The character of Razumihin, in Dovstoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, states that ‘Pain
and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart.
The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.”
Hi, I’m Hamish Black and this is Writing On Games.
From Soft's Dark Souls, due to a number of factors, has spawned its own legacy as a piece
of media that revels in the grim and macabre - a grand guignol of the developer's sadism
and the player's masochism.
This is due in large part to the way the game was marketed upon its release - 'PREPARE TO
DIE' graced almost every piece of promotional material associated with the game, as well
as becoming the nomenclature of the complete edition of Dark Souls which included the Artorias
DLC.
Its unflinching sense of constantly escalating challenge also played a part in this - the
game was described in almost every review as one of the most difficult games made in
recent years, and many likened it to the often sadistic difficulty of many older games (whilst
also forgetting that those older games, even on consoles, were still very much in the mindset
of the arcade, where the goal was to extract as much money from gullible infants as possible).
In any case, it is clear that many regard Dark Souls' legacy as one of unrelenting challenge
and intimidation, of the macabre and the miserable, of death.
Are they correct in asserting this view of the game?
You could certainly make an argument for that case, but to do so I believe would be reductive.
In fact, I would go as far as to argue that Dark Souls is actually about as uncompromising
a celebration of life as the medium of games has produced up until this point.
Woah woah woah, slow down there Hamish.
Where are you coming from with this?
Well, this (totally anecdotal) argument comes from a very personal place.
In fact, it comes from my own experiences wallowing in what I imagined to be the endless
sadness of life and imagining my own ideas of death.
That is to say, they come from my experiences with severe mental illness - specifically
major depression, anxiety and to a lesser extent OCD.
For context, I have dealt with these issues for many years and they have driven me to
some incredibly dark places in my time, including multiple attempts on my own life.
Depression robs you of your rationality, your personality and your energy, and without those
your brain develops a pretty warped view of what it means to exist, and a fairly nihilistic
approach to existence, as laughable as it might seem to some, is almost inevitable in
cases like this.
Why am I talking about this?
Because I believe that my experiences with suicidal depression and my experiences with
Dark Souls resonate with each other in some pretty odd ways.
Not only does depression warp your ideas of what it means to exist, surviving something
as traumatic as suicide attempts and deciding to carry on necessitate viewing life in a
totally different way.
Just like during depressive episodes what other people might view as totally innocuous
you might view as a threat to your very being, after surviving your own irrational urges
to end your own life and coming out the other side of that, it's impossible to view life
and death in quite the same way as you did before, and that way still might not line
up with what is considered 'normal'.
For me, I moved into a state of what I like to call affirmative nihilism - retaining the
feeling of relative insignificance, whilst also feeling freed of the burden of having
to live my life for anyone else as a direct result.
How does this relate to my experiences with Dark Souls then?
Well, in short, I would say that the revelation that occurred after my last suicide attempt
regarding my views on life and death were reinforced by the way Dark Souls tackles the
ideas of life and death.
Dark Souls came into my life at just the right time and I would argue minimised the very
prevalent risk of relapse that comes from a traumatic experience such as suicide.
You see, every element of Dark Souls' design resonated with me in a way that at first fell
in line with the surface legacy of the game that I mentioned at the start.
However, as time went on and I moved from my point of being suicidally depressed to
realising that I wanted to get better and live, I realised that the complexities of
choosing whether or not to end my own life were entirely reflected by the duality of
almost everything in the game.
This was as revelatory an experience to me as the post-suicidal realisation of wishing
to perpetuate my own existence, and I would argue played a substantial part in teaching
me how to get better and also in reinforcing my newfound ideas regarding life and death.
In short, Dark Souls helped convince me that it was alright to keep fighting through what
I originally saw as unbeatable, and has led me to a point where I am making good progress
in tackling my illnesses.
How did it do this?
Well, people talk all the time about the harsh but fair nature of Dark Souls’ difficulty,
but arguably this extends to not only the visceral nature of the combat, but the narrative
and lore and the world design, right down to the mechanics of life and death within
the game.
What's key, at least to me however, is that ultimately Dark Souls is not a game that wants
to beat its players senseless - it thrives on player triumph.
It wants you to succeed - you just need to learn the rules and how to work around them.
For me, the idea that a game was finally representing what I perceived to be the harshness of the
world I was living in (despite its fantasy aesthetic), yet was simultaneously urging
me to fight through it, was quite refreshing.
Depression, and the lack of energy to do things it creates, arguably leave most with quite
a bit of spare time.
At my lowest point I was jobless, broke, had just graduated from university with a degree
I knew wasn't going to get me anywhere, I had shut myself off from many of those closest
to me and was becoming more and more of a recluse thanks to the depression.
