When it comes to video games there is a line between incidental glitches that a player may come across (such as an enemy getting stuck in the wall during gameplay) and a Good Bad Bug that is well documented in scripted cutscenes. I mostly think of Mass Effect: Andromeda where the facial animation was famously cracked, leading to weird expressions regardless of the scene (which can be a major problem given the importance of character customization). Any example that indicates it was a random coincidence in a personal runthrough can be nuked without question.
Do you not know that in the service one must always choose the lesser of two weevils!
Yeah, for video games in particular, there can be a line drawn between botched and unintentionally funny presentation (which would count as Narm) vs. players being given the ability to derail the game in a way antithetical to the intended tone and presentation of the game (which would not). Glitches might be very context-heavy, but there's a difference between a one-off inappropriate situation that someone might experience (like a 0.1% chance of a cutscene skipping so that "Superman" sounds like "Soupman"
) and a game with consistently and generally bad and unstable presentation that such distracting interference is an inevitable part of the work itself.
Narm describes a lot of cases. From what I can guess from the description and this discussion
,
Narm is:
- poor writing
- poor acting/scenery
Narm is not:The page uses "unintended humor" and "unintentionally funny" a lot, but if the above is accurate then these are poor summarizations of the page that include more than inteded, and the page should spell out it's about inherent problems with narrative delivery.
TroperWall / WikiMagic Cleanup