Videogames like Jazzpunk, however, ask us to resist. They ask us to suspend our suspension of disbelief, and reconsider the nature of the worlds we immerse ourselves in. A comedy above all else, Jazzpunk derives its humor from the tacit acknowledgement that all games are artificial, and does everything it can to remind us of this fact.

Necrophone

In a surreal twist, opening a pizza box in Jazzpunk’s first area reveals it to be a games console, one that abruptly transports the player into a meta-fictive game-within-a-game; a comic, hack-n-slash world that owes equal debts to survival horror and Raimi’s The Evil Dead. Stuck within its confines, the player has no choice but to play along, held hostage within a game that is clearly a joke, but mechanically feels all-too familiar. For the player, it’s the first reminder that nothing in Jazzpunk is real, that the only thing separating normality from obscurity is a quick texture change.

If the language of videogames is comedic, Jazzpunk changes the phrasing to highlight it. The simple idea of a button press is complicated tenfold, the expected interaction of opening a pizza box, or talking to an NPC, is subverted again and again. Descriptive text becomes a physical construct used to manoeuvre around the environment. In-game computers play Jazzpunk. An NPC coldly states, “You are good at doing things.” This is a game gleefully aware of the medium’s artifice, one that bulldozes any pretence of reality and expects you to play in the rubble, laughing both with and at it.

Yet Jazzpunk never betrays its roots as a videogame: the “interact” button will always interact; the radical difference is what happens on the other side. The player’s conscious goal is to persist: to navigate through the game’s countless abstractions and adapt to a language in flux. They are encouraged to revel in the absurd, and even add to it; to explore and experiment, to probe at its edges. It’s right there in the title: jazz and punk, improvisation and anarchy, coming together.

This approach is not new. Over the last few years, more and more games have started using reflexive comedy to take stock of gaming’s idiosyncrasies. Brendon Chung’s Thirty Flights of Loving, challenged by the idea that videogaming was veering towards cinematic spectacle, took the concept to its natural conclusion with a narrative full of disorienting—albeit decidedly “cinematic”—jump-cuts. Similarly, his earlier Gravity Bone poked at the idea of player-as-narrator, casting its player as someone who, as it turns out, is little more than a bit-part in a larger narrative—a narrative that they will never see unfold. These aren’t just games with punch lines, but games in which the idea of a game in itself is a punchline.

All of these games are part of a recent trend that is systematically disassembling and lampooning the systems we use to tell stories, placing them in figurative pizza boxes where their artifice is plain to see. The cult hit Space Funeral, for example, turns a comic eye towards turn-based role playing games, showing us a world that is coyly incompatible with the genre’s tropes. In it, “morality” is a status effect just as valid as “poison,” melancholy dances are offensive weapons, and combat is largely superfluous—rarely presenting a challenge, but instead proving little more than a mock hindrance. Space Funeral will be the first to tell you that none of it matters. It’s all artificial. Fake. Unreal.