Is this some kind of book club?
I’ve been reading a book called You Died, written by two journalists, Keza MacDonald and Jason Killingsworth. You Died is essentially a collection of essays where the two aim to explain why Dark Souls has been so influential in the games industry and has profoundly affected so many people in a myriad of ways. The essays cover such a broad collection of topics that each chapter reads like a completely different book.
One chapter might talk about the history of FROMSOFTWARE, the developer of Dark Souls, and how they came about making the game or its predecessor Demon’s Souls. Another might be about the developing and thriving community surrounding the game’s lore. If someone wanted to understand Dark Souls in its entirety – culturally, design wise, and everything else – this is the book to read.
One of the beginning chapters that stands out to me is one concerning an email thread between the two authors and their colleagues that were reviewing Dark Souls for various gaming websites and magazines. This back-and-forth thread is filled with questions about the game that a person now, in 2020, could answer with ease. Like: what does humanity do? Or: where do I go from the bridge bonfire in Blighttown? There are also moments of triumph that veterans of the series take for granted now. One person in the email thread was apparently, “fucking SHAKING”, from defeating . . . the Bell Gargoyles.
Now, I’m not downplaying this person’s achievement. The first time I played Dark Souls, I too, was fucking shaking after beating the gargoyles. That was genuinely one of the hardest video game things I’d done in my entire life up to that point. And my curiosity of this new and interesting world was equally as exciting. But it was a moment forgotten. Reading You Died helped remind me of that.
Prior to 2017, I was a video game poser. As a nerdy teen growing up in the 2010’s, I spent my ‘video game time’ playing shooters like Call of Duty and Battlefield with my friends. That was good fun, but it was all I played (all I did for a while really). Any brushes outside of that sphere of games was met with passing interest at best, and indifference at worst. That’s just kinda how it was for a while. However, I would occasionally get hooked on a game that a friend would recommend. One of those games was Demon’s Souls.
This was in 2013. As I try to mind-palatially put myself in the psyche of fourteen-year-old me, I need to stress again, that I really didn’t play that many video games. Of course, as a tiny child I played games. But my parents rarely bought me new ones – I promise this isn’t some remarkably un-self-aware middle-class sob story. Some kids have fond memories of playing Zelda. I was a blank slate.
So, when I played Demon’s Souls in 2013 (mind you, Dark Souls was already out), it was like a whole new world to me. And just like the writers from the email thread discussed in You Died, I had so many questions.
What does World Tendency do? Can someone teach me how upgrade my weapon without screwing anything up? What level should I go to next? Tower of Latria or Valley of Defilement? What NPCs should I talk to? How do I get cool spells? What about cool weapons, like the Dragon Bone Smasher? Oh, you need a Pure White World Tendency to get that? What the hell does Pure White even mean?
Me and a couple of friends were just getting started with Demon’s Souls. Another friend, who was by then a veteran of the series, was guiding us along. We constantly asked them questions about the game. Sometimes, even our veteran didn’t know the answers, and we had to consult the wiki pages like a bunch of scholars (of the First Sin?). That was a lot of help. The beauty of FROM’s Souls games is that you can summon your friends to your world for help whenever you want. We would spend time by ourselves contending with the demons and monsters that inhabited our world. Other times we would band together as a Unit and help one person clear a level together.
We had to do this not because the game was poorly designed, but because of the opposite. In an interview with Keza MacDonald in 2010, Miyazaki stated that, “part of the idea behind the message system was that before, when we didn’t have so much information, everyone had to work together to help each other through games. So there was the intention to bring a sense of unity to players”. This withholding of information is very much a part of the experience.
Now of course, this was with regard to the message system of the game. But I’m sure the FROM team behind Demon’s Souls imagined people would talk to their close friends and consult wikis together like we did. There was this sense of enormity behind it all. Like there was so much information out there that I could never learn everything the game had to offer. It was just too much for my fourteen-year-old brain to handle.
That enormity ballooned until the game became a world. So much information was withheld from us that it became hard to ‘gamify’ it. To optimize the fun out of it. To understand the game’s systems to the point where you can exploit it. That point comes sooner or later for all games, but for Demon’s Souls that point didn’t come for many months.
Because of that obscuration of the game’s systems and rules, so many moments in Demon’s Souls felt so real and inescapable. Although I didn’t know this at the time, I was looking for signs of a game designed for my comfort and enjoyment. A game that – as a lot of people love to say – “held my hand”. I was looking for reassurance that every moment I experience was curated and play tested. Of course, the game was clearly designed with intent, that’s the nature of any work of art. But I couldn’t find it. It felt so indifferent.
The haphazardly placed rotted planks above festering swamps in the Valley of Defilement felt like they were there because some lunatic built them, not for ‘game design’ purposes. Some of them would break and send you drifting down into the valley below, or drop you into a group of emaciated crazed peasants. The orderly jail cells that line the dark walls in the Tower of Latria speaks of a sinister higher being at work. None of the areas had music (except for boss fights). In their place, were diegetic sounds. Screams of the dead and dying. Metal contracting. Rivers flowing. It wasn’t just the passage of information that felt indifferent, it was the world itself.
Nowhere was this more apparent for me than in the Tower Knight boss fight. It’s a massive 50-ft tall knight with a tower shield just as large as it is. As this thing loomed and blocked out the sun as it brought its shield down on top of me, my fourteen-year-old brain came to a realization. I was struck with this sense that, in the face of this incomprehensible foe, I would never succeed. I understood that the world was indifferent to my existence. I felt that the game wasn’t being difficult for the sake of it, it was me who was too weak to even exist in the world.
The fact that the game could instill that kind of feeling in me is really interesting. A part of that is clearly because my mind was fresh, I really hadn’t played a variety of video games at that point. I hadn’t subconsciously logged terabytes of game design data, that everyone does, at that point. I had no understanding of what games could offer. So I took my experience playing Demon’s Souls as the truth. Whatever happened while I was playing it was just the way it was. Because I didn’t know any better.
Instead of – as I sadly would do now – bicker and complain about the obscureness of the games systems, the limited information it provides, and the difficulty, I just played the game. I talked with my friends, we went on the wiki, we experimented, we summoned each other and worked together, we learned about the world. We figured out where and how (which was usually the tricky part) to get the best weapons and the best spells. We learned how to cheese bosses. We read up on the lore, that now seemed so interesting to us. We even exploited the game with glitches, but it never felt like cheating (well, to be fair, the infinite soul level up exploit was pretty broken).
Reading You Died, despite it being about Dark Souls, is a bit of an affirmation that the way my friends and I played Demon’s Souls was the right way. Embracing the unknown on your own, but conquering it together.
Slickaria! 