There are no flashing lights, beeps, or grinding noises. The reader enters words into the computer to communicate with the narrator and generates a story; (s)he does not press buttons to aim electronic projectiles or fire simulated weapons. (6) Instead of asking players to compete, react, and strategize (as videogames usually do), adventure game players access humor-filled stories that are systematically blocked by “puzzles.” While the signifying function of “adventure game” has since widened markedly, herein the focus is on the above, narrower conceptualization set forth by Buckles.11 Many recent successful titles such as Heavy Rain (Quantic Dream, 2010), L.A. Noire (Team Bondi, 2011), Dear Esther (The Chinese Room, 2012), The Walking Dead (Telltale Games, 2012), and Gone Home (The Fulbright Company, 2013) often get classified as adventure games, yet they lack explicit humor. While this could be interpreted as a shift in design (adventure game designers have learned to address topics via non-comic means), they also involve a clear mechanical shift—these titles do not rely on puzzles anymore, but rather on action and navigational wandering. The fact is in coherence with this article’s argument: successful integration of non-comic expression seems to entail removing puzzles, which excludes these works from the “adventure game” specifications adopted here. Through the wide-ranging catalog of text-based titles in the 1980s, the graphic adventure boom in the 1990s, and ultimately the re-popularization of the genre by recent independent developers, the comic element has always been central to the adventure game (Bonello Rutter Giappone). Nowadays, the premise also stands on empirical evidence; for instance, Anne-Marie Grönroos’s study of videogame humor analyzed 659 gaming magazine reviews written between 2010 and 2012 and found that a quarter of the reviewed titles contained explicit humor. Of those, the adventure game genre was clearly the most humorous one, as almost “all of the adventure games were primarily comedic, and the quality of their jokes was often scrutinized in the review” (Grönroos 18). For further evidence, the present study commenced with a systematic review of the “Top 100 Adventure Games” list assembled by a leading community, Adventure Gamers. Despite the fact that high-status critical rankings like this typically favor “serious” works over those with “comic” appeal (to employ a problematic cultural binary), more than half of the titles were explicitly humorous. For context, many of these titles belong to popular series such as Monkey Island (Lucasfilm Games, since 1990), Simon the Sorcerer (Adventure Soft, since 1993), and Discworld (Perfect 10 Productions, since 1995).22 The complete list is available at https://adventuregamers.com/articles/view/18643. Here, “systematic review” means the authors having played eighty-nine out of the one hundred adventure games in the list and examined the eleven remaining titles via second hand sources such as databases, reviews, and walkthroughs. Naturally, “explicit humor” is based on subjective judgement. With the above as a starting-point, the goal of this study is to solve the persistent meta-puzzle that has troubled critics, scholars, and popular culture experts within the field since Buckles: Why do adventure games, as a literary form with a history extending over seven decades, make use of humor as their means of expression to such a remarkable extent? Answers to the above are sought via a comparative analysis of two conceptual trajectories, humor and puzzles, that synthesize in the adventure game to a degree that has nowadays reached the status of substantial cultural convention. An argument is set forth as follows: humor and puzzles operate on similar structural principles and thus run on explicit enigmatic synergy that functions as one (yet not the sole) explanation for the adventure game’s inclination to treat its diverse themes through the comic. Methodologically, the argument relies on an analytical close reading of a well-known adventure game series, Leisure Suit Larry (1987–97), selected for its clear thematic frame of sexuality, which resonates with humor and puzzles. The analysis maps out how Leisure Suit Larry’s humor and puzzles operate together and serve its thematics, thus exemplifying the mechanisms of enigmatic synergy that govern adventure game design in general. Every riddle contains two parts of unequal length: the encoded text and revealed solution. These parts are opposites that seek to unite, thus eliminating the tension of opposition between them. The riddle, however, exists for the sake of that very tension, which reflects the social tension, the contest between riddler and riddle … The moment the riddle is completed, it also ceases to exist. (83–84) are not solved by the use of accurate reckoning