“A great playwright, Tom Stoppard, once said that laughter is the sound of comprehension. My goal will be to get you to laugh at the end. I need to start with a digression, though. There’s this idea in both comedy and video games called ‘negative transfer.’ The idea is that a rapid switching of one’s frame, in the comedy case, or control scheme, in the video game case, can be both funny and frustrating. As a simple example, think about playing a Nintendo game and you’ve learned since the beginning of time that the left little button on the D-pad moves your character left and the ‘A’ button makes him jump. And then imagine some sort of spell in the game and suddenly all the controls are reversed. That’s called a ‘negative transfer.”