Humour and Games Season 3, Episode 6 - Wyatt Moss-Wellington on “Benign Trials, Vexing Violations: Reading Humour in Puzzle Games.”

On this episode we speak with Wyatt Moss-Wellington on his article with Paul Martin, titled “Benign Trials, Vexing Violations: Reading Humour in Puzzle Games.” We learn about benign violation theory and the role of psychological distance in creating humour out of tragedy and puzzles.

“Games all inherently have benign violations written into them, in that they’re forms of play that offer continuous attempts to frustrate one’s abilities, and resolving this stands in the way of progress. [...] Platform genres are unusually happy to frustrate players in their sense of progress [...] so they have a particular structure of threat to motor and cognitive skills…” - Wyatt Moss-Wellington