During this time, understandably, I devoted a lot of my time to video games.
They helped me feel connected to at least some form of universe or world, they allowed
me to become immersed in interesting narratives, or they allowed me to maintain some form of
reflexes with a minimal expenditure of energy (which, when you are depressed, becomes the
most valuable of commodities).
However, I couldn't shake the feeling that these games I was playing, no matter how grandiose
their narratives and writing seemed in their quest to show us the human condition, they
almost always failed by placing us at the centre of the action.
Even if the centre of the action is a place where you have to conserve ammo or healing
items or make choices regarding who gets food and who doesn't for example, you are at the
centre.
You decide these things that affect others around you.
Whilst I get that sometimes this can be used to great effect, I never felt that these were
actually representative of the situation I found myself in.
They automatically place the player in a position of empowerment, and as I talked about in my
video on player agency, sometimes that is not the way to truly immerse the player in
your world.
Regardless of your views on life, we as individuals are largely insignificant, and that's an important
thing that doesn't often get reflected in games due to the inherent need for the player
to control and be at the centre of the action.
However, Dark Souls manages this, and with a great deal of panache.
It places the player in a position of relative insignificance, in a world that isn't just
hostile to the player, but crucially indifferent to them.
The world would exist whether or not the player was there to experience it - things would
keep on moving.
Your goal within the world is to either prolong the Age of Fire or extinguish it and bring
about the Age of Darkness.
The path to achieving this goal, however, twists and turns to the point that it's easy
for the goal to become obfuscated to the player - for them to forget what the larger narrative
is.
This isn't bad storytelling, quite the opposite - it brings the narrative down to a singular
level.
The main cataclysm and how you affect it no longer matters in the same way it might in
a more linear, player-focused game.
The player's goals, as a result, become 1) making the experience in this cold, indifferent
world as bearable as it possibly can be because there is joy to behold in this world and 2)
reclaim as much agency within this world as you possibly can.
I can't tell you how much this realisation of what Dark Souls is trying to do helped
me deal with my own emotions and mental illness - this game is life!
The world around us is completely indifferent to any of us, and would continue whether we
were here or not.
With that in mind, the way to live a happy life becomes clear - take the little steps
to gain as much agency over your life as possible, and make the lower points as bearable as possible
so that you can experience the numerous high points.
The small things in Dark Souls include learning the mechanics of combat - learning when to
dodge, when to parry, how to manage your stamina and inventory, these are all fairly small
elements when taken on their own, and they each get learned and honed separately as their
requirements in combat become clearer to the player, but when added together they become
an incredibly deep combat system that make the player feel like a master of the systems
in a way that no other game allows the player to feel.
Compare this to how I was viewing my life - my idea of where I wanted to be compared
to where I was seemed like this incredible gulf and this arguably contributed a great
deal to my feelings of hopelessness and worthlessness because I thought nothing could change.
By focusing on the tiniest things, like forcing myself to get showered and dressed when I
wake up, or finishing that piece of music I was writing but was going to give up on,
or cooking myself a healthy meal, or lifting weights, or working on this damn show, whilst
I'm still very much in the early stages of getting to where I want to be, breaking it
all down and focusing on one element at a time allows me to progress in my life, no
matter how glacial that progress might seem at times.
Dark Souls taught me that it was ok for that progress to be slow - working to achieve that
progress is enough to keep going with it.
What initially seemed like an utter brickwall of difficulty in Dark Souls I was able to
chip away at it gradually until I became actually pretty good at it!
What's more is that I trained myself to become good at it - the world of the game didn't
help me do it, it couldn't care less about me.
The design of the game, however, subtly encourages you to keep going with it so you can feel
the celebratory feeling when you overcome an obstacle.
Taking this approach and applying it to my life allowed me to realise that even if I
didn't have a concrete goal in mind, as long as I was working to make sure I could see
the joy of life, then that was good enough.
And there is joy in life, both in Dark Souls and subsequently, I discovered, in the real
world.
One might think of the joy of Dark Souls being as simple as mastering each combat encounter,
as this is the core mechanic.
Sure enough the mastery of the combat system is the payoff for training yourself to become
better at the smaller systems that make up the larger whole and as a result every combat
encounter and victory feels more substantial because it is all truly earned by the player,
but for me there was a much more simple source of joy I found within Dark Souls - the views.
That may sound silly, but the stunning world design and the vistas in Dark Souls encouraged
me to keep going even when the difficulty felt insurmountable.
