No one really knows what dark souls is about.
Sure there have been many valiant attempts by members
of its community to piece together its lore, and yes there is a reasonable consensus about
the general overarching plot, but why do we continue to
find it endlessly fascinating?
Is it the challenge, ambiguity, atmosphere, themes, immersiveness, complexity
or art?
Perhaps it's all these things.
I don't think it is a coincidence that one of the single most unforgiving
games in recent history, dripping in dread, despair
and dilapidated décor, happens to be one of the most talked about games in our medium,
has inspired a quasi genre of it's own and serves as a
gatekeeper into the hallowed halls of gaming elitism.
What does it say about us that we revel in the punishment
and madness it inflicts upon us?
Life is about death and madness goes the saying, and maybe that's
describes why we fetishize this masochistic piece of media.
The paradox can only be confronted if we recognize that there is genuine pleasure in hardship,
palpable purpose in punishment, and ultimately fun
to be had though failure.
Dark souls is a distillation of what it means to be human.
Its brilliance however is that it systemizes the human tragedy in a way that makes
us love it.
If we are being reductive, Darks souls is a 3d action rpg, developed by an eastern developer,
but infused with western sensibilities.
Immediately we see the duality the game embodies.
Western Rpg's like fallout and mass effect tend to be about
letting us create our own characters and living out a
fantasy.
Japanese Rpg's like final fantasy and kingdom hearts tend to have a suite of well defined
characters with their own motivations that we get invested in.
The line between these two is not impermeable but I'm speaking in generalities.
Dark souls is a western Rpg developed by a Japanese
company featuring architecture from Europe , but confronting themes of cycles and reincarnation
from the east, and futility and nihilism inherited
from the west.
It's everything all at once, yet at the same
time impenetrable, elusive and mysterious.
This scattershot aesthetic may seem like what a focus
tested mainstream game might try to do as opposed to a niche title like Dark souls,
but in this case it's deliberate.
The game occupies the space between things, in all its dimensions.
It's eastern and western, high fantasy and demonic, about death and
life, futility and triumph, light and darkness It has vague
themes and narrative structure, but the rules governing it are precise and exacting.
We live in the space between things as an undead being, neither
living nor dead, and this ambiguous purgatory is exactly
what the director Hedetaki miyazaki was aiming for.
Miyazaki was inspired by the English Rpg's of his youth that he could not understand
for himself.
In order to get the most out of his experiences
, he conjured up stories of his own to fill in the ambiguity,
Sound familiar?
This need is not exclusive to obscure Japanese game developers, it is intrinsic to us as
a species.
Without closure or explanations we are facing a vast meaningless cosmos with us as it's
sole witnesses.
Instead we read stories into things, placating our angst about our isolation.
What do you see here?
Do you see a bunch of shapes moving about , or a narrative about danger, predation,
escape and triumph.
The Researchers Heider and Simmel found out that most people infuse the scene with narrative
energy, despite being about a bunch of shapes moving about.
The game Thomas was alone took this to heart, using different shapes
to represent different character traits.
Psychologists and anthropologists argue we have what they hall
a hyper agency detection module, an instinct to see
purpose design and intention where it might not be.
The reason for this is deeply evolutionary , as
assuming the rustling of leaves is a tiger as opposed to the wind would be a truly adaptive
precaution.
. Needless to say, we have been conjuring up myths, gods and legends our entire existence
for these exact reasons, driven by a need to explain
the seemingly arbitrary patterns surrounding us.
Some explanation is better than no explanation and herego the voracious lore community of
Dark souls.
The rabbit hole one can go down with the collective storytelling chops on display is nothing short
of astonishing.
People scrounge from obtuse lines of dialogue, item descriptions, the world itself and
the context of certain events.
I have no doubt that many of the dark souls community could put
archaeologists to shame.
They employ a whole host of storytelling styles , like modern day bards
revealing wisdom to us ignorant masses.
This obsessive forensic analysis is more strange as the
overarching plot of the game is fairly straightforward.
Much like many a mythology, in the beginning the world was shrouded in fog.
Suddenly , fire entered the world and there was disparity, creating
form out of chaos.
