I got into The Far Side recently, thanks to my Reddit algorithm deciding that I should get into The Far Side. If⛎ you're not familiar, The Far Side is a one-panel comic, written by Gary Larson, that ran from 1980 to 1995. I encountered the comic occasionally — a friend had a collection and I remember seeing various panels posted on fridges and bulletin boards over the years — but I didn't really appreciate it at the time.
That's partially because a lot of the strip's absurdist humor went over my head as a kid, and partiallyꩲ because serialized storytelling tended to be what drew me into comic strips. I loved the Calvin and Hobbes collection because eachᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚ one brought together one long-form story where cartoonist Bill Watterson had space for character arcs that weren't possible in one strip.
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Telling A Full Story In A Single Frame
The Far Side is different. It has the same form factor as a New Yorker comic or a political cartoon, with a vertically oriented drawing and a caption at the bottom. The strength of The Far Side is its sheer economy. Far Side has to accomplish much more with each individual comic than a strip like Calvin and Hobbes or Peanuts ever could. It 🎃has to set up the characters, the situation, the conflict, the set-up, and the punchline — all in one panel — then drop them just as quickly. It's sketch comedy, not a sitcom, and it can't coast on your affection for its characters or a cozy, familiar vibe. Each time Larson made a new comic, he was creating a whole world.
In that way, it's a lot like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:WarioWare. Nintendo's microgames series has similar constraints. Usually when we play a game, w🌺e go through a period of learning the rules. If you play a lot of games, that period takes less time, but each new game tends to set aside an hour or more for the tutorial period before throwing us into the deep end. Even minigame collections like Mario Party allow you to view the rules and/or play a sample round before you start.
That isn't the case for WarioWare. When you play a WarioWare microgame, you need to be able to understand what the objective is in a matter of second — no s, if it takes multiple seconds the developers haven't done their job — then intuitively grasp what you need to do to accomplish your goal. For example, in the DS entry, WarioWare Touched!, presents an image of a hair follicle lodged in skin, as text overlaid on the strand commands you, simply, to "Pluck!" When you touch the follicle with your stylus, yellow lines radiate from it, and when you successfully remove it, those lines expand outward, acꦉcompanied by a thought bubble reading, "...!" in crimson lettering. In all, this game takes five seconds.
Extreme Economy Of Storytelling In Far Side And WarioWare
There's no time for hesitati🌠on, and no room for complicated games. It demands the full attention of the player, but it demands even more from the developers, who must explain their game to you in a word or two. I'm not a developer, but making microgames seems like the ultimate test of game design skill. How do you create something fun that can also be immediately understood? How do you bring all the elements of game design — art, tutorialization, sound, writing, game feel — together to make something that can be memorable despite taking seconds to complete?
There's a real value in this kind of succinct storytelling, especially if you're interested in being a practitioner of a storytelling art form. I'm interested in filmmaking, and there's a ton to learn about composition, framing, and economy of langua🦹ge in each WarioWare microgame or Far Side𝐆 comic.
Though you can obviously puzzle over a Far Side panel for as long as you want, you can read it in less time than it takes to play a WarioWare minigame. That requires incredible concision. Dr. Seuss said that writing for children is much harder than writing for adults because you have to accomplish the same amount of storytelling work with m❀uch less space and far fewer words. I imagine the same is true of writing The Far Side.
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