The Joke Was The Doorway

What happened when I made the mistake of taking a dachshund tower-defense game seriously.

Dachshund tower-defense game.

That's funny.

It's also the sort of idea a sensible person could exhaust in approximately fifteen minutes.

Make the dogs soldiers.

Give one of them a helmet.

Put a sausage joke somewhere in the UI.

Maybe somebody says ruff instead of rough.

Congratulations.

Premise successfully murdered.

I made a different mistake.

I took it seriously.

There was absolutely no reason to ask the next question

Wiener Defense began with a premise that was supposed to be ridiculous.

Dachshunds defending the home front.

That's it.

You can see the whole joke from where you're standing.

The problem is that once I can see the joke, I start wondering what's behind it.

If the dachshunds are defending the home front, what does the home front look like?

What are they defending it from?

Do they have an Army?

Obviously.

Navy?

Well, now they do.

Air Corps?

This is getting expensive.

What does their propaganda look like?

Who produces it?

What does their military infrastructure look like?

What does their town look like?

What happens when the war expands?

At some point the question stops being:

Wouldn't it be funny if dachshunds fought a war?

and becomes:

What kind of world would have to exist for all of this to make perfect sense?

That's a much more dangerous question.

Because questions produce answers.

And answers have an irritating habit of producing more questions.

The world doesn't know it's funny

This turned out to matter.

Wiener Defense works best when the world itself never acknowledges the joke.

The Department of Hound Defense does not think it is participating in a comedy.

Its propaganda is important.

Its intelligence reports are serious.

Its enemies are genuine threats.

Its military branches have jobs to do.

Somebody, somewhere, has apparently been given responsibility for public morale.

The dachshunds aren't standing around winking at the player because they're dachshunds.

They're busy. There's a war on.

And the straighter I played the world, the funnier it became.

That's the strange thing about absurdity.

You don't always strengthen it by adding more jokes.

Sometimes you strengthen it by removing them.

Give the ridiculous thing rules.

Give it consequences.

Give it history.

Let everyone inside the world behave as though the premise is completely ordinary.

The audience already knows it's ridiculous.

You don't have to keep reminding them.

Commitment creates better jokes than jokes do

There's a point where a gag either runs out of oxygen or becomes something else.

Wiener Defense became something else.

A propaganda poster wasn't enough.

Now there were propaganda campaigns.

A military dachshund wasn't enough.

Now there were branches of service.

An enemy wasn't enough.

Now opposing forces needed their own visual language, behavior, hierarchy and character.

A battlefield wasn't enough.

Now there was Wienerville.

And apparently a tower-defense game wasn't enough either, because somewhere along the way Wiener Launch happened.

Wiener Launch is a game inside the game.

There are rockets.

I don't have a defense for this.

But none of these things appeared because a design document declared that Wiener Defense required a certain quantity of Content™.

They appeared because the previous thing created a question that was too interesting not to answer.

That's a very different way of expanding a project.

You aren't adding more. You're following consequences.

A stupid idea can survive serious scrutiny

I think creative people sometimes kill good ideas by protecting them from seriousness.

An idea arrives wearing a clown nose, so we assume it must remain small.

It's a joke.

It's weird.

It's indulgent.

It's not the serious project.

So we don't interrogate it.

We don't give it the same craftsmanship we'd give the respectable idea.

We don't ask what happens if we follow it all the way down.

And sometimes that's correct.

Some jokes really are fifteen-minute jokes.

God knows not every stupid idea needs a mythology.

But occasionally an absurd premise contains something structurally interesting underneath it.

You only discover that by pushing.

Can the world support another question?

Does the answer create useful constraints?

Do those constraints produce better ideas?

Does the thing become richer as you take it more seriously?

If the answer keeps being yes, maybe the clown nose was camouflage.

Play is not the opposite of rigor

This may be the part I care about most.

There's a tendency to treat play and rigor as opposite modes of work.

Play is unserious.

Rigor is disciplined.

One generates silly ideas.

The other produces real work.

I don't think that's how it works.

Play is often how I get somewhere I wouldn't have permitted myself to go deliberately.

Rigor is what I use once I get there.

The ridiculous premise gets me through the door.

Then the work begins.

Does the art belong to the same world?

Does the visual language hold?

Does the mechanic actually work?

Does the joke survive repetition?

Does the world remain internally coherent?

Is this genuinely making the project better, or am I merely adding shit because I can?

That last question is particularly annoying.

Taking a stupid idea seriously does not mean refusing to edit it.

Quite the opposite.

If I'm asking the audience to accept dachshund military bureaucracy as a functioning reality, then I owe the absurdity enough discipline to make that reality convincing.

The sillier the premise, sometimes the straighter the craftsmanship needs to be.

The joke was the doorway

Wiener Defense is considerably larger now than the joke that started it.

But I don't think the joke disappeared.

It's everywhere.

It's in the propaganda.

It's in the military bureaucracy.

It's in the enemies.

It's in the increasingly questionable technological ambitions of Wienerville.

It's in the fact that somebody apparently looked at a dachshund and decided the obvious next step was aerospace.

The difference is that the joke has a world to push against now.

And I think that's what I've learned from building it.

Not every ridiculous idea deserves to become an enormous project.

That would be terrible advice.

But when an idea keeps producing interesting questions, I no longer dismiss it because the original premise was stupid.

Sometimes stupid is useful.

Sometimes ridiculous is permission.

Sometimes the thing that makes you laugh is simply the first visible piece of something much larger.

You don't know until you follow it.

So when an idea arrives that is clearly impractical, somewhat embarrassing, difficult to categorize, and absolutely not what a sensible person would build next, I've learned to ask one question before throwing it away:

What happens if I take this completely seriously?

This time, apparently, the answer was dachshunds.

And rockets.

Obviously.

— Starhound Studio