Sketches in Another Reality

More on developing strong games

In my last open post, I responded to a reader’s question about developing strong premises for sketches. Today, I’m responding to the second part of their question about writing sketches in heightened realities.

Also, I wanted to ask - is there a way to come up with game ideas that are based on fictional stories, rather than real life?

My dream is to be able to make animated comedy sketches based on sci-fi or fantasy premises (in the style of Rick and Morty, Gravity Falls, or hilarious moments you guys have on Dimension 20).

I really wish I could learn how to take some scifi/fantasy premise (like werewolves, ghosts, resurrected dinosaurs, supervillains, brain slugs, evil clones, truth serum, etc), and use that as the "unusual thing", or figure out some other way to make it funny.

This question probably arose out of my general advice to get inspiration from the frustrations of your everyday life. Should you really turn to boring ol’ reality if you want to write about robots, and wizards, and monsters? Well… yes!

Writing sketches in a different reality is not really much different from writing sketches set in our own world. This is because each sketch has its own baseline reality that you should establish at the very beginning. This is important because we can only appreciate what’s unusual after we know what’s normal.

Imagine a scene with two people standing in a field. We hear hoofbeats and moments later an eleven prince rides in on horseback. If those first two people are dressed as modern hikers this would be very unusual; if the first two people look like travelers in a fantasy movie, the appearance of the elven prince would be totally normal. So just existing in a fantasy or sci-fi setting is not enough to be the unusual thing of a sketch. The unusual thing should be like any other sketch: it should point to something surprising but true, just like any other sketch.

Sketches are usually set in other realities for one of two reasons:

1. The sketch is really about some everyday or personal experience, but the heightened reality provides an interesting contrast.

2. The sketch is about a pattern or trope in that particular genre.

That’s a lot of generalities, so let’s look at some specifics:

Aliens!

Here’s a sketch from Kids in the Hall about alien anal probes. But what is it really about? What’s the contrast or pattern at the heart of this thing? What’s the surprising truth?

Here’s one thing we know to be true: it’s a trope of alien abduction stories that aliens abduct unsuspecting people and probe them for mysterious reasons. We don’t know why they do what they do. Here’s another thing that’s true: working at a low level in a corporate job means your day-to-day is filled with repetitive work whose larger purpose may be unclear to you. You don’t know why you do what you do.

These are two wildly different situations: the heightened reality of an alien spaceship and the mundanity of an office job, but both are linked by the idea of mysterious, possibly pointless work. So, sure, we don’t know why aliens conduct anal probes, but what if they also don’t know why they’re doing it. Now we can build a sketch around this juxtaposition: what if aliens were beset with the same ennui as the average corporate drone. We enjoy seeing the aliens muddle through their anal probing 9-to-5, and this juxtaposition feels like it’s saying something: why do aliens probe people? Well, why do you do the job you do?

Devils!

This sketch is one that plays with the trope of the genre. The Faustian bargain. A hapless fool sells their soul to the devil for greatness. The devil can always deliver on these deals, no matter how impossible the ask. This sketch subverts our expectations by making the devil a terrible musician who can’t provide the hit song that was promised. The beats heighten as the devil plays increasingly terrible songs, and between the beats we get to enjoy the character of devil being petty, making excuses, and having a creative crisis.

This sketch is mostly focused on the question “What if the devil couldn’t deliver on a deal for once,” but we relate to it because of the character elements. The devil experiences a relatable, human crisis of creativity, making excuses, getting defensive, panicking, etc. This sketch is about the trope of a genre, but it still gives us something relatable to connect to.

Discovering Games with Genre Elements

Now, again, it’s much easier to recognize someone else’s game than it is to find your own, so let’s talk a bit about that. You’ll usually approach from either the genre side or the human side.

Approaching from the Human Side

One time I wanted to write a sketch about how I kept putting off things I didn’t want to do. I’d put it on my to do list and come up with great excuses to NOT do them, and then feel guilty about it. This is a relatable bit of a bad behavior, but it’s not particularly funny, and not very heightened. So I asked myself, is there anything about this experience that feels like something bigger? Does the emotion of it translate into a high stakes movie scene, or a sci-fi concept, or a monster. And this thinking led me to ghosts.

