- [Announcer] This video is brought to you by Bokksu.
(upbeat music)
- What's up, people?
Michael here to talk about the video game
that's set the internet ablaze.
"Elden Ring" debuted to almost a million Twitch views
on its first day in the wild.
And, thanks to some complicated gameplay
and a huge world to explore,
the hype seems to be here to stay.
Now there are plenty of reasons to dig this game.
The visuals are amazing,
and the open world is littered with bizarre adventures.
The character and creature designs rule.
And, of course, it continues the great FromSoftware legacy
of making games so challenging
you want to throw your controller at your TV
yet so rewarding you buy a new controller and TV anyway.
But beyond all that,
what explains "Elden Ring's" explosive popularity?
Is there something about this game
that's uniquely suited to this historical moment?
We think so, and think you might agree
after watching this "Wisecrack Edition:
"Philosophy of Elden Ring."
And of course, spoilers ahead
for some of the game and its lore
as far as we understand it,
but no one seems to know what's going on
so maybe we'll come back to this
once anyone understands the whole story.
But before we get into it I wanna tell you
about this video's sponsor, Bokksu.
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Now back to the show.
Let's start with a quick recap.
"Elden Ring" takes place in a world that has fallen apart.
It's rife with creepy monsters,
sunken churches and dilapidated buildings.
Death and decay are everywhere.
After the Goddess Marika removed the Death Rune
from the Elden Ring,
assassins responded by killing several demigods.
- [Woman] On a night of wintry fog,
(horses thumping)
the Rune of Death was stolen.
- Marika then fractured
the powerful, titular ring into pieces.
Each remaining demigod grabbed a piece of the ring.
This caused a war that effectively broke the world,
leaving behind a (beep) dirty wasteland.
Today, shardbearers each hold a piece of the ring,
and if you can simply unite them,
it seems you can return the land to prosperity.
To better understand your quest,
it helps to look to Jacques Derrida
and his concept of hauntology,
coined in the 1993 book "Specters of Marx."
Here's the deal, Derrida said that the present is marked
by a temporal disjunction
in which history seems to break
and a certain narrative of the past haunts the present,
like a ghost.
Derrida was responding to what the West saw
as the death of communism after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
But he argues that Marxism never died.
Rather, it lived on as a specter
continuing to haunt Western society.
For some, that specter is frightening,
a looming threat with the potential
to destroy Western capitalism.
For others, that specter is mournful,
because they view Marxism as a ghost of lost potential,
a specter of a world that could have been.
And the future that could have been
remains a ghostly presence,
gone but never forgotten.
Aspects of the Marxist dream are seen in fits and starts,
but never with the same momentum or clarity as in the past.
Like when Bernie Sanders ran a presidential campaign that,
while definitely not Marxist,
was based on dismantling certain structures
of neoliberal capitalism
in order to facilitate greater equality.
We see hauntology alive and well in America
in the lingering nostalgia for the 1950s,
a time supposedly defined by happy housewives,
a booming economy, affordable housing,
and college education for all.
White picket fences and "Leave It to Beaver"
seem infinitely more attractive
than what the present has to offer.
The specter of the '50s, thus,
leaves us longing for America's glory days.
We see this same mythologizing throughout "Elden Ring."
It's a world defined by its destruction.
But even the most tragic ruins you encounter
seem to whisper faint memories of past glory.
Indeed, this was even embedded in the development process.
George R.R. Martin was recruited
to build the world of "Elden Ring's" glorious past.
Then, Miyazaki and co. brought that world to present day
and turned it nasty.
A castle with collapsed towers
evokes halcyon days of flying banners and pageantry.
There's even a secret boss fight where time rewinds
and a dragon returns to life
to reassert its power and glory.
Remnants of an ancient, glorious past are everywhere
in this un-glorious, unwelcoming world.
And also literal ghosts.
Lots of ghosts haunting us in the present.
So, telling stories about how great the past was
is all well and good.
But as with most storytelling,
narratives about the past are typically riddled
with nostalgic half-truths, outright lies,
and everything in between.