alone [but] also (and above all else) by a substantial use of insight thinking … in a phrase, insight thinking does not emerge fortuitously or haphazardly. It comes about only after the observation and contemplation of recurring patterns. Insight thinking can be defined as the ability to see with the mind’s eye the inner nature of some specific thing. (27–28) what might be called our instinct for humor. No one knows exactly why we are impelled to laugh or why anything that is perceived as funny should cause us to make such peculiar noise … similarly, when we are given a puzzle to solve, our mind sharpens, our logica utens starts working, and we set out to find a solution, as if by instinct, until we are satisfied cathartically. (35) puzzles are best theorized as conceptual, immaterial demands the overcoming of which happens outside the empirical; in contrast to strategic demands that can never be given a stable conceptual form due to their open-endedness; that is, strategic demands exist only along with the player’s recursive empirical input. (30) Accordingly, it is the immaterial conceptuality that separates the puzzle from other ludic challenges in videogame culture in particular: whereas the physically and strategically oriented challenges that dominate contemporary gaming are potentially never-ending loops of cybernetic rediscovery (recall Buckles), the structural binary of the static puzzle entails an insightful process of meaning-making that has its own aesthetic and rhetoric. In adventure games in particular, these puzzles tend to occur as specific fiction puzzles (i.e., problems integrated as actions and events in the adventure games’ exclusive storyworlds), rather than mere logico-mathematical brainteasers or other abstract dilemmas (Karhulahti, “Puzzle”; “Fiction Puzzle”). As such, fiction puzzles surface as ludo-semiotic constructs, the solving of which is a hermeneutic meaning-making process that may (and often does) involve insight thinking, eventually leading to a pleasurable epiphanic surprise. To a large extent, the hermeneutic (fiction) puzzle-solving process and its pivotal moment of insight are strikingly comparable to the way in which joke “set-ups” and “background patterns” are turned around by punch-lines. Analyses of the joke formula often fall into one (or more) of three theoretical threads, traditionally identified as “superiority,” “incongruity,” and “relief” (Morreall). While none of the three theoretical categories can account for all instances of comic effect, they appear to supplement each other (Raskin in Morreall 7). As such, and despite their limitations, the theories help comprehend the relationship between the puzzle-riddle and the humor-joke domains, thereby affording a valuable foundation for enigmatic synergy. Below, all three theories are taken into account, respectively, as their co-occurrence in adventure games is explored through the case study of Leisure Suit Larry. To recap, puzzles (and fiction puzzles in particular) share a structural similarity with humor (and jokes in particular). The two structurally similar sides complement each other in a way that sparks enigmatic synergy, which often materializes in adventure games that challenge their players with fiction puzzles in thematically diverse story contexts. In practice, enigmatic synergy can be considered as a certain coinciding tension between likeness and incongruity (of puzzle and humor) that provokes laughter. Most prominently, the satisfying closure of a puzzle solution—be it reached accidentally or by strenuous deduction—reopens onto vibratory release akin to the pattern that occurs in the production of laughter. Such resemblances suggest that the puzzle and/or joke may sometimes be read through each other; for instance, a solution to a puzzle often depends on “getting it,” as if it were a joke or some other instance of humor. Puzzles and humor are both essential elements of Leisure Suit Larry. The Larry series was conceived by the software artist Al Lowe in 1987 along with the first episode Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards, published by Sierra On-line (later Sierra Entertainment). As such, Larry represents perhaps the most popular franchise of adventure games that expressly deals with sexuality—next to similarly themed titles such as Leather Goddesses of Phobos (Infocom, 1986), 2064: Read Only Memories (MidBoss, 2015), as well as multipart series such as Les Manley (Accolade, 1990–91) and Spellcasting (Legend Entertainment, 1990–92). Story-wise, Larry centers on the antihero Larry Laffer: a wannabe-Casanova whose one and only goal in life is “to find a woman and get laid.” In line with the conventions of the genre (which were still being consolidated at the time), reaching this goal requires the player to solve fiction puzzles that are integrated into the