Holistic Analysis - Dark Souls

The difficulty is never an obstacle to stop players from playing a game, but dullness is. Dark Souls , known for their difficulty, are the flag of challenging in-game area, however, opposite to normal recognition, Dark Souls are welcome among players, especially their plots. Dark Souls’ plots are chaotic and obscure like their gameplay, but players do like them and spend thousands of hours to investigate the truth of the game. In video websites like Youtube, players can find hundreds of videos about Dark Souls’ plot. The reason for Dark Souls to become this popular is the culture of Dark Souls, the art of secret.

  If Dark Souls are books, I am pretty sure they will be criticized for their deliberately obfuscates and terrible narrative structures. Reading Dark Souls must be a torture because readers cannot find a complete story or a sentence with certainty, however, Dark Souls are games. Like Venus de Milo losing its arms, and The Winged Victory of Samothrace standing without its head, Dark Souls are intentionally incomplete, so secrets and imagination play important roles in the major parts of the plots. In Daniel Vella’s, an lecturer at the institute of Digital Games at the University of Malta, own work, he focuses specifically on the aesthetic experience of not being able to grasp the rules (or other elements) of the game -- a phenomenon he calls the ludic sublime(Vella,2015). “In practice, however, Dark Souls sets out with the express purpose of unsettling these preconceptions, deploying a range of formal techniques and mechanisms designed to arrest the player’s judgment and prevent her from arriving at a stable cosmic understanding, preserving a sense of mystery and gesturing towards a whole that escapes the player’s conceptualizing grasp,” wrote by Daniel Vella. Telling ambivalent fact of an event, naming a same object or person in different ways, hiding certain part of a fact are common in Dark Souls to mislead the players. For example, before the start of the Dark Souls 1, players believe that when the fire of the world extinguishes, the world will be shrouded with darkness. However, in Dark Souls 3, an important character called the Pontiff Sulyvahn exposed the fraud that the world would ended up in deep sea, which refreshed players’ recognition. At the end of the game, players are transported to the world that the fire was put out for hundreds years. Unlike what they were told, the world isn’t black at all, instead, the sun is still on the sky as usual and brightness still exists in the world. Therefore, players need to believe what they want to believe and make their own choices. If one word can precisely conclude the setting of Dark Souls, it will be mystery.

  In order to cooperate with the basic setting, the game designer invented a new narrative structure, which I called decentralized storytelling. In normal circumstance, if players choose to skip any animation and doesn’t talk to any characters, they will not read more than a hundred words in the game. However, according to Frazer Heritage and his studies, there are 42,165 in the entire game, which is a great number comparing to Bioshock Infinite, which has 17,303 words, and Final Fantasy, which has 36,270 words. Dark Souls store information in the descriptions of items, without hurting the basic story of the game, which is the reason I call this structure decentralized storytelling. Instead of telling the whole story by playing some long and tedious CGs, Hidetaka Miyazaki likes to chop the story into tiny pieces and hide them in the description of items. There are some benefits of decentralized storytelling. The first benefit is the stability of the story’s structure.For example, in Dark Souls 1, the story can be simplify into a sentence, players collect power from previous kings and extend the fire of the world. Because the structure is fixed, problems like wasting time on an inessential NPC’s story or player losing track of the story can be avoided. Supposed a player does what I said before, skipping every animation and keeping silence to every characters, he/she will know the basic taste of the story though some mysteries remained. If the players want to investigate the truth of the world, he/she must read the descriptions of the items, because details are stored in them. Therefore, solving the puzzle of the story becomes another power for players to continue the game. For example, Pontiff Sulyvahn is an enemy that player must defeat, however, players know nothing about him unless they read many descriptions of different items. In the description of a magic, players will know that the young Sulyvahn is from the painting world, a cold and rotten world, but he gave up his hometown because people in the painting did nothing to stop the decay of the world. When Sulyvahn entered the world with fire, he found out this world was same to the painting world. Human being and gods continued the pathetic loop of the fire, which was hated by the young Sulyvahn. In the description of his sword, Sulyvahn’s ambition grew even larger when he discovered the lost city and eternal fire. After years of undercover, Sulyvahn became the pontiff of a religion called the White. He cooperates with the twins kings to keep the players away from the fire, so if his plan successfully works, the fire will eventually extinguish. Therefore, if players don’t exist in the game, he is the one who will restores the nature circle of the world. Also, another benefit of the structure is that foreshadowing works excellently in decentralized storytelling. Because players’ movement can be manipulated, so information collected by players can also be controlled, which means writer can foreshadow the trend of the story, which maintain the mysterious mood of the story. Another example is a secret path to the dragon’s mountain. When players walk into the Lothric castle, they will face some enemies that should not exist in that place, and they will get  a new item which is meaningless at that time. However, when players enter the underground jail, they will see a strange spot that contains the previous item, and if they use the item, they will be transported to the dragon’s mountain. The decentralized storytelling supports the mysterious culture of the Dark Souls, which can’t be done by other storytelling structure.

Another interesting culture of Dark Souls is the souls-like type of game. Few games in the world can be praised like this cause imitating itself is the representation of respect. There are some characteristics of souls-like game: obscure plots, limited freedom, and abundant decisions. Start from the last characteristics. One reason for Dark Souls become persistent is the abundance of weapons. For example, in Dark Souls 3, there are more than 150 weapons in the world with their own ability and characteristics, so, after players have defeated a boss in a their favor weapons, they can also try another ways by switching weapons. “It is important to note that few players, however, took a third path to mediate their experience. These players usually had "challenge" as their primary focus and were less likely to find extrinsic motivators when faced with frustrating game segments. Their main strategy instead was to lower the complexity of the system by using outside resources, taking advantage of different game mechanics, and mentally framing frustrating situations as interesting challenges instead,” said by David Melhart.Utilizing different game mechanics to reach the same goal is an effective method to sustain players’ gaming time. Abundant decisions is not only represented by multiple weapons, but also showed by the obscure plot. In Dark Souls, acquiring a certain thing always mean players have to give up another thing. For example, in Dark Souls 3, there are four endings, and if players want to experience all ending, they must replay the game for four times, which means they must spend more than 200 hours on it. Another important decisions for players is NPCs’ plots. For example, in Dark Souls 3, most of the NPCs have more than two endings, and sometimes they’re exclusive, which means players can enjoy a new story in a new round of game. Obscure plot is a flag of Souls-like game, because decentralized storytelling is attractive to players, for example, Salt And Sanctuary is a typical Souls-like game for its plots and amazing weapons system. The plots of Salt And Sanctuary can be explained in thousands way, so players can spend their imagination on the plot.

The culture of Dark Souls is complex like the game itself, but the culture is the thing that attract players to spend their money and time on the games.

1:Heritage, Frazer. “Game Studies - Applying Corpus Linguistics to Videogame Data: Exploring the Representation of Gender in Videogames at a Lexical Level.” Game Studies, 2018,

gamestudies.org/2003/articles/heritage_frazer.

2:Melhárt, David. “Game Studies - Towards a Comprehensive Model of Mediating Frustration in Videogames.” Game Studies, 2014, gamestudies.org/1801/articles/david_melhart.

3:Švelch, Jaroslav. “Game Studies - Should the Monster Play Fair?: Reception of Artificial Intelligence in Alien: Isolation.” Game Studies, 2012,

gamestudies.org/2002/articles/jaroslav_svelch.

4:Vella, Daniel. “Game Studies - No Mastery Without Mystery: Dark Souls and the Ludic Sublime.” Game Studies, 2015, gamestudies.org/1501/articles/vella.