So when society creates a fabricated version of the past,
what happens to the real past that actually existed?
According to Derrida,
the real, less-savory version of the past
sort of peeks through society's curtains,
influencing our world in subtle and not-subtle ways.
This is where we get the haunting part of hauntology,
as the real lived past becomes the greatest ghost of all,
a looming specter haunting the present.
We see this in the real version of the 1950s
that continues to haunt America.
Racism was rampant
and the redlining that occurred continues to be realized
in unequal housing opportunities to this day.
The decade also saw a major step backwards
for women in the workplace,
which continues to be seen in a wage gap
that is alive and well.
Everything from the Red Scare
to the genuine fear of nuclear war
to American foreign policy decisions
that wreaked havoc on South America,
among other places,
it all gets erased when we reminisce
about America's glory days.
Still, many of us living
in an objectively unappealing present
look back on this imagined past with nostalgia.
The world of "Elden Ring," like America,
has a narrativized past defined by greatness.
But, similarly, the real past haunts the present
and suggests something more nefarious.
And perhaps the scariest ghosts in "Elden Ring"
aren't the ones lurking in creepy manors,
but the world's real, yet unspoken, past.
There are plenty of signs indicating
that the olden days were not as glorious
as everyone tells you.
Hell, if it had been so awesome, there would be no game.
What's more, there doesn't seem to be a consistent vision
of what the glorious past actually was.
The enemies you fight are people and creatures
with opposing motivations,
suggesting that the old world wasn't so peaceful.
In fact, it seems to have been rife
with factions and organizations competing for power.
- [Man] Praetor Rykard.
Lunar Princess Ranni.
Wilful traitors, all.
- [Michael] It's also hinted
that the legend of the Golden Order,
supposedly supported by an ineffable god,
has been given a glossy varnish.
- [Man] The rhythms and calculus of the master's finger
betray a suspicion of the holism of the Golden Order.
- [Michael] After all, if everybody got along so well,
why did things descend into war?
And if the world was so perfect,
why did Marika decide to break it?
All signs indicate that this perfect world
may have been more illusory
than we're initially led to believe.
- How long will it be, I wonder,
before the Tarnished tire of obeisance to the Two Fingers?
- After all, not everyone seems so big
on the whole Golden Order thing.
Plenty of characters are determined to destroy it
by burning the Erdtree.
Sure, some of those characters are horrifying,
like this snake man.
- Together, we will devour the very gods.
- [Michael] But some seem genuinely good,
like the maiden who guides you on your quest.
She even entreats you to burn down the tree.
- So I'd like you to undertake a new journey, with me.
To the flame of ruin,
far above the clouds,
upon the snowy mountaintops of the giants.
Then I can set the Erdtree aflame.
- [Michael] An act deemed the cardinal sin by others.
- The burning of the Erdtree is the first cardinal sin.
- [Michael] All of which suggests that good and evil
might not be so simple here.
The idea of being haunted by the past,
or some imagined version of it,
might not be too surprising.
But when writer Mark Fisher expanded on the idea,
he identified something arguably more disturbing.
When you're haunted by an imagined past,
you're also haunted by what Fisher calls lost futures,
i.e. potential futures that could have materialized
if not for the events in the past
that closed those paths off.
He cites philosopher Franco Berardi who coined the phrase,
"the slow cancellation of the future."
This describes his view of the way
any hope for a happy future in the West
was eroded from the late '70s into the 21st century,
as the rise of neoliberalism attacked social welfare,
lionized consumerism, wreaked havoc on the environment,
and so on.
As Fisher puts it,
"The slow cancellation of the future
"has been accompanied by a deflation of expectations.
"The feeling of belatedness,
"of living after the gold rush,
"is as omnipresent as it is disavowed."
The sense of futurelessness in our own society
can best be realized by looking to the comparative optimism
of the 1950s.
Back then, visions of the future were starry-eyed,
just think of "The Jetsons."
Yet in our contemporary world,
this vision no longer seems attainable.