Much like the war between the Titans and the gods in Greek mythology, there is a war
between the dragons and the gods in Dark souls, which ends
in the king of the gods, Gwyn, think of him like Zeus, ushering in an age of fire.
However, this age needs constant renewal, and the inevitable death
of the world linger over all it's inhabitants.
This theme is common globally, where a once pristine state
of nature is violated by the corruptibility of man, whether
Eden, arcadia or the golden ages of old.
Gwyn realizes the age of the gods is dwindling, and sacrifices
himself to allow his age of fire to persist, but this casts a curse upon all humans, searing
them with a dark sign that renders us all undead.
We are cursed with perpetual death, with every cycle hallowing out
our souls until we are driven to meandering husks.
Enter the protagonist of this game, you presumably, prophesized as being the chosen undead who
is to inherit the mantle from Gwyn to link the flame once
more and reignite the age of fire.
Thus far this sounds much like the well popularized Hero's journey of Joseph Campbell fame.
For those unfamiliar, Joseph Campbell wrote a book entitled
a hero with a thousand faces that argues for something called the monomyth, the idea
that all stories ever told and continue to be told adhere to
a singular template.
Even George Lucas claims to have used this template for the star wars saga.
There is
an ordinary world,(the inside of a cell that sees you rotting till Armageddon), where the
chosen undead finds themselves imprisoned at the
start.
A call to adventure happens in the form of these keys
that are conveniently dropped down for you.
An inciting event leads to a crossing of a threshold after
you defeat a threshold guardian.
You are then whisked to another realm where there is no return.
You then embark on a road of trials in the form
of an inordinate number of bosses, then you reunite with
the mother, reconcile with the father, receive assistance from some friends and serpentine
miscreants, or primordial snakes, and receive wisdom from
a host of wise elders.
On your way to journey's end you overcome your own death many a time, and
this endlessly recurring apotheosis allows you to
defeat the tyrannical king of old to usher in a new age of peace prosperity and light.
It's fitting that Campbell's monomyth is meant to apply to all mythologies across
the world, allowing for the game to accommodate its global set of
themes.
But is this what Dark Souls story is about?
A heroic individual who reinvigorates society from
within?
In this sense the difficulty of the game is a very potent
metaphor for the tribulations surrounding heroism and transformation.
It quite literally puts you through the ordeal a hero might have to go
through to rescue civilization from itself.
However, Dark souls elegantly subverts this traditional
heroic narrative.
At the end, it is left unclear whether linking the flame is the right thing to do.
In the middle of your quest, two different serpents implore you
to do two different things, one urging you to follow your
destiny, and the other to let the age of fire to end.
Who should you trust?
It's never made explicitly clear, but its enough introduce doubt into
your heroic questing.
By questioning the legitimacy of renewing civilization, Dark souls critiques
the very idea of renewal and persistence.
Why should we persist?
Are we deserving of it?
What are the consequences?
Why do we blindly abide by the dogmas of the past ?What is the point of these endless
cycles of light and darkness and why are we, as
game-players , always eager the play the role of sacrificial lamb?
There is a meta dimension to this as well, because it's kind of critiquing why
we continue to embody the same heroic narratives again and
again in all the games we play.
This part of Dark soul's ambiguity is conveyed with exacting precision.
Supposedly Gwyn is keeping alight the age of gods, and we, as the chosen one are allowing
their reign to persist.
The other ending sees the player allowing the age of light to end, with a new age of
dark being ushered in under the protagonist.
Is this a new age of man?
Is it evil or is it good?
Our traditional symbolism associates lightness with goodness
and darkness with sin, but perhaps Dark souls is
subverting that trope?
It is in fact humanity who possesses fragments of the titular dark soul, so does
that make us born in original sin, or imbued with universal goodness?
Is man, as Rousseau said, born free and then lives everywhere else in chains,
or s the state of nature nasty brutish and short.
By revelling in its ambiguity, Dark souls highlight
the intractable duality of these questions.
It clarifies ambiguity, if that's clear.
Death is inevitable.
If Ernst Becker is to be believed, this guiding fear apparently governs our every
move , forcing us to try and stave it away, prolong our life, deny our mortality, or just
accept it.
It's a particular predicament for a self- aware species
as it allows us to picture our own annihilation.
