Egon: Making Games Funny Is Like "Writing Three Hit Movies" News

Harold Ramis, who co-wrote and starred in the Ghostbusters movies, has been talking about some of the challenges that game writers face when they're trying to pen a funny script.

Ramis explained that because game scripts are so long, the challenge of writing enough comic alternatives to make the dialogue funny is like producing three hit movie scripts.

"To make a game so funny with so many comic alternatives, that would be like writing three hit movies," Ramis told GamesRadar. "The scripts are impossibly long. That would be a considerable investment. And I was thinking if you wrote that much comedy, chances are you would put it in a feature film."

Considering this, he hasn't done a bad job on the script for the Ghostbusters videogame, which certainly has its funny moments. Although Dan Aykroyd and Ramis were originally touted as the writers of the game, Aykroyd has since revealed that the script was originally penned by writers at Terminal Reality before he and Ramis took a second look at the script to make sure that it fitted snugly into the Ghostbusters universe.

Despite admitting that he hasn't really spent a lot of time playing games since the days of Pong and Pac Man, Ramis also made some perceptive points about what makes gamers tick.

"In videogames, it seems like the attraction of playing any videogame is that it gives you control over a world that you have no other access to. I read something interesting about the psychology of videogames and why they're addicting," Ramis explained. "It's about the learning curve. Gamers are happiest and most excited on the up side of the learning curve. Once you've mastered a game, you kind of lose interest. Repetition in a game, you're not only dealing with the repetition of the comedy, but you're dealing with the repetition of the gamers mastering the game, itself."

That certainly explains the feeling you get after completing Modern Warfare: 10 straight hours of pure gaming joy is then followed by a slightly empty feeling as you wonder how you're going to fill the void that's been left in your life after the game's completion... thank the good Lord for multiplayer.