I asked my friends if they wanted to join in with my Pandemic Ponderings…. I got one response (thanks, pals)! So here is Séan – being his usual nerdy self and talking about his favourite topics. Thanks, Séan!

Dark Souls & LudoNarrative

When my friend first suggested to me that I should write a blog post, my initial reaction was something along the lines of “I don’t have any smart observations. All I think about on a regular basis is games, music, and more games”. So, I found myself struggling to think of an observation I’d made that was coherent enough to not seem like I was on illicit drugs when I thought of it, but profound enough that my friend wouldn’t immediately terminate our friendship and pretend she never knew me. After a while musing on possibly musings, it occured to me that maybe I can use my stupid interest to talk about something profound and artistic. After all, video games are technically art, even that one game where you date birds. And with that, I immediately knew what I wanted to talk about; Dark Souls, and its use of ludonarrative.

To start, I should explain what both of these are to help those who aren’t fans of video games. Dark Souls is a series of fantasy games with three main series games, a prequel (of sorts), and two spin-offs. They are characterised by unique gameplay, a hands-off approach to story-telling, and a famously high level of difficulty. The main focus point of those is by far the difficulty, as all aspects of the game seemingly exist to support the insane challenge these games present. I mean, the remastered version of the first Dark Souls game is called the “Prepare to Die” edition. So, I think it should go without saying that you will die a lot if you play this game, and that’s important.

The other point of discussion is ludonarrative, which is described as “The intersection in a video game of [gameplay] elements and narrative elements.” It is the way in which a game uses its gameplay to tell a story. For a hopefully understandable example, look at a Monopoly board. You start at the cheap, crappy brown properties and have to slowly make your way towards the valuable dark blue properties. From a gameplay standpoint, this is so that one player can’t just immediately land on Mayfair and dominate the entire game from the start. However, from a narrative perspective, it shows how this little shoe or dog or thimble had to work their way upward from the slums to be the property mogul that wins the game. 

So, how do these two fit together? Well, I believe that Dark Souls has created the best use of ludonarrative that I have ever seen in a game. To elaborate we must go back to that famous Dark Souls difficulty. As mentioned, you die a lot. Literally everything in the game can and will kill you. Whenever you die in the game you lose all your “souls”, the game’s form of currency and experience points. You have a chance to regain them, but often they’ll be lost forever. This represents an aspect of the game’s world, namely, the fact that humans were cursed with immortality and thus can never truly die. Due to this curse, whenever someone does die, they return but they lose a part of themselves, be it memories, personality traits, ambitions, hopes, or dreams. Eventually, once someone dies enough, they’re barely human. They’re husks of their former selves, content to do nothing for eternity because their very soul has been broken so many times that it can never be made whole. Sat around waiting for something to happen, not even knowing what that thing might be.

You as a player are no exception to this, and the in-game representation is the aforementioned losing of your souls. But I’ve come to realise that the in-game representation isn’t the only thing in play here. See, the reason your player character doesn’t become like the others and keeps on fighting is because they retain their determination each time they die. They respawn, fight on, and keep doing that until they either die and restart the cycle or they achieve victory. The moment I realised this was the point that I knew Dark Souls was something special. Because that is the perfect representation of playing a video game. In every video game you begin, face challenges, and either fail and begin again, or succeed. The only thing that keeps you going beyond failure is the determination to succeed and see your journey through to the end. 

However, there is an alternative when playing any game: quitting. IF a game proves too difficult or not rewarding enough, you can just give up. You figure that there’s no reason to carry on, since the joy of victory will likely not match the frustration and pain of defeat, and thus you move on to something else. Once again, Dark Souls has captured this feeling. When you’ve finally reached your threshold for dying to that same stupid enemy or impossible boss andyou decide to go play Animal Crossing or something, it means you and your player character have lost enough of yourselves with every defeat that you no longer have enough to continue. The harsh world has beaten you down for too long and you’ve contended that the world has won. Your character, seeing as they can’t die, likely exists when you’re gone, but they don’t do anything. They exist lifelessly just like every other lost soul in the game, content to do nothing.

That is until you as a real world human decide “I’m going to do it this time.” You pick the controller back up, and head back into the world of Dark Souls ready to fight through the adversity and progress through this beautiful yet deadly world. You face setbacks, just as you did last time, but now you have more experience than ever before, and soon you try enough times that you make it past that boss battle, and you reap the rewards that come with it, least of all being the unmatchable feeling of knowing that you kept on trying and you finally made it.

This design is beautiful for two reasons. Firstly, it is representative of all games. Dark Souls uses its story and gameplay to craft an experience that is akin to pure gaming. You try and you fail until you either resign to failure or you live to see victory. Secondly, it teaches us an important life lesson. Everyone experiences hardships (especially now during such strange and scary times). But Dark Souls teaches us that we should never give up. Even though the world is harsh and seemingly only exists you kick you down whenever you try to get up, the only way to truly fail is to stop trying, because no matter how many times we die, we can always still win.