The most upsetting thing is that the world will just
go on without you, but maybe that's comforting.
Becker thinks Depression comes from failing in our immortality
project, schizophrenia and madness arise from denying reality, and creativity is driven
by trying to overcome it.
Perhaps death intensifies meaning, which is the central paradox to be solved
in our infatuation with dark souls.
All the characters in the game start of cogent, lucid and sometimes
just plain friendly, but by the games end they have all
descended into madness.
They are all on their own quests of righteousness wisdom and beauty, but
they all fail one way or the other.
Failing in trying to creatively overcome the inevitable death of their
universe, perhaps all these characters have no option but to wither away.
This might seem abject and dreary, but really, it's a reminder for
us to dare not go hollow.
In Dark souls, death is not like other games.
There is genuine loss to it, both for the character as well as
us, the player.
Our avatar loses a bit of his humanity every time he dies, and we lose all the souls,
progress and perhaps some of our will.
It's a beautiful metaphor in some sense, finding a way to
represent mechanically the loss of these digitized husks to us the player.
Recall that in the universe of Dark souls, every time you die you lose just
a little bit more of yourself.
Why try if every loss puts you back?
Well that's because not all is lost.
We still preserve our skills, our acumen and our knowledge
of what transpired.
Death is not just a chance for meaning, but also learning.
Dark souls highlights how purpose should always come from within,
by highlighting how it is you who has to improve to
overcome.
Miyazaki never intended for his game to be hard.
He was trying to create a certain atmosphere and he
found that death through difficulty was the best way to tell it.
Hardship sharpens us . Anyone who is "trained" to play a souls game,
knows never to just leap into a new area, is always observant,
constantly vigilant, deliberate in combat, hyper attentive to enemy patterns and moves
and is , for the duration they inhabit the world of Lordran,
truly alive.
The difficulty is never unfair though, with some
glaring exemptions, and is governed by very precise systems and rules that can be uncovered
over time.
Because the game is not overly forthcoming about what to do, we feel like we have accomplished
something ourselves.
If games are about challenge fundamentally, tutorials and easy modes might seem
self undermining.
In a world of suffocating tutorialization, Dark souls trusts us to be free.
Why does this matter though?
I've listened to people who claimed Darks souls helped them
with suicidal depression, because although it is soul crushing, it is a surmountable
challenge.
Suicidal ideation sets in when you see no way of escaping
your current predicament, which some might think
characterizes darks souls, but that's really not the case here.
If you are stuck, you can find a way to level up by doing side tasks, improve your weapons,
explore more of the world, or most importantly, you can
solicit the aid of others.
Yes, in a world of stark and unyielding isolation, the game is brimming with life.
The multiplayer works differently here as well . In the story of the game as well as
our reality, it takes place in simultaneous and overlapping worlds.
You summon people into your world to aid in conquering
a troublesome beast, and nothing quite captures the joy of jolly cooperation.
Implicitly Dark souls is telling us that when you are struggling at
your most, when you are lonely and in despair, the best thing
you can do is to lean on others for help.
There are always people willing to assist, and there are always
people going through similar struggles to you as well.
The game leaves these often comical reminders of
others failures in the form of bloodstains, forcing you to bear witness to others peoples
suffering.
This is not arbitrary malice, this is all deliberately
designed.
To confront hardship voluntarily and with others is
one way of overcoming your fears and anxieties, and Dark souls positively revels in instilling
that in us.
There's a curious inversion of the Christian religion in Dark Souls . Jesus sacrificed
himself to redeem mankind, but Gwyn's sacrifice led to their
eternal damnation.
In dark souls, instead of being redeemed vicariously you have to redeem yourself.
The only way you do this is by shouldering the burden of
constant and interminable hardship and pushing back against the curse.
By framing the insurmountable as surmountable, by trusting us to overcome
it without being patronizing, by subtly guiding us to seek
the aid of others, and by showing the liabilities of losing your will in the form of hollowing,
Dark souls makes you the hero whilst also deconstructing
it in its own narrative.
I said it was ambiguous.
As punishment for violation some arbitrary norms, Sisyphus was condemned to roll a boulder
up a hill for all eternity.
Once he got to the top, the boulder would roll all the way down and he would be forced
to start over.
