Bonfire by Bonfire: Unpacking Dark Souls’ Redemptive Nature
The Text: “Dark Souls Saved Me” by NakeyJakey
In my junior high days, a friend recommended a video game. He claimed the game was so hard that half of its new players refunded it after the first hour. While this statement was greatly exaggerated, the difficulty of the game was not. This game is Dark Souls (2011), and its influence on video games cannot be overstated, as it spawned and popularized the video games sub-genre “Souls-likes” — — known for their exceptionally difficult gameplay and understated yet complex narratives.
However, what I find most intriguing is how games like Dark Souls challenge and thus positively influence its players. In my chosen text, the youtube video “Dark Souls Saved Me” by NakeyJakey (Jacob Christensen), the author gives a deeply personal account of how Dark Souls helped him overcome real-life struggles and deal with the social and economic structures of society. Combining Christensen’s video with my own experience with Dark Souls, I intend to argue that Dark Souls allowed Christensen to become more optimistic about life, and therefore reflects how video games are capable of being redemptive and beneficial. However, I believe that Christensen fails to address ostensible shortcomings in his own experience that can potentially strengthen the single story about games. Moreover, Christensen does not give detailed reasoning as to why Dark Souls specifically had such a profound impact. With this in mind, I would like to argue that Christensen’s life is bettered due to Dark Souls’ unprecedented design of a sparse narrative and heuristic gameplay that encourages the player to learn, understand, and overcome challenges via trial and error.
To start, how can a video game “save” someone? In Christensen’s video, he recounts how he played Dark Souls at a time when he was “barely making any money,” “super depressed,” and lacking all direction; how he lived in an apartment with his sister, had few friends, and worked as a waiter living off of tips. The embedded social critique in the author’s story portrays the social and economic structures of society as something many both in and outside the gaming community need to be saved from. In his video, however, Christensen emphasizes that in the face of these hardships, gamers have access to valuable experiences like Dark Souls that are both emotionally moving and spiritually motivating. Indeed, whether it be financial, social, or mental hardships, I too believe many video games can help relieve these real-life challenges through a moving narrative, thrilling gameplay, or a combination of both. Like Christensen, video games played a pretty significant role in my coming of age during the COVID lockdown. Firewatch taught me how to handle heartbreak and the need to face the most daunting problems head-on, BioShock Infinite gave me a taste of what it’s like to lose someone you care about, and Mass Effect took me on an exhilarating adventure across the galaxy, on which I was able to make sense of my loneliness and regain self-confidence. If these experiences sound familiar, it’s because they are what Christensen, countless others, and I have once gone through. “I somehow went on that journey and came out of it all the better… It took a virtual thing to make me appreciate my real life a lot more.” In a society where those in unfortunate circumstances have difficulty dealing with real-world challenges, Christensen’s particular experience proves Dark Souls, and therefore video games, can be effective in empowering the disadvantaged by granting them a mythological dimension in which they have greater control and through which they gain a greater sense of purpose.
On the other hand, certain claims Christensen makes in the video may be interpreted by the opposition as evidence against video games. Since video games entered popular culture, they have been subject to much controversy, often seen as mindless entertainment associated with addiction, reclusiveness, and violence. In the text, Christensen states that other than his routine activities, “all I basically thought about was playing Dark Souls… I was just that sucked into the game.” Based on these quotes, some may make the conclusion that Christensen was probably just addicted to the game, wasting hours and hours of his life on escapist entertainment. But I would refute this by arguing that such perceptions of games are just surface-level understandings founded upon the undesirable aspects of certain games and gamers favored by media outlets. Though video game addiction and other negative influences are real-world issues that ought to be acknowledged, time management and practicing mental well-being are crucial for any hobby or interest. In Christensen’s case, Dark Souls’ not only refutes this single story in many respects but also highlights how games can be just as impactful and inspiring as other mediums.
“It was like… my divine destiny to beat the game…I knew I had to see it through… [Dark Souls] made me feel like I had some sense of purpose the second I got sucked into [it].” In the video, Christensen does reference other game titles such as Super Smash Bros and Left 4 Dead (both multiplayer games of higher intensity). While it is clear that Dark Souls genuinely bettered Christensen’s life, I believe he fails in answering the question: What exactly makes Dark Souls stand out from other video games or even other mediums? When comparing Dark Souls to the other titles, Christensen simply commented that “Dark Souls was different” and “there was just… like a beauty underneath all the backstories of the characters, of the tragedies, or the bosses.” Indeed, an essential element of Dark Souls’ redemptive quality lies within its storytelling. Unlike most games and narratives of other mediums, Dark Souls is frugal in giving information about the overarching narrative, as very little of the story is directly revealed to the player. Instead, players must make the active decisions of talking to game characters, reading item descriptions, and exploring hidden areas in order to piece together Dark Souls’ sprawling narrative — — a form of sparse storytelling that’s rarely used in games. In doing so, Dark Souls rejects the conventional aesthetic in favor of a “heteroglossic spatiality” (multi-story environment), which invites the player to be enterprising in navigating the game’s semantic field and become an active producer rather than a passive recipient of knowledge — — qualities that players can apply to the real world.
Similarly, Dark Souls’ heuristic gameplay also plays an important role in challenging the player to put forth continuous effort to overcome seemingly impossible enemies. The game, as stated previously, is remarkably difficult, which is partly due to the fact that the player begins as a measly zombie. The player begins abandoned in a dungeon, unempowered. There is no tutorial or omniscient voice breaking the fourth wall to showcase where to go or teach the game’s core mechanisms. It is all up to the player to discover adaptive strategies via experimentation and rigorous repetition. The player’s effort towards self-improvement is then reflected in boss encounters, where the player takes on an extraordinarily powerful foe and eventually defeats them. In my opinion, this turbulent yet rewarding journey metaphorizes the real-world process of overcoming difficulties and gaining self-confidence much more explicitly than works in any other medium. As Christensen comments: “I had things to be proud of but I remember when I finally beat O and S (Ornstein and Smough)… oh man I was so stoked.” While it may seem counterintuitive, I believe Dark Soul’s limited guidance in narrative and gameplay encourages players to rely solely on their determination to move forward and find their own direction — the very reason Christensen felt the game gave him a “divine” agency and thus fulfilled a void in his life. Dark Souls’ unforgiving difficulty has always been a driving force behind gamers’ interest, as it allows players to feel engaged in a world where they can be motivated to accomplish great feats and make a difference in a virtual world.
“If something like that can exist in this world… this is a world I want to live in.” In Dark Souls, the player will fail dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of times, but the sense of accomplishment one feels to overpower an enemy more than outweighs the frustration during the process. In Dark Souls, the player is offered choices from beginning to end, from choosing your first weapon to choosing one of the game’s two endings. In his 2010 article “Video games can never be art,” renowned film critic Roger Ebert stated, “No one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great poets, filmmakers, and novelists” because games ask players to make choices, which hinders “authorial control” of an artwork. Yet, in Christensen’s life, this ability to personalize the experience and guide his own fate became a healing process when he was constrained by the economic structures of society. Unlike what Ebert once claimed, I argue that the marriage of challenge and freedom Dark Souls offers elevates the title to a position above many works of art. In Dark Souls, the player rests at bonfires to save their progress and enhance their abilities. I hope as the video game medium becomes increasingly sophisticated, more and more like Christensen can find solace in these experiences and be motivated to continue their fight, step by step, enemy by enemy, bonfire by bonfire.
