Referencing the References: Do We Need New Jokes?

(I'm writing seriously about jokes and isn't that the biggest joke of all? Yes.)

Memes and that, am I right guys? Cake is a lie, Battletoads is hard and where is Half Life? lol. Most everyone enjoys seeing something that they recognise in something else that they’re fond of for a little giggle every now and then, but I’m not wrong in thinking that videogames seem to be the one medium that uses these Easter Eggs so often that it’s becoming more of a shock NOT to find at least one reference to another other game in the one that I’m playing. Videogames are certainly the most referential medium out there, that’s for sure(bar those ghastly Friedberg and Seltzer movies), and a perfect example of this would be Retro City Rampage, a (fantastic) game dedicated entirely to referencing pop culture. However, is our comedy dependant on these pop culture references being used repeatedly and have games and gamers reached a point where we need new jokes?

I’m not a comedian so feel free to help point me in the right direction here but this is something that dawned on me going way back to around the time Duke Nukem Forever was unveiled to the public (though I think we all know what the real punch line there was, hahahah geddit? It was shit.) We, as gamers, had lost one of the cornerstones of our small fortress of jokes, as one of the younger forms of media, games don’t really have a lot to go off in terms of jokes but we did have ‘When is Half Life coming?’ ‘Where is Duke Nukem?’ and ‘The Cake is a lie’ (of Portal). When Duke was announced Yahtzee, of Zero Punctuation fame, made a joking remark that a third of our ‘jokes’ were gone now that Duke Nukem was on its way, this made me think more deeply about jokes in gaming which generally seem to be references to highlights of other games.

‘The cake is a lie’ first appeared in Portal in 2007 and is a perfect example of a gaming joke. The joke itself refers to the promise of cake in return for taking on a series of increasingly suicidal trials offered by the psychotic AI GLaDOS and with the player eventually stumbling across the words ‘the cake is a lie’ scribbled with apparent madness and desperation across the facility’s walls. This phrase quickly caught on among gamers as being twistedly funny and as such went down in history as gaming’s principle joke. The line pops up in almost every facet of gamer culture and has gone on to appear in other industry juggernauts such as GTA V and Fable 3.

It was an interesting little meme and we were happy to see it rearing it’s head from place to place although the problem now is that many people feel that it has reached a point where they find this phrase overused and unfunny, taken far away from its original context and merely used to get a cheap ‘ha’ from consumers. One of the main problems with its overuse is that many of the people laughing at this nowadays probably don’t even know why it’s funny, they just know it to be and so it is. The phrase itself is in danger of becoming a dead dogma, like how children are forced to repeat the Lord’s prayer without understanding it’s actual meaning, this is one of the key dangers of the over referencing occurring in the medium of videogames (and why rage comics aren’t funny).

The Cake is a lie is probably the most famous case of this happening but there are plenty of others ‘Stay Awhile and Listen’ (Diablo 2, 2000) ‘it’s dangerous to go alone!’ (Legend of Zelda, 1986) and ‘Metal Gear?!’ (Metal Gear Solid, 1998). All have been referenced in some game or another and whilst we’re a fairly insular consumer base, there’s no denying that, why should we be limited to the same phrases repeated over and over? Can’t we create something new to laugh at? Even Borderlands 2, a fantastically funny game, was still absolutely laden with pop culture references. It’s impossible to write comedy in a vacuum, that is obviously true, but why are we restricting ourselves into continuing to dilute the already diluted until every joke we have is but some vague reference that no one truly understand the original meaning of anymore?

Come on friends, let’s not turn into Family Guy. I shudder at the thought.