story, thus presenting (mostly heterosexual) sex and sexualities as mysteries to be deciphered in a very literal sense. Despite (or due to) its adult thematics, the first Larry episode was a commercial success. It eventually sold more than 300,000 copies and led Lowe to write five direct sequels for Sierra by 1997, altogether selling millions of copies and becoming likely the most popular series of erotic videogames in Western history. In one quantitative study (n = 281) on computer users born between 1960 and 1989, no less than 99 percent of the respondents were familiar with Larry (Reunanen et al.). Though this study likely involved some response bias due to its specific method of collection (via IRC, Facebook, and gaming forums), industry experts have also repeatedly recognized Larry’s influence and popularity—including the occasional estimation that a significant proportion of Larry players were actually female (Rosen). With this context in mind, the present analysis delves into the specific mechanic (fiction puzzles) and thematic (sexual humor) synergy that makes adventure games like Larry exceptionally suitable for expression through laughter. Laughing at the misfortunes of others can be fun. This is the assumption underlying the superiority theory of humor, which is more specifically based upon a perception of discrepancy that seems to satisfyingly confirm the laugher’s superiority in relation to an object deemed worthy of contempt. Hence, the superiority theory would appear to presuppose a degree of cruelty, which was already entertained by Plato when he suggested laughter “mix[es] pleasure with malice” in finding something “ridiculous” in the misfortunes of others (58–59, 49b–50a). Thomas Hobbes’s better-known formulation of this view locates its cause in the laughers’ “apprehension of some deformed thing in another, by comparison whereof they suddenly applaud themselves” (125). More recently, in The Game of Humor, Charles Gruner gives the superiority theory a less negative spin, noting a fundamental similarity between humor and games in a shared dynamic of competition, striving for victory and overcoming. He suggests that “punning riddles,” for example, aim to “defeat their targets/publics with brilliant verbal exhibitionism” (145). Along the same lines, one of the leading riddle theorists Annikki Kaivola-Bregenhøj (“Riddles and Humour”) describes riddles as a lesson in “humiliation and its tolerance” (197). Through these frames, the superiority effect gains a function that is both comic and ludic at the same time. In Leisure Suit Larry 6: Shape Up or Slip Out! (Sierra Entertainment, 1993), the expected outcome of each encounter is a climactic sex scene. The scenes tie to Larry’s quest to win women by giving them an item they desire or by performing tasks that please them—a pattern established by the first episode.33 There is another possible ending that may be discovered: walking into the sunset with the male towel attendant. This ending can be attained at any point; though it is a valid ending, it is presented as more of a surprise (“Easter egg”) than as closure due to short-circuiting progression. Yet, the expectation of sexual satisfaction for Larry is overturned: the woman in each case (apart from the last) is only a step on the way to obtaining a piece of the overarching fiction puzzle that will yield results with the final, ideal woman. In this way, the promised sexual encounter in Larry 6 is deferred, replaced by one that caters to the woman’s desire and satisfaction when it is revealed that her understanding and expectation fail to correspond with that of Larry’s. This outcome is consistently painful or humiliating for Larry. His desires are repeatedly frustrated, but since the events are comically framed, the consequences are not severe or lasting, and Larry simply bounces from one downfall to another in the manner of slapstick (Figure 1). In Henri Bergson’s view, this capacity for “rebounding” (being ruled by “habit” as opposed to learning from past mistakes) contributes to the comedy and the impression of “inelasticity” (5, 29, 35, 49).44 The later Larry episodes removed the possibility of death; in the earlier installments, the capacity to bounce back by reloading an earlier saved state is implicit within the narrative itself. In Larry 2, for example, the protagonist gets the opportunity to ask where he went wrong before dying horribly–information that cannot benefit the ill-fated Larry of this play-through but that will carry over into the reloaded state through the player, who therefore has more privileged awareness than any other incarnation of Larry. Yet, the Larry that finally “wins” has done so by benefiting from the player’s knowledge; there are certain fiction puzzles in the first three Larry episodes that only become known after a death, such as