The core of the story is the idea of futility and purposelessness, , or as 2b in nier automata
put it, "We are perpetually trapped in a never ending cycle of life and death."
We are not reviving automatons though, we only have one life.
Death brings with it three possibilities, either we die, and
that's it.
Perhaps one of the many religious traditions is correct and we are on our way to heaven
and hell, or another alternative presents itself
in the form of a universe simulated by some entities
insubordinate kid.
Either way, It's only fair to say we don't really know.
For a mortal being, the death in game is analogous to a failure in the real
world, whether it is personally or professionally.
This can be crippling, both for our self- esteem, as well
as our existential plight.
Failure and repetition in the real world can lead to depression and madness,
but then I can ask why the hell we all play games when
it seems to center around this things known as a fail states and endless cycles of dying?
Why do we love failure in games, but hate it in the real world?
Jaasper Juul calles games "The art of failure", suggesting it defines what games
are about.
Think about how people dismiss walking simulators as 'not games' because they don't have
two key ingredients, Fail states and challenge.
Games like Dear Esther and Gone home are classifies as insufficiently
gamey as they focus exclusively on storytelling, but
perhaps that's missing the point.
The art of death and challenge tells its own story.
To solve the paradox inherent in dark souls, we have to understand why we love failure.
We can start with an easier question, why do we love watching
others suffers?
Why do we like watching the walking dead, or breaking bad when really, as humans,
we should be wanting to avoid hardship at all costs.
Maybe it's a kind of cynical schadenfreude, feeling good about ourselves after seeing
others mired in crap.
Maybe, as Aristotle thought, tragedies are cathartic, a way for us to get rid of latent
emotions that need to be expressed and a way to remind us
of what we have.
It stands to reason that the benefits of witnessing horror outweigh the costs in some
sense.
The true paradox of dark souls is that its paradox is
a paradox.
Ummmmm.
What?
In dark souls death has consequences, real consequences, but, really how real are they?.
You are still sitting in your living room hitting a plastic
device, not on a spirit quest to Anor Londo.
The trick seems to be that when we subconconsciously know we
are safe, but consciously feel we are in peril, we have a
way of deriving pleasure from the endeavour.
Failure in the real world has real consequences, whereas
failure in stories and in games are ultimately 'safe'.
Dark souls is the ultimate expression of this paradoxical pleasure.
We grind, suffer, wander aimlessly in despair, but we know we can switch the
console off and come back later.
Unlike in schools where a bad grade can ruin your future, games allow
you to jump right back in.
Failure and suffering are not to be avoided, they are to be confronted and
relished as that's how you triumph.
Oh and how triumphant is that triumph.
I don't think anything compares to the sensation of having finally
defeated Ornstein and Smough in Anor Londo.
I don't know how long it took you to defeat this duo, but
it took me more tries than I care to admit.
One of these bosses is nimble and precise, the other lumbering
and hard hitting.
It seems like there's never an opening to ever hit one before another maims
you from behind.
But you do it, somehow you do it.
Ultimately, we love challenge and hardship when we are safe, and we confront it voluntarily,
which is ultimately why we love games.
And ultimately why Dark souls is the purest expression of what a game is.
Part 3
The world of Dark Souls feels like a genuine world of its own.
It isn't an elaborate stage, set dressing with avatars populating a high fantasy realm,
but a self- contained reality all its own.
Npc's aren't there to serve you, they have their own agendas.
One second they are in fire link shrine and the next they are
gone, servicing their own ambitions.
The world of dark souls isn't here to ingratiate you, it lives
completely indifferent to you.
How better to simulate a real world than one where no one cares
about you?
The world itself feels organic because its design seems to be one of a coherent place.
The world is this elaborate interconnected labyrinth, with astonishing verticality as
well.
You descend to the misleadingly titled depths, only to realize
it leads to a bog infested underground cavern in the form
of blight town, which then descends into the demon ruins and then the lost Izalith.
Because none of the exploration is explicitly prompted, you feel
like you are genuinely journeying to the centre of the earth,
in the vein of the Jules Verne classic, and this sense of adventure is seldom found in
games that guide you more directly.
At times the ambiguity seems a little too harsh.
