For over a decade, Jackbox Games has specialized in outrageous party games, played on consoles, computers and smart TVs. The company’s latest edition, The Jackbox Party Pack 11, out Thursday, tasks players to decorate digital cookies, sniff out phony detectives and write jokes to ruin a friend’s favorite thing.
“We’re genuinely always trying to follow where the laughs are, so an idea can be out there and wild and maybe something that we haven’t tried before,” said Brooke Breit, Jackbox Games creative director. “So the seed of an idea might be, ‘Hey, what about a game where we can make ridiculous noises into our phone and then be forced to hear them back with a different context?’”
Such experimentation led to the party game Hear Say, one of five included in the Jackbox Party Pack 11. The design process comes naturally to a company based in Chicago, home of the famous Second City comedy club, which honed legendary comics like Chris Farley, Tina Fey and Gilda Radner.
Since its origins, making “You Don’t Know Jack” trivia games in the 1990s, the company has regularly hired Second City veterans.
“A lot of the folks that staff the company have connections to improv,” said Breit, herself an alumna. “You can’t avoid improv in Chicago — you walk one step, you’re going to bump into somebody that’s taken a class.”
That comedic training, embodied by a classic improv tenet, resonates with the design philosophy at Jackbox.
“The idea of ‘yes and’ is taking an idea and then building upon it,” said Breit, “Once we kind of hit that sweet spot, we roll with it.”
Ultimately, Breit says her company’s games should make it easy to be funny with friends.
“One of the key elements that I always held on to was the idea of making your scene partner look good,” said Breit. “We want people to make each other laugh with inside jokes, references, things that your group is really going to have a good time with that we couldn’t have predicted — we’re just kind of giving you the diving board so that you can jump in.”
3 questions with Brooke Breit
The Party Pack 11 game “Doomiate” feels like an improv game already. How did you come up with it?
“One of our other creative directors, Warren Arnold, pitched this game and he just brought in a simple kind of a paper test to show the idea of taking a setup and then adding something to absolutely ruin it. So it was a really fun idea. It was very simple. It got a lot of laughs in the room.
“The thing that was very appealing to me about it is it’s secretly a storytelling game because there’s that natural cadence you have in storytelling where it’s like the setup and then, ‘Oh, but this happened, here’s the conflict.’ So that’s kind of what people are doing. So you get these tiny narratives, and then in the final round we’re asking people to put a little button on it to end on a positive.”
Comedy is a really tricky thing, whether you’re doing improv or you’re on a stage. But what kind of challenge do you face with video game comedy? To make sure that whatever you thought was funny might translate into someone’s living room when they were playing it on their own.
“Not all of our ideas come from an improv idea. There’s a sensibility there, but we’re coming from party games, like what’s something fun that you would want to do with your friends? And again, that crosses over because we play a lot of games when we’re improvising.
“I love to tell the story of a different game I worked on in a prior Party Pack, a game called ‘Job Job.’ You’re basically answering job interview questions with a mishmash of words that someone else gave you. And that came from inspiration of an improv game where you just have to justify an out-of-context line of dialogue.
“So it’s not a one-to-one. We’re not having people play that improv game, which is a more performance-based situation. But we’re taking the feeling and kind of the core of that idea. It’s more intimate, you’re having fun with your friends.”
Jackbox games got very popular over the pandemic. You could hang out and be silly without being in person, which, of course, everybody needed. We played these games on Zoom. How is that changing the way you do business, rethinking the way we play together?
“We very much want our games to play just as well online as they do in person. And I think that’s important. We as people are gathering in different ways. So I love that we hear all the time from our community and our fan base how our games provided connection during a really difficult time. We’re always looking to push what we can do and make sure that we’re supporting different ways of play.
“The same game is going to play a little differently, like if you’re all in the room together, for example. ‘Hear Say’ is a perfect example of that. It plays really well when everyone’s on a call and you can mute and then do your secret little noise. It’s really fun to play in person and to see people kind of squirreling away and trying to make their noises and make it work. They’re both really wonderful experiences and they’re different experiences.”
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James Perkins Mastromarino produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Mark Navin. Allison Hagan also adapted it for the web.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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