I’ve been playing a bunch of the Space Quest games lately. Probably not going to Game Pile them, because really, they’re not actually that good and I don’t have anything that feels that worthwhile to say about any individual element in each game. The whole, however, deserves mention.
There’s a very specific type of joke in Space Quest. It takes this very simple form when you look at an object:
This is either a quadrilateralising hyperdimensional retronetropic core refolder disjunction entity, or one of those cheap end tables from Ikea.
Super detailed thing you couldn’t possibly recognise, incredibly mundane and obvious thing. That’s it. This is a joke the game series overwhelmingly uses. When I noticed this today, I went back and double checked a bunch of stuff in the games and realised that it was really core to a lot of how the games’ universe worked. They’re almost all about high-tech problems and low-tech solutions, about complicated plans running into a total dunderhead. Even the games’ very basic premise is obviously about juxtaposition: Your main character is a space janitor. The reward you receive for saving the galaxy in the first installment? It’s a golden mop.
Now this is mainly notable to me because I feel like this is how I structure jokes. I feel like this is the first place I learned this habit, the way I could recognise jokes working. Put the complex next to the simple, put the highly esteemed next to the practical. Contrast and compare and let there be an inherent comedy there.