Even when the design is at its most grim, such as in Blighttown or Sens Fortress, there
is a level of detail and architectural consistency to the design of these places that they take
on a warped beauty of their own, and as such exploring them is just as rewarding as any
other area of the game.
Why do I mention this?
Because it actually encouraged me to go outside and explore the world around me!
For the longest time my depression had rendered me a recluse which led to me feeling incredibly
isolated and alone, whilst also viewing everything outside my curtained bedroom window as a threat.
Dark Souls reminded me that I actually am fortunate enough to live in a fairly pretty
place myself in Western Scotland and the joy I had of discovering new places and simply
taking in the atmosphere and staring into the distance of Dark Souls’ vistas encouraged
me to get out of my self - imposed prison and experience it for myself!
It took a long time to get to that point, but as Dark Souls also taught me, as long
as you are teaching yourself and training yourself in little steps, no matter how glacial
the progress might seem, it will eventually yield rewards for you - you just need to know
where to look for them.
What’s best is that From Software is acutely aware of all of this – from the legacy the
game has garnered to the ways in which they very deliberately subvert this legacy.
For one, difficulty is not the main element of the game – in fact, director Hidetaka
Miyazaki has stated that “…the main concept behind the death system is trial and error.
The difficulty is high, but always achievable.
Everyone can achieve without all that much technique – all you need to do is learn,
from your deaths, how to overcome the difficulties.
Overcoming challenges by learning something in a game is a very rewarding feeling, and
that's what I wanted to prioritise in Dark Souls and Demon's Souls.
And because of the online, you can even learn something from somebody else's death.
I'd say that was the main concept behind the online, too."
The online is another key element of how this game helped me deal with my depression – it
helped me realise that I’m not alone.
Depression can lead to people feeling more isolated than they ever have done in the past,
and this can be one of the main reasons the illness feels so insurmountable.
The idea that the world around you is out to get you and you are alone in this struggle
is utterly demoralising.
However, once you realise that far more people suffer from this illness than many people
think, even if their circumstances and the way the illness affects them differ completely
to how they affect you, just knowing that they’re ultimately fighting the same battle
can be enough to convince someone that the battle is indeed winnable.
I don’t think I really need to explain how this relates to Dark Souls’ multiplayer,
but I would argue that the game would flat out not work if not for the summoning system
(which, although derided by some as a means of ‘not playing the game right’ can give
people a sense of respite when they need it most) or even just the spectres that sit at
bonfires as you approach.
They exemplify the game’s philosophy that ‘hey, you’re ultimately the one that is
going to have to work hard in order to survive in this world, and the world is brutally indifferent
towards your presence, but you can get through this, because you’re not alone in your efforts.’
Maybe it’s just my warped post-suicidal perspective on life talking, but I ended up
taking a great deal of comfort from this outlook.
This is why I say that Dark Souls is a celebration of life rather than simply a showcase of death
and sadism.
It communicates these ideas without at all feeling patronising, and just representing
what it truly means to live.
Its design, mechanics and writing are all geared to encourage the player to keep fighting
through even when it seems insurmountable, and guides the player as to how they should
break down a problem and solve it bit by bit.
In fact, the game actively trivialises death - at least on your first time through, you
are going to die far more than you are going to succeed (the world can still be cruel and
is always indifferent towards you), to an almost comical degree.
Death becomes inevitable, expected, rote, but not in a way that forces the player to
resign themselves to that fact.
As I say, through working on those small elements, you can create your own agency and become
what you want to be in this world.
The world is so consumed by the idea of death that the times you survive become true moments
of triumph, to be fully celebrated - and the game will celebrate with you.
Before plunging you into the next horrific difficulty wall head first because, ya know,
Dark Souls.
And because, ya know, life.
But it's okay, because both can be pretty cool sometimes.
Hopefully I've made clear how the close ties between Dark Souls’ world and the real world
reflect and resonate in some pretty interesting ways.
Like I say, this is purely anecdotal (the science is largely still out on specifically
how games affect pre-existing depression) so don't take this as me saying ‘PLAYING
DARK SOULS WILL CURE YOU OF YOUR DEPRESSION!’
However just know that a lot if the lessons I learned from Dark Souls ended up becoming
incredibly useful to me in recognising the joy in life and teaching me how to achieve
it when previously I had been so resigned to the idea of my own death.
That's pretty important to me and is something perhaps more games should explore - reality
doesn't centre around the individual, and that's ok.
as has been proven to me by Dark Souls, sometimes that's exactly what's needed to remind you
that things are alright, and you're not alone.
Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this slightly different, more personal episode of Writing On Games
- if you enjoyed it then if you'd consider subscribing that'd be really cool - and i’ll
see you next time.