When you first arrive at firelink shrine, you are told
you have to ring the two bells of awakening, and the only piece of advice you are given
is one lies above and the other below.
That's it.
The opening area itself has three directions you can go in once you are
put to the task, and so you set on your merry way.
One direction sees you run into reviving skeletons, bad idea.
The other has you accosted by invulnerable ghosts.
Even worse.
The third path, has perfectly manageable foot soldiers and so you gleefully
press on.
Although it is vague and ostensibly directionless, the game implicitly guides you a specific
direction by modulating the level of challenge.
It just trusts us to be smart enough to realize this.
The game has an overarching plot, but much of the narrative beauty comes from the small
vignettes of different characters you meat along the Way.
Most of these tales have a dark twist to them, in keeping
with the themes of madness decay and futility.
There's the fan favourite knight Solaire, a conspicuously
joyful knight who aids you on your travels, and all he wants is a glimpse of the sun,
yet he ends up consumed by it.
He is reminiscent of the Greek figure Icarus, who flew too close to the sun and was
burned by it.
Eventually , you the player have to put him out of his misery, but this is framed as a
tragic and unavoidable mess, not an act of glory
and triumph.
To see a singular light of joy and vitality being
reduced to madness is an absolute gut punch.
In fact , it seems tragedy is the default setting of Lordran,
a place without hope of any kind.
Dostoevsky said that to live without hope is to not live at all, and this is
precisely what the game is telling us.
As I said before, the heroic arcs of all these characters is
subverted in one way or the other, leading to the unholy trinity of depression, madness
and death.
Witnessing their downfalls is that act of catharsis Aristotle spoke off, a reminder
that we should persist despite other peoples failings.
Sometimes we directly contribute to the tragic state of affairs.
Take the story of Artorious, one of the Knights of Gwyn, who voyaged to oolacile to
conquer the encroaching abyss that was swallowing everything in its path.
Much like the other characters, Artorius succumbs to the demons he was trying
to destroy, . The chosen undead, through some elaborate series of actions, ends up travelling
back in time to quell the scourge that Artorious failed
to push back against, but on his way, has to kill a
corrupted Artorious.
Artorious had a wolf, Sif, who accompanied him, and his final act before he was
driven to madness was to cast a protection spell so she wasn't consumed by the physical
manifestation of the scourge called Manus.
You kill Artorious, save Sif from Manus, and the rest of the world from the
abyss, travel back to the future from whence you came, where you meet Sif once more, now
as a fully grown giant wolf.
Actually, most players would have killed Sif in the future before returning to the past
that birthed her but I digress.
She is tending to the grave of her master, the one you had no choice but
to kill to save both her and the world, but this doesn't stop you from locking arms,
and claws in conflict.
She recognizes you, presumably understanding your hands were tied, but it doesn't matter.
Her love for her master and her need to avenge him outweigh
these petty considerations.
There is no triumph here, only death.
The battle has this beautiful haunting music that seems out of place for a triumphant battle,
and when you whittle down the wolfs health, she stats to visibly fade and whimper.
It's amazing how framing changes everything, and this is masterfully
executed.
This Shakespearean parable is never told to us explicitly, it exists in the world for
us to uncover at our leisure, or our peril.
In the arcade era, games were difficult because that fit the economic needs of the time.
The way for developers to generate revenue was for
them to get the players to pony up additional quarters, and
the only way for them to weave this into their games is if they killed you repeatedly.
Today however, with a blossoming home console market, games
are shipped with ways to render them accessible to the
widest possible market, because that is how you make money in the modern era.
Dark souls doesn't seem to care about trends though , Or does
it?
Promoting yourself as hard has become its own
elaborate marketing ploy, seen in the advertising campaign of the souls borne games.
It was a niche that was ripe for the taking, an advantage
that has seen the birth of the meme, the "dark souls off".
What does it mean to say something is the dark souls of?
What is this essence of darksoul-ness?
Superficially, it is a reference to difficulty, but that is so grotesquely oversimplifying
the point so as to border on insulting.
In any case, what does dark souls represent for the medium.
To many, Dark souls seems like a reactionary movement.
As games are extending to more people, the thing that people love
is being diluted by ever more watered down experiences.