The vision of the future as imagined in the '50s
can be considered lost,
yet it continues to pervade our culture
in the form of retrofuturism,
i.e. images in culture, technology, and so on
that evoke what people in the '50s
thought the future would look like.
Retrofuturism in culture continues to perpetuate
"The Jetsons" vision of the future,
even as that path now seems impossible.
Such is the power of ghosts.
We see this, too, throughout "Elden Ring,"
where characters wax poetic about what could have been
had the world not been destroyed.
You have nobles asking you to recapture their lost castles,
daughters asking for help finding their father,
even a weird little man
who just wants to live in his cave again.
Take the demigod Radahn,
who was, before the shattering,
a powerful warrior and servant of the Golden Order.
During the war he was infected with a disease
and driven mad.
In the midst of the broken world of The Lands Between,
he holds tournaments at a castle
where warriors can fight him for the ultimate prize,
his great rune of the Elden Ring.
- [Man] The stars have aligned.
The festival is nigh.
General Radahn, mightiest demigod
of the Shattering, awaits you.
- Clearly, he can't let go of his time
as a warrior and ruler,
instead continuing to fight,
trying to relive his glory days.
In fact, his fellow soldiers from the war
are continuing to haphazardly fight,
though there's no longer any real battlefield to fight on.
Clearly, Radahn is in mourning for the lost future
where he would have maintained his greatness.
So much is his grief
that he even uses his powerful gravity magic
to hold the stars in place.
This keeps the world in stasis,
hiding from a future where he actually has to confront
the loss and destruction of the broken Elden Ring,
and only once you defeat him can the stars move again.
So, clearly, your quest within "Elden Ring"
isn't just to resurrect a lost past
by restoring the Golden Order.
It's much bigger than that.
By putting the pieces of the ring together
and restoring that past,
you're also reclaiming a lost future
as an extension of that glorious past.
But who benefits from this?
Well, most of the characters urging you on
are servants or beneficiaries of the Golden Order.
That includes both heroes and villains
who want to return to a past they believe
was taken from them.
But the various endings, which we'll detail more later,
call the nobleness of this act into question.
Like many FromSoftware games,
the majority of endings have you reconstructing
a version of the status quo
and instantiating a hollow version of this lost future.
Now, underpinning the idea of a world of lost futures
is a sense that we can no longer imagine
any kind of actually attainable future.
The lost futures that haunt us simply loom too large.
Fisher identifies this lack of imagination
in his book "Capitalist Realism,"
a term he defines as "the widespread sense
"that not only is capitalism the only viable
"political and economic system,
"but also that it is now impossible even to imagine
"a coherent alternative to it."
Though the world of "Elden Ring"
has nothing to do with capitalism,
we do see a similar vibe,
one of not being able to imagine an alternative
to the world in which you're living.
Take the demigod Renalla.
She's trapped in a library surrounded by her creepy children
and holding what appears to be a squishy, amber egg.
The game hints
that after Renalla's daughter Ranni killed herself,
Renalla became obsessed with this egg of rebirth.
- [Renalla] Oh little Ranni, my dear daughter.
Weave thy night into being.
- [Michael] Rather than move beyond her loss
into a new future,
she is consumed by a desire
to recreate the daughter that she lost.
She literally can't imagine an alternative
to her current situation.
- [Renalla] Dither not, come out say I.
Or will ye be gravestones?
To be better born anew?
- Fisher believed that this stasis
makes sense under neoliberalism,
"a system that is unresponsive, impersonal, centreless,
"abstract and fragmentary."
In a world so subsumed by capitalism,
a world that imagines every person as primarily a consumer,
every thing as primarily a product to be consumed,
the prospect of change feels kind of hollow and hopeless.
As he puts it,
"Capitalism seamlessly occupies
"the horizons of the thinkable."
Fisher often identifies this capitalist realist sense
that there is no future
in our art and culture.
He sees the endless postmodern culture
of remixing and remaking, of pastiche and nostalgia,
as evidence that we have lost the capacity
to imagine anything that has not already been created.
This dooms us to repeat the structures of the past,
both in art and in life.
