How Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream Turns You Into a Comedy Master Nintendo knows the secret ingredient to making a funny game: You. By the time you read this, Nintendo's oddball life simulator, Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream, will likely have passed 4 million copies sold since its Switch debut on April 16. When you first glance at the game's Wii-class graphics and seeming lack of anything resembling a traditional gameplay loop, you may ask, "How?" or, "Why?" After playing Living the Dream for a few hours (or watching someone else dress up their Miis and making them interact), you will come to understand a human fact that Nintendo, Maxis, and other sim-weavers understood long, long, ago: We never outgrow our love of playing with dollhouses. It's fun to arrange little fake people and tiny pieces of furniture to your liking, no matter your age or gender. Lording over a narrative—even a narrative acted out by a passel of goofy Miis—is a harmless but pleasant power rush. And Living the Dream's funny and weird writing is some of Nintendo's best, which compliments the players' fantasies and keeps the experience fresh. Living the Dream's popularity is compounded by its extensive options for editing Mii's looks, its inclusion of same-sex relationships, and its surprising lack of a filter. This has made the game the perfect pastime for YouTubers who think that Walter White from Breaking Bad needs to marry the Red Power Ranger and go on a honeymoon in Antarctica. Outrageous visual gags paired with bad words are good for some hearty laughs, but it's normally not the kind of joke that gets more amusing the more times you hear it. The difference with Living the Dream is that the character staging is written and arranged by Nintendo, a company that historically has a quiet but wicked sense of humor. Indeed, the Living the Dream development team admits it challenged itself to be as funny as possible. They were surprised at how easily Living the Dream's jokes write themselves with simple events, like two cat-faced Miis having a strange-looking animal baby with a mix of its parents' features. Here in the west, when we're unleashed upon something innocent and encouraged to make it an object of humor we appeal first and foremost to, well, genitals. So when your Mii tries to make a new friend they break the ice with something like, "Hey Barry B. Benson from Bee Movie, what do you think of [CENSORED?]" And the Barry the Seinfeld bee, whose face has been drawn upon to make him look like an actual anthropomorphic bee horror, will widen his eyes and shriek "Itotallyloooove [CENSORED]" at chipmunk speed because that's how you set his voice. And maybe you and Barry will talk about [CENSORED] as you fall in love and make a horrible bee baby with a digital heartfelt collage of growth milestones that Nintendo knew you'd defile. How funny! How droll! How – hey, wait. This game's divorce cutscenes are framed like Emmy-nominated dramas. Now the bee man gets to reminisce about his sins against his mate as his antennae bob sadly in the dark. And just like that, Nintendo turns your funny time into the video game equivalent of that black velvet painting of a sad clown hanging on your parents' wall. It's difficult to make video games genuinely funny. It takes everything a developer has just to make sure that a game's systems, art, music, and narrative interact without exploding, so who has the time or resources to put into workshopping jokes? Nintendo excels with Living the Dream by setting up every conceivable prop on its grand stage. You just need to bring the imagination, the spice, and potentially the rude words. Together, you'll perform comedy genius.