Dark souls is a violent rejection of the arc of
history for the gaming medium, a call to revert back to an age of diabolical difficulty and
genuine challenge.
In fact, in many ways, the dark souls franchise is to the gaming medium what the chosen
undead is to the world of Lordran.
Both are violent refusals of the status quo and preordained truths.
You as the chosen undead come to confront the ambiguity of the eternal task of linking
the flame . Dark souls as a game mirrors this, it pushes back
against the demands of an ever popularizing medium.
So there's this renegade impulse built into the Dark souls ethos, despite becoming a massive
series In itself.
Its success has spawned a whole host of copycats, and Imitation is also the sincerest form of
flattery, This is seen in the incredible array of dark souls pretenders, sometimes dubbed
souls likes.
Lords of the Fallen, Nioh, The surge, salt and sanctuary and more are variations on the
theme of dark souls, with their own creative amendments.
Al these games are actually selling torture and death for a
modest fee, and although they don't see the same level of success, they seem to be
finding their own niche.
Difficulty, deliberate thoughtful action, an oppressive atmosphere, obtuse stories hidden
behind items, , these seem to be a common theme.
What these descriptions miss are the many things I've
already outlined.
It's the psychology of triumph in the face of hardship, it's the ambiguity of patterns
and directed purpose, it's the inversion of myths and overarching trends, it's confronting
chaos with the aid of others, it's the catharsis that accompanies
bearing witness to suffering and mental decay, it's
about feeling alive by confronting death, its about the pleasure of failure in a safe
context and its about leveraging all these things to put the player
in a particular psychological space.
That space is one of revelling in the meaning and inevitability
of suffering in life, and that's what truly makes us feel alive.
Games are often lambasted for being overly eager to employ violence as a language, and
you can't blame outsiders for coming to this conclusion.
It's hard for games to systemize in mechanics the ways
conflict is represented in other mediums.
Paintings can swish color together, books can just
write out descriptions of event and movies can frame conflicts form conversation to manipulation.
The language of games is inherently spatial, which
is why we get lots of platformers and shooters.
Conflict is represented by attacking things through space
or avoiding and navigating around things in space.
You might think this is limiting, but most of
our communications is conveyed through body language.
The real problem stems from trying to justify
the violence and mayhem in games in the narrative.
Analysts have a pretentious word for this, it's called
ludo-narrative dissonance.
Nathan drake is a plucky adventurous globetrotter who happens to murders
thousands.
Why?
All for the sake of treasure.
Treasure is what we all seek in games to be fair, whether, an arbitrary goal, a princess
in the case of Mario or an achievement.
These are all extrinsic goals in some sense, an intrinsic goal would have us
strive to achieve it for it's own sake.
Dark souls has such a goal, it's about putting up or shutting up,
improving or retrieving, or in the vulgar ways of the internet, Gitting Gud.
Dark souls suffers from none of this dissonance though.
The world is malicious and out to get you, it
exists regardless of whether you intervene or not and it.
Conflict, and violence are the only plausible language of survival and triumph, making your
actions feel in perfect accord with the themes at play.
The Combat here is deliberate and lumbering.
A single incorrect step can mean defeat, so concentration
is paramount.
There's a certain way you have to think about combat if you are a souls player, like
an almost new language in itself.
It's not there to appease us, it's there to remind us that combat is not
meant to be fun, but engaging.
For all its complexity, the system is fairly simple.
You can attack, defend, parry, dive, position and mostly, die.
There are no complex combos, no quarter circle inputs to execute a
move, its just you, a simple skillset and an array of human and demonic foes.
There's no excuse for death apart from your own lack of knowledge,
as it's not as if experts are somehow privy to moves you
aren't.
The PvP highlights how this system operates when put under pressure, , and the Dark souls
competitive community is a thriving one.
Dark souls allows players to invade other peoples worlds, to
actually deliberately halt peoples progress in an already hostile situation.
For some reason, knowing how debilitating the game to be, I just can't
bring myself to do this.
Maybe I'm just soft, but I don't doubt many think like me as well.
In any case, The combat in these games reinforce almost all the
themes embedded in the story, doing away with that pesky dissonance that afflicts our medium.
Ironic that it took a game about death and madness
for that to coalesce.
But then again , games are the art of failure.