Ghost stories often carry an idea of “unfinished business”… and is this really so different from my stupid to do lists? Literally, no; tonally, yes. And that’s actually perfect for comedy. True in one way and opposites in another. So I wrote a sketch that was essentially, “What if a ghost’s unfinished business was just mundane bullshit.” This gave me a heightened, high-stakes way to talk about a relatable bit of human behavior, and also have fun with ghost specifics at the same time.

Approaching from the Genre Side

Instead of showing another example of a produced sketch, let’s go back to the original questioner, who went on to say this:

Let's say I have a few scene ideas: Witches are brewing a potion. A group of kids investigate a haunted house. A knight fights a dragon to save a princess. A group of villagers hunt a werewolf. A group of post-apocalyptic survivors fight evil robots. Special agents find a crashed UFO. A family visits Jurassic Park. Steampunk scientist resurrects a Frankenstein's Monster.

Could you take a couple of those that you find interesting, and try to come up with a "game" for them? Or, if you don't usually start with scenes, come up with a game that has a supernatural element by using whatever method you'd normally use?

So, this reader is clearly approaching these sketches from the genre side. They’ve got the supernatural part, and they’re looking for the comedy.

If I’m given this list, I’ll look at each item and ask myself the following questions:

• What’s weird about this? Why is that weird thing funny?

• What tropes are present in scenes like this? Why are they repeated? How might they be subverted?

• What moments from my own life do these scenes remind me of?

As we ask these questions and think about these scenes we should be particularly attuned to contradictions, patterns, surprise, and strong emotions.

So let’s try it with a few of these:

A Group of Kids Investigate a Haunted House: These days I can’t see the word “house” without thinking of all the problems today around affordable housing. So I might start looking for connections there. Maybe while a pair of kids are unraveling the secret of some old murder in here the open a door and… see a realtor giving a tour. Yes, even the elevators full of blood aren’t enough to turn people away in this market. You’ve got a contrast between absolute horror, and really boring house-hunting details. Maybe now we push these potential home-buyers, come up with a bunch of gruesome specifics, see how horrible we can make this house knowing they’ll still be like, “But at this price we’d HAVE to consider it.” And maybe the kids keep hoping for adventure, but they just keep finding boring adults talking about house stuff.

Special Agents Find a Crashed UFO: There’s a lot of things you could focus on here. For no reason at all, my mind went to “agents.” Mulder and Scully were federal agents, but is an X-file type case necessarily the jurisdiction of the federal government? Could there be a state-level paranormal investigator? City? Local? Maybe these special agents are in a jurisdiction dispute with small time paranormal cops, who are clearly corrupt or inept. They’re planting drugs in the crashed UFO, and just looking to make their quota. “Scumbag X-Files Cop” or something like it.

A Family Visits Jurassic Park: The funniest thing about Jurassic Park to me is that it is a theme park. Theme parks are full of all kinds of mundane, obnoxious things that already contrast nicely with the big drama of Jurassic Park. The lines, the gift shops, the marketing, all these little bits of bullshit that seem weird juxtaposed with killer dinosaurs. One specific stands out in my mind: the annual pass. Is there anyone buying the annual pass to Jurassic Park, even though there have been so many escaped dinosaur incidents? How many family members have they lost? How many limbs are they missing. Maybe there’s a scene where someone is abashedly talking about their JP annual pass, and treating it like a guilty pleasure, instead of a clearly bad, life-threatening proposition.

Do any of these have legs? Maybe. Some feel better than others, but they all feel write-able to me. And if you dug a little deeper you could probably find some better angles. Or ones that just appeal to you more, and your sense of humor. Ultimately, a sketch with aliens is not that different from any other sketch; it should still have something to say that is surprising and truthful. Sometimes this may be a surprising truth about the way we think about aliens; sometimes the aliens are just a way to show a surprising truth about ourselves.