Even the counterculture today, he argues,
"endlessly repeat older gestures
"of rebellion and contestation
"as if for the first time."
And the concept of a society stuck on a loop
pervades "Elden Ring" far more than you'd see
in an average video game.
The gameplay itself is remarkably repetitive,
which is probably a good thing given how hard it is.
In fact, it's basically defined by repetition,
particularly with regards to death.
First off, you die, like, a lot.
(woman grunting)
(woman screams)
- [Man] Oh no. Me no.
- But what's more, when you die,
it's not like in, say, "Mario,"
where you just reset and try again.
Rather, when you die,
the runes you were carrying are lost
unless you go back and retrieve them.
This forces you to return to sites of defeat
over and over again
with different approaches or better plans
in order to preserve your progress
and grow as both a player and a character.
Each time you know a little better what to expect
and possibly how to avoid yet another death.
And that brings us to the first not depressing part
of this video,
the possible emancipatory potential of hauntology,
and specifically, of repetition.
See, being haunted by lost futures
doesn't doom us to a life of what ifs.
At least, not necessarily.
Fisher also believed that these ghosts can also inspire us
to see different potentials for the world
outside of our present.
Maybe that means imagining a world
where we don't have to rely on fossil fuels
that are slowly suffocating the planet,
or where you don't have to view yourself
as a sentient personal brand.
Back in the 1960s,
philosopher Gilles Deleuze recognized
the potential of repetition
as an "active force producing difference."
He saw repetition as "the power of beginning
"and beginning again."
He was responding in part to Sigmund Freud,
who saw repetition as a psychological compulsion,
a need to recreate a past
that feels safe in its familiarity.
Conversely, Deleuze, inspired by Nietzsche and Kierkegaard,
understood repetition as a springboard for reinvention,
for conceiving of new choices,
for creating spaces for difference.
We see this idea of repetition as reinvention
at the core of the game, in its conclusion.
Now, most "Souls" games are pretty depressing.
They often underscore the futility of trying,
the false illusion of choice in a universe
where most things are predetermined.
But not "Elden Ring."
At least, not every time.
Notably, the game offers several endings.
In one, everybody dies. Bummer.
In most, you restore the world
pretty close to how it used to be,
but always with a wrinkle.
There's also one where you burn literally everything down
in a frenzy of destruction.
But there's one ending that we find really interesting.
In it, you restore the Elden Ring,
but rather than handing it back to Marika
and returning to the Golden Order,
you give that power to Ranni.
Remember, the daughter who died by suicide
but is now back as a ghost who lives in a doll.
Like we've said, this game really is all about haunting.
- [Woman] Oh? A dogged fellow, aren't we?
Or is it merely thy habit to talk to dolls?
- With this newfound power,
Ranni changes the nature of the Golden Order,
which was once a God-like force
that exerted power on and intervened in the world.
Under Ranni's rules,
the Golden Order is still a system that, like gravity,
sets certain rules.
But now the people within it have free will
and can abide by or violate its norms as they see fit.
In this way, a world once ruled by predestination
is now ruled by the uncertainty that is individual choice.
And choice, as basically
every existentialist philosopher would tell you,
is a necessary prerequisite for freedom.
In this way, Ranni has imagined a different world,
one where visions of the future are not dictated
by myths of the past.
And according to folks like Mark Fisher,
that's what our real world needs most.
People willing to conceive of new possibilities,
rather than passively accepting
all the logical inevitabilities of our present.
Of course, if you want to reinvent the future,
you have to let go of the mythologized glorious past
you were trying to restore
and accept the past as it actually was.
That's the only way to stop being haunted by it
and to realize a different future,
whether it's in a video game or in the real world.
But what do you guys think?
Is "Elden Ring" a game about letting go of the past,
or are our brains just broken
from trying to understand Derrida?
Let us know what you think in the comments.
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and if you haven't checked out our Patreon recently,
we have a lot of very cool new stuff coming.
And not in the imagined future sort of way,
it's all really happening.
So please check out our Patreon page,
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And as always, thanks for watching, later.
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