Part 5 requiem
In the war of the ancients between dragons and gods, Seath the Scaleless betrayed his
own kin and sided with the gods, turning the tide of the
war.
He was rewarded with Dukedom and granted an archive to conduct his research into immortality.
This obsession of our scaly friend is a rather human
one, seen in the search for eternal life from The epic of Gilgamesh, to the alchemists looking
for the philosophers stone, extending to singulatarians
like Ray Kurzweil who are questing for immortality.
This idea of persisting past your death is also
a guiding theme in the metal gear series, which confronts
themes of breaking free of our genetics, , asserting our independent will, and forging our own
memes.
The idea of a meme harkens to Richard Dawkins idea of there existing a replicator for cultural
information analogous to Dna for genetic information.
Thoughts, ideas, and practices that are successful or likely to be copied get passed on as people
voraciously copy one another.
He chose meme as it comes from mimesis, an ancient Greek term
for mimicry
Dark souls is obsessed with cycles, which is just a pattern that copies itself repeatedly.
Instead of copying the present , we copy the past.
Our lives are filled with them as well, days turn into weeks which
turn into months and then years.
Most of your Sundays are like every other Sunday, which is much like
The god of the Hebrew tradition in that it is a day of rest.
We are constantly repeating the patterns of the past, and this is ultimately where Darks
souls story wants to take us.
Cycles of fire are eternally dwindling and us, a protagonist trapped in
a cycle of death has to rebirth that cycle by definitively
ending ours.
A poetic transferal perhaps.
This is where repeating cycles can be a transcendent experience.
Mircea Eliade argues that our repetition of the past is a way for us to
access the eternal.
He says, "In imitating the exemplary acts of a
god or of a mythic hero, or simply by recounting their adventures, the man of an archaic society
detaches himself from profane time and magically re-enters the Great Time, the sacred time."
In other words, by copying cycles, we become as gods.
This was his argument for why we have rituals.
Why do we celebrate Christmas, new years and Easter every year without fail?
Ultimately, we escape the decay of a world like Dark souls by acting
out cycles.
What is the cycle we are acting out?
Why it's the hero's journey of course.
Games are uniquely situated to have us act the archetypical heroes
journey because it forces us to embody the role ourselves.
But what is this "great time" that Eliade spoke off?
Well , ever wonder why we can get lost for hours
in a game and not even realize that an entire day may have passed?
In games psychology terms this is called flow, where our skills are confronted
by equivalent challenge that puts us in a state of pure
engagement.
If a game is too easy it feels boring and flaccid, and if it is too difficult it is
anxiety inducing.
An optimized challenge is crucial for fun, which is why games have different difficulty
settings.
This seems to be an argument for an easy mode in
Dark souls though right?
The thing is , Dark souls already has an easy mode, it's just built into the
game.
Like I said, you can level up, choose an easier class,
summon others to help in your game, run past all the minor enemies once you've memorized
their positions after repeated deaths, or go online
and look up strategies.
Some games make you feel like an incompetent idiot for reducing the difficulty,
but by not making it explicit, Dark souls makes you feel
smart for finding ways to overcome its systems.
By calibrating the challenge to accommodate folk who have played games our entire life,
but by also not patronizing those who don't have the
same abilities, dark souls can quite literally be a religious
experience.
This is why the mechanical conceit of difficulty perfectly ties into what the stories themes
are about.
The challenge of Dark souls allows us to escape the present, just like acting out cycles allows
us to escape the present.
The fact that that challenge comes from repeated cycles of death is a nice
poetic coincidence.
Its ritualized death, which is ultimately what games are about.
Eliade argued that much of our modern anxiety comes from doing away with rituals and traditions
that allowed us to access the eternal, whatever it may be.
This gives us a terror of history, the idea that
things are bad and will continue to deteriorate.
Dark souls confronts this issue head on, as everyone is
ever consumed with delaying the inevitable decay of all they know.
The gods are either dead, dying, deceptive or about to be killed by you.
For a chosen undead prophesized to prolong the age of the gods,
you sure do a lot of killing.
We reveal Gynewere to be an illusion cast by Gyndolin to keep the façade of
prosperity alive, but all this will be destroyed by us as well.