finding a means to avoid a venereal disease (Larry 1) and throughout Larry’s devising of a disguise (Larry 2). The first Larry is exceptional in mixing purely tragic death scenes in with more farcically slapstick ones; and indeed, there is one that comes as the ultimate end: if Larry is still a virgin at the end of eight hours of play, he puts a gun to his head and the possibilities for rebound have run out with the time. The consequences, for the player too, are graver; given the time factor, the last saved state is unlikely to suffice and one may be forced to restart from scratch. In Larry 6, the lack of correspondence between the women and Larry’s interpretations of the governing respective situations generates an incongruity that the player may come to expect. Thus, the player derives pleasure not simply from the answer, but also (through a kind of comic dramatic irony) from Larry’s comparative blindness, as well as from Larry’s “wrong” understanding. Larry’s persistent hopes and efforts may appear ridiculous in this light, as players are openly invited to laugh at Larry’s expense over and over again. In Lowe’s own words, “I used sex to laugh at Larry and tried to make a game where you laughed at sex rather than being excited by it” (qtd. in Brown). This laughter is not without cruelty, however, for the player’s success is precisely Larry’s failure until the last fiction puzzle with the final woman, through which Larry finally receives his gratification. Yet, with the frequent habit of Larry 6 constantly addressing the player and Larry simultaneously as “you,” there is also an invitation to self-deprecating humor and a reluctance to allow full indulgence in feeling superior. As a whole, the Larry series tends to tease the player by delivering or denying explicit graphics. At strategic moments of Larry 7: Love for Sail! (Sierra Entertainment, 1996), the player shares Larry’s perspective, and, for example, in order to reveal “Drew Baringmore’s” breasts, the player must literally (by means of the verbal command interface) “push” away a “pesky branch.” This command must be guessed and typed in; no available regular command will do to provide easy and immediate gratification. In this way, Larry 7 addresses the player with a specific enigma where ludic satisfaction synergizes with that of (diegetic excited Larry) moving the titillating pesky branch (Figure 2). In the history of adventure games more broadly and text adventure in particular, this vein of fun in riddling failure lines up with their specific “frustration aesthetic” by the “art of error message design” (Douglass). Such courting of failure on the way to unlocking the “correct” interpretation is also typical of sexual riddles, as Kaivola-Bregenhøj observes: “One thing all sexual riddles have in common [is that] the right answer is always in a sense the wrong one” (“Sexual Riddles”). The adventure game, in turn, has always relied on players needing to try out every single option and collecting useless objects (“pathological kleptomania”) that generates constant failures and errors, typically making a fool out of the protagonist. Akin to this lineage, exploring conversation options by directly asking for sex in any Larry often results in scorn being heaped upon him and his overreaching aspirations. The fiction puzzle design, however, allows for and anticipates such experimentation, as ludic errors usually reward the player with comic drama and/or successful progression. In the second episode of the series from 1988, Leisure Suit Larry Goes Looking for Love (in Several Wrong Places), if the player decides to make Larry directly approach his romantic interest, Barbie, by entering her cabin, Larry will face a “hilarious” end by being tortured to death by Barbie’s BDSM-inclined mother who “proceeds to have her way with you repeatedly” (emphasis added). While the function of Barbie’s aged mother (as a violation of sorts, in terms of assumed cultural standards of desire) is to terminate Larry’s progress, it also serves the playful experiment-fail-experiment-succeed formula, through which the superiority effect emerges as part of testing and teasing: Larry receives his punishment as the alter-ego scapegoat, so that the players can claim their erotic (to a degree) and ludic rewards (Figure 3). But who, in the end, gets punished and feels superior, the player or the protagonist? As noted earlier, the Larry series (and Sierra’s adventure games in general) tend to implicate the player through second-person address along with the protagonist. This, nevertheless, is not clear-cut; and of course, players always watch Larry’s painful humiliations and frequent violent deaths from a safe distance, perhaps with a touch of schadenfreude. Still, along with progress, it is the player’s past errors that turn into a gradual epiphany of control: as