| name | deadpan-institutional-register |
| description | Tone and diction for comedy-horror where an institution processes the impossible without noticing: corporate horror, bureaucratic dread, workplace supernatural, company-town folk horror, the memo that mentions the wolves. Use when writing in-game text, tips, item descriptions, or flavour for a game whose joke is the organisation rather than the monster; when horror-comedy copy is landing as jokey rather than deadpan; when the monsters are becoming the punchline; or when satire is drifting into winking at the player. Instance two of the six-slot register template — see cosmic-horror-register for the template itself and how to build a third. |
Deadpan Institutional Register
Purpose: Write the voice of an organisation that has filed the supernatural
under the wrong heading and moved on.
Sources: The tradition runs through Catch-22 (Heller, 1961) for procedural
absurdity played straight, The Twilight Zone's corporate episodes, Douglas
Adams's Vogons for bureaucracy as horror, Charles Stross's Laundry Files for
occult-as-civil-service, and Welcome to Night Vale for institutional calm about
the impossible. In games: Papers, Please, Universal Paperclips, Control,
The Stanley Parable. Slot rules below are derived from those and from a working
implementation; they are practice, not findings.
This skill is tone only. Structure — passage length, teaching copy, the
information-state ledger — is in game-narrative-craft. A perfectly deadpan
line that teaches the wrong thing at the wrong time is still a broken line.
Slot 1 — The scale rule
The threat is supernatural-large. The frame is administratively-small. The
frame never yields.
This inverts cosmic horror, where the threat is cosmic and the payoff is a small
human warmth. Here the institution is the constant, and the joke is that it
absorbs the impossible without adjusting. Wolves on the site are logged as
weather. The moon is a known variable. Hazard pay remains under review.
The horror and the comedy are the same fact: nothing the player encounters is
big enough to change the paperwork. A player who dies has failed to meet a
quota.
Test: name the largest thing that happens in your game, then write the form
it would be filed under. If the form would be revised by the event, you have
written a different genre — one where the institution can be surprised, which
means it can be reasoned with, which removes the dread.
Slot 2 — The signature move
The category error, played absolutely straight.
The institution processes the impossible using the wrong instrument and does not
notice. Not "the company is evil" — evil is engaged. Indifference through
correct procedure is the register.
| Move | Shape | Example |
|---|
| Misfiling | The supernatural entered under a mundane heading | "Wolves on the cut. Logged as weather." |
| The pending review | A catastrophe awaiting an administrative decision | "Hazard pay remains under review." |
| The unchanged rate | Reality shifts; the terms do not | "Blood moon. Rates unchanged." |
| Awareness without action | Someone above knows and has done nothing | "Corporate is aware of the moon." |
| The policy citation | A cosmic constraint given a mundane authority | "Cutting rights expire at dawn. Company policy." |
Rule: the institution is never the villain and never the fool. A villain is
opposable. A fool is correctable. What makes this register work is that the
organisation is functioning correctly and the correctness is the problem.
Test: could a competent, well-meaning employee have written this line in good
faith? If it reads as authored by someone in on the joke, it has broken.
Slot 3 — Sensory palette
Leads with: units, rates, quantities, deadlines, forms, job titles,
equipment nomenclature, the language of scheduling and entitlement. The texture
of work — the specific weight of a thing, the specific hour.
Underuses: gore, fear, the monster's interiority, weather as mood, anything
the institution would not have a field for. The register cannot describe what
it cannot file, and that constraint is the whole effect.
Signature moves:
- The precise number in the wrong place. "120 wood, carried, reopens it."
Specificity where you expect a reaction.
- Passive voice with an absent actor. "Logged as weather" — by whom? The
omission is the horror; this is the one register where passive voice is
correct, and it is a deliberate exception to the rule in
game-narrative-craft.
- The reassurance that reassures nobody. "Rates unchanged."
- Equipment named by function, never by menace. A torch is lighting. An axe
is issued.
Vocabulary that carries it: allowance, requisition, tonnage, logged, rate,
standard, entitlement, review, policy, on file, per schedule, remains, pending,
issued, cleared, restocks.
Slot 4 — What is never explained
Never explain:
- Whether anyone above knows. "Corporate is aware of the moon" is perfect
because it confirms awareness and withholds everything else. Resolve this and
the register collapses into either conspiracy or farce.
- What the monsters are. They are a condition of the site, like frost.
- Why the player is still employed. Economic necessity is understood and
never stated. Stating it makes the game about that, and it isn't.
- The joke. Ever. This is the register's single hardest rule and the one that
breaks most often under pressure to be funny.
Do explain, exactly: the rules, the rates, the quota, the schedule, what
counts and what does not. The institution is scrupulously precise about
procedure and silent about meaning — and that gap is where the player does the
work.
The direction rule
The farce points at the institution. Never at the monsters, and never at the
player.
The wolves are not staff. They are not on a rota, they do not have opinions
about management, they are not secretly unionised. The moment a monster becomes
a participant in the joke, the horror leaves and does not return — you have
written a workplace comedy with a wolf in it.
Test: for each line, name its target. If the answer is the wolves, cut it. If
the answer is the player, cut it harder — this register never winks.
Slot 5 — Register and period
Default: mid-century industrial memo. Clipped declaratives. Passive where a
memo would be passive. No contractions in official voice; contractions permitted
where a person is speaking rather than the company.
Two voices, and they must be distinguishable at a glance:
| Voice | Who | Style |
|---|
| The company | Notices, signage, terms, anything official | Imperative or declarative. Present tense. No hedging, no humour, no acknowledgement of the absurd. Often typographically distinct — small caps, all caps, a form-like layout. |
| The wry aside | Ambient scroll, incidental text | Sentence case. Slightly weary. Permitted to notice, never to complain. Still never explains. |
The gap between them carries most of the comedy. The company cannot see the joke;
the aside can see it and can do nothing.
Calibration:
- Sentences are short. A memo does not build to anything.
- Understatement always. The register never raises its voice — which is what
makes the one line that does land.
- No modern idiom, no exclamation marks, no emoji-adjacent tone.
- No jokes with a structure. No setups, no punchlines, no rule-of-three. The
humour is entirely situational and must survive being read flatly aloud by
someone who does not find it funny.
The inherited problem. This register's raw material is real institutional
harm — dangerous work, absent employers, people with no option to leave. Played
carelessly it becomes a joke at the expense of the worker, which is both cruel
and unfunny. Locate the absurdity in the institution's procedures, never in the
worker's predicament. The player character is competent and stuck; that is
sympathetic. A player character who is stupid for staying is the register
failing.
Slot 6 — Tuning forks
Read a page before drafting, for cadence:
- Heller, Catch-22 — the founding text for procedure as horror. Read any
Milo Minderbinder passage.
- Real safety notices and terms of service. Better than any fiction for the
actual voice. A workplace hazard sign is doing this register sincerely.
- Stross, The Atrocity Archives — occult under civil-service management.
- Night Vale — institutional calm about the impossible, though it winks more
than this register permits; read for the calm, not the jokes.
Rule: read the sincere source, not the parody. The parodies have already made
the choices you need to make yourself, and copying them yields a copy of a joke.
Review checklist
Run after the game-narrative-craft checklist, not instead of it.
Cross-References
Three tight links. Everything else routes through the map, so adding a skill
touches one file rather than twenty: references/routing-map.md (in
game-design).
- game-narrative-craft — structure, teaching copy, the information-state ledger; read it first
- cosmic-horror-register — the six-slot template this instantiates, and its build rules
- generated-content-quality — the referent ledger, which this register makes harder and more necessary
