Perspective Shifting: Humour and Comedy in Games

In this paper, we offer a distinction between comedy and humour. This distinction is employed to examine the intentional, scripted comedy and the context-driven, ludic emergence of humour in the game Portal. The game is examined, through content analysis of the game's transcript, using Berger's categories and techniques of comedy and Apter and Martin's Reversal Theory of Humour. The results of this pairing of theoretical approaches suggest there is an oscillation in the affective state of the player between the telic and paratelic states defined in Reversal Theory, and provide at least another lens through which researchers can analyse and map affective states and their shifts.