puzzles get solved, Larry and his partners get demystified and exposed—a distinct superiority comes into being through the ludic-comic, disarming Larry’s “deaths” of their initial danger and turning them into something to laugh at. Adventure games let us expect that their fiction puzzles can be overcome, but the solution’s surprise might equally involve circumvention or substitution. This ties in with relief theory (aka release theory), which is best-represented by Sigmund Freud’s influential approach. Namely, the build-up to laughter, for Freud, is geared toward some kind of release as a socially acceptable outlet for the “satisfaction of a drive … (be it lustful or hostile) in face of an obstacle in its way” (98). This diversion of energy is most loaded in the case of what Freud calls “tendentious” jokes, which navigate and circumvent taboos and inhibitions, thus fulfilling a purpose and usually having an implied (more or less indirect) target. This, again, echoes Kaivola-Bregenhøj’s note on riddles: “When delicate matters are dressed in humor, youngsters learn to speak of them in a way that is socially acceptable” (“Riddles and Humour” 200). Along these lines, adventure games and humor provide a safe environment for the exploration of provocative themes. While explicit sex in Larry (not that common, though the allusions are overt) is itself conveyed in a way that is not full-blown pornography, limited by the audiovisual technology of the time, the synergy between Larry’s aim (sex) and the player’s goal (solving sex) denotes sex being clearly part of the joke. One may recall here Lowe’s assertion that Larry is not simply about sex—and indeed, sex per se is rare—but it would be difficult to imagine any Larry without sex governing its thematics. This inseparability also applies to its humor. In the Larry series, comic relief tends to surface through the contrasting teamwork of punishment and liberation. In fact, moderation and caution are necessary in various lethal encounters; the player learns something that a new (re-loaded) Larry fresh off the production line will benefit from. In one scene, unprotected sex in Larry 1 leads to the contraction of a venereal disease followed by death. At the time (1987), safe sex was not widely tackled in popular media, and condom ads were banned from television until the proliferation of the HIV epidemic in the late 1980s. Larry 1 integrates this serious issue in a way that encourages reflection: Larry’s pseudo-death influences the player’s actions on return. The framing of the scene also targets the way condoms caused social anxiety, for Larry is forced to go through increasingly ridiculous options (to the player’s amusement and delight) to pick a “customized” condom at the pharmacy via a series of choices that the pharmacist then loudly announces to everybody in the shop: “Hey, everybody!! This weird-o just bought a spearmint-flavored, striped, rough-cut, colored, smooth lubber!!!” The announcement is greeted by shocked gasps from the more “respectable” customers, and while Larry’s embarrassment is funny, a commentary on harmful social perceptions may be read into it. On a more problematic note, hostility and lust may also combine in “bawdry” (or “smut”) that in Freud’s view replaces the desired touching of an inaccessible person and makes use of speech rather than action (95–98). It presumes “the woman’s intransigence” but also lays siege to this and may also function as part of a soliciting approach; or, as Kaivola-Bregenhøj observes of sexual riddles, as a way of flirtatiously bringing erotic tensions to the fore (“Sexual Riddles”). Playful diversion, as in the Freudian “tendentious” joke, may mask and channel desire as well as hostility. In a typical smut scenario, as per Freud, the intended target of the joke (usually a woman) tends to be supplanted by a third party in the role of a primary listener—the target is objectified and presented to the third party as the inhibiting “obstacle” to be “attacked” (with the joke), thereby getting “unclothed” through words. In the Larry series, female characters are frequently the goal and the mystery to be solved. In Larry 6, progress occasionally involves clicking on the desired bodies, including one character who soon reveals herself to be transgender, provoking excessive disgust from Larry. No doubt, Larry’s reaction is problematically in line with the cultural cis norms of femininity that work to “frame trans women’s bodies as fascinatingly and disgustingly underclass” (Vähäpassi 5). At the same time, one could recall the narrator’s casually observational quip on Larry’s own cross-dressing in Larry 2: “You slip back into your leisure suit and toss the bikini and soap far over the cliff. Too bad, as you were beginning to enjoy wearing women’s clothing!” While it would be inaccurate to equate Larry’s