Humor in Violent Video Games and its Effects on Iranian Audience

One of the key differences between video game and the other media is audience interaction. Like no other audio or visual media, video game has a reciprocal relationship with its audience rather than consider them as mere viewers. Actually, video games need players to achieve their potential. Game is not only confined to the virtual world of video games created by game creators but also to the real world of players who interact with each other. So we should study humor not only within the video games but also among the players. We call the first one “Scripted humor” and the latter one “Emergent humor”. Emergent humor is also divided into “Emergent humor through game” and “Post game emergent humor”. One type of video games which has a wide range of audience is violent video games. Humor and violence have close relationship with each other. Numerous studies on this relationship in different media outlets indicate the issue. When it comes to the combination of humor and violence, we have three kinds of it: Friendly humor, Aggressive humor and Humorous aggression. Considering all types of humor in the media, game elements and humor-violence combinations, this paper is going to present a framework to study humor not only within video games but also among the players. At the end, we can figure an outline of the combination of humor and violence which can be used by video game creators.