Humour and Games Podcasts — Season 3, Episode 9

I’m very happy to share that my episode of Season 3 of the Humour and Games podcast was recently published — and it’s now available to listen to! The interview itself actually dates back to 2022, so it’s been a while in the making. I’m glad it’s finally out in the world. In Episode 9, host Scott DeJong and I spend about 33 minutes talking about Tetris parodies, the strange logic of comedy in games, and why making fun of a classic can be a surprisingly serious business.

🎧 Listen now on Spotify or Apple Podcasts

What We Talk About

The conversation is loosely based on my chapter “Making Fun of Tetris: Humour in Parodies of a Computer Game Classic”, published in the collected volume Video Games and Comedy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022). In it — and in the interview — I explore the surprisingly rich world of Tetris parodies: webcomics, meta-games, YouTube videos, and other playful interventions that twist the iconic falling-block formula into something absurd, critical, or philosophically provocative.

In the episode, we get into three ideas that I find especially compelling:

• Paradox as comedic engine. Tetris parodies don’t just joke about the game — they expose and amplify its own internal contradictions, turning its rigid logic into the punchline.
• Processing the strange. Humour here functions as a way of working through the uncanny: that feeling when something familiar suddenly seems deeply wrong.
• The evocative power of parody in game design. The best Tetris parodies are themselves inventive game concepts — they reflect the gameplay logic of the original more sharply than Tetris itself ever does.

I also argue that these parodies continue a long tradition of paradoxical interventions from art history. And that many carry an implicit critique of neoliberal game design. A dimension I find particularly interesting to think about alongside the humour.

If you’ve ever laughed at xkcd’s “Hell” you’re already in the territory we cover. The episode explains why that joke lands so well, and why it means more than it first appears.

About the Chapter and the Book

My chapter appears in Video Games and Comedy, edited by Krista Bonello Rutter Giappone, Tomasz Z. Majkowski, and Jaroslav Švelch — a volume I’m genuinely proud to be part of. Published in Palgrave’s Studies in Comedy series, it is the first edited academic collection to systematically explore the intersections of comedy theory and video games, drawing on a diverse range of scholarly approaches.

The chapter (pp. 191–213) has been a long time in the making — I first presented an early version at a DiGRA conference in Hilversum back in 2011, so seeing it eventually become the basis for a podcast conversation feels like a satisfying full circle.

Möring, Sebastian. 2022. “Making Fun of Tetris: Humour in Parodies of a Computer Game Classic.” In: Video Games and Comedy, ed. Krista Bonello Rutter Giappone, Tomasz Z. Majkowski, and Jaroslav Švelch, 191–213. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-88338-6_10

Bonello Rutter Giappone, Krista, Tomasz Z. Majkowski, and Jaroslav Švelch, eds. 2022. Video Games and Comedy. Palgrave Studies in Comedy. Cham: Springer International Publishing.
📖 Publisher page (Springer)

About the Podcast

Humour and Games is produced and hosted by Scott DeJong, Marc Lajeunesse, and Andrei Zanescu, and sponsored by TAG (Technology, Art and Games Research Centre) at Concordia University. Season 3 — the podcast’s final season — is dedicated entirely to conversations with contributors to Video Games and Comedy, meaning most of the book’s authors and editors each feature in their own episode. It’s a wonderful format that turns the book into something genuinely alive and listenable.

I’d encourage you to start from the beginning of the season if you haven’t already: Episode 1 features the three editors of the book and sets the stage beautifully for everything that follows.

🎧 Subscribe and listen:

• Spotify: Humour and Games on Spotify
• Apple Podcasts: Humour and Games on Apple Podcasts

Making Fun of Tetris