enjoyment with women’s clothing to trans identities, footnotes like this remind us that the heteronormativity of the Larry series is a puzzle without a straightforward solution. Despite the sexism, laughter at the overturning of expectations sometimes encounters the normalization (and implied acceptance) of different sexual practices and identities. In the Larry series, sexualization is thus not only integrated via respective fiction puzzles and humor, but it also becomes thematically mechanically fused. Everything in Larry’s world is potentially sexualized, and everything sexual may also be potentially re-purposed. The player can order a “Gigantic Erection” (cocktail) in Larry 7, and the ambiguity—paradoxical as it may be to apply this term to something so explicit—also allows for amusing misunderstandings between characters and becomes an opportunity to flirt with Drew Baringmore. And yet, it is also still a means to an end: ordering a Gigantic Erection forces the bartender to leave his post (“that’ll take a while, are you sure?”) and grants access to the next explorable location. The mixing of comedy with the sexual and the mechanical extends also to the very basics of interaction: the cursor—a player’s means of access to Larry 7—is a condom that fills out and extends on a “hotspot”; a cosmetic amendment to the form that does not essentially alter the conventional point-and-click interface but makes overt a possible link between the theme and the very technics of the adventure game genre (i.e., action is literally phallocentrically styled via erection). As the player’s clicks contribute to the climax (solution), progression is always preceded by teasing: a foreplay of sorts that delays satisfaction and completion, prolonging the narrative in a series of repetitions punctuated by bursts. Female characters in Larry are often both desired objects and solvable fiction puzzles at once. With this in mind, it is interesting how little effort is required to gain the attention of the male towel attendant (the only actively willing and immediately consenting partner in Larry’s world), though Larry himself seems ambivalent and the narrator mocks the outcome as “an ignominious end.” While a player may read in this a troublingly stereotyped association of promiscuity with homosexuality, in contrast, the women are obtained or won by delivering items or finding other solutions for the sought-after goal. With some notable exceptions (see Patti below), the women’s desires do not usually directly include Larry himself, which entangles his relationships with women in a network of exchange that builds up a surplus of repressed energy awaiting (delayed) expenditure. Accordingly, choosing the homosexual option feels like a case of the player’s agency overriding Larry’s heterosexual desires (at times open to question nonetheless). By actively including sexual and other minorities, the Larry series contributes to inclusion and normalization; simultaneously, though, the laughter present in their representation (as in other representations) enables controversial or conservative interpretations. Narratologically, the Larry series relies strongly on an external omniscient narrative voice as well as Larry’s own focalized internal consciousness (Figure 1). While this narrative duality and its inconsistencies generate plenty of riddling humor, it also makes any straightforwardly hermeneutic reading of the plot difficult or impossible—what Larry himself thinks may differ radically from what the voice narrates (de-centering the protagonist’s voice and desires). Furthermore, the (audio)visual representation of entities and (stereo)types still complicates arriving at a final reading of what “Larry is trying to say about sexuality” as a politico-cultural product. More often than not, as Larry attempts to fix his efforts on a woman, the narrating voice shames Larry and trivializes his desires, which may turn Larry from desiring adventurer to comic butt. Nevertheless, Larry does usually achieve his goal in the end (if the player is successful) by “earning” it, that is, by finding out what the women want and satisfying their wishes. Hence, Larry’s sexual desire is deflected and the fiction puzzles multiplied before accessing the finale. The gendered relations become more complex in the two Larry episodes that allow the player to control the desiring woman “Passionate Patti” as a secondary protagonist. In the first of these, Leisure Suit Larry 3: Passionate Patti in Pursuit of the Pulsating Pectorals (Sierra Entertainment, 1989), Larry falls in love and initiates a relationship with Patti; however, due to a misunderstanding, he comes to believe that Patti is seeing another man and eventually leaves her to begin a celibate life as a hermit (“I give up. I’ve had it with women! It’s just not worth it! I’m going where no