We kill Seath, the four kings, the bed of chaos and all the demons it spawns.
We kill undead soldiers, death himself, and the revered pantheon
all the way up to the children of gwyn, and then Gwyn himself.
This is a far more literal interpretation of
Nietzsches claim that god is dead, and we killed him.
The character Gwyndolin is interesting to think about.
This child of Gwyn was born a male, but raised as a female because of her affinity for the
moon.
She was ostracized by her father, not being featured in
any statue work or paintings, yet for reasons unknown she remained in Anor Londo even after
every one else either left or died to tend over her
father's kingdom.
She resides near the tomb of her father, and she casts the illusion of Gynewere to bequeath
the player with the Lordvessel once you have defeated
Ornstein and Smough.
Could it be that this most loyal of children was manipulating us from the start to
carry out her fathers will?
Most player' s will not have uncovered this on their first play through.
, instead assuming the noble mantle of chosen undead is a deserving birthright.
What game doesn't have us play a role where one is
destined for greatness?
We are being led to the slaughter by our own desire for being heroic, but this
act of manipulation is being carried out by an ill-treated,
fiercely loyal, and ultimately deeply misunderstood daughter who just wants the appreciation of
her father.
There have been lots of games that have critiqued the nature of agency in games, Bioshock,
,Spec ops and Metal gear solid 2 chief among them, but none do it in such a subtle and
poetically understated way.
Nietzsche also talked about cycles curiously enough, and his idea of the eternal recurrence.
To simplify a complicated topic, time is infinite, but
objects are finite, hence they are bound to continually reoccur.
But then again time is convoluted , but well put that aside for now.
To push back against this horrifying aspect of reality, one must exercise amor
fati, or a love of fate.
The key to a life well lived is to be okay with having to live the same life repeatedly
with nothing being different, and to revel in the fatalistic.
Is there purpose in futility then?
To exhibit this sense is to appreciate life for what it is, suffering and all.
This is the opposite of eastern philosophical traditions like Hinduism and Buddhism that
ask us to escape the present by transcending the self and eternal
cycles, and different to the traditional western idea of
transcending the self once we perish
The true golden mean , to use Aristotle's phrase, lies somewhere in the middle.
Fortunately Dark souls occupies that space.
Perhaps this expert can put it better.
Walter Kaufmann wrote that Nietzsche "celebrates the Greeks who, facing up to the
terrors of nature and history, did not seek refuge in 'a
Buddhistic negation of the will,' as Schopenhauer did, but instead created tragedies in which
life is affirmed as beautiful in spite of everything."
We can only appreciate the good if we are mired in the bad,
the holy if we escape the profane by acting out cycles, and the beautiful if we are confronted
with constant challenge.
It's a good thing then that Dark souls is about acting out eternal cycles by
confronting insurmountable challenges and learning to love it for what it is because
it clarifies, cleanses and invigorates.
Dark soul systemizes through gameplay that which is beautiful by throwing hardship at
us and making us love it.
Dark souls is hard, but then again so is life.
But life sucks and yet dark souls is our escape from it.
The real world seems profane and misguided, yet dark souls is filled with intrigue, purpose
and romance.
The old saying goes that the meek shall inherit the earth, but dark souls opposes this.
It challenges us to sharpen our wits, our guile
and our resilience in a harsh but ultimately safe playground.
Every time I play the game again I can't help but feel that the themes of death , madness,
decay, corruption, cycles and futility are ultimately
the greatest affirmation of life.
I replay the game every year in this almost quasi ritualistic fashion,
in keeping with its cyclical conceit.it both thrusts us into the
heroes journey, but simultaneously deconstructs it by suggesting our actions are futile, and
perhaps detrimental.
It uses ambiguity to clearly assert the liabilities of absolute certainty.
I can think of no other piece of media , regardless of the medium,
that has this effect.
This to me is what the essence of dark souls is, and why the liberal overuse
of the meme the dark souls of is annoying.
The surface level difficulty is just a vehicle.
What Dark souls is ultimately, is an affirmation of life through repeated death.
This , in essence, is what a game is too.
Then again, no one really knows what dark souls is about.
For more infomation >> Dark Souls: Remastered. Да возгорится жопа. - Duration: 9:28. 
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