The Narrative Fatigue of Dark Souls

I just finished Dark Souls, the notorious sequel to From Software's 2009 sleeper hit Demon's Souls. Dark Souls was a game I was more excited to play than any other this year. Demon's Souls was a revelation for me, one of the richest, freshest, most daring AAA games of the last decade. It was also - contrary to popular belief - a superb narrative experience, with a game system and a fictional world that informed each other in resonant ways that hearkened back to the heyday of Origin and Looking Glass.

I was expecting a lot from Dark Souls, and "a lot" is exactly what I got. It is an absurdly massive game, making Demon's Souls, which took me 100 hours to finish, look small. I only finished it just last night, and my first thought as the credits rolled was: what the fuck was that?

I was expecting it to be cryptic, but I wasn't prepared for how terse it was. It was over in 30 seconds. If I include my hour-50 restart, I played Dark Souls for 150 hours. Demon’s Souls took me 100 only because I let it. I could have easily finished it in less, but I wanted it to be longer. I was ready for Dark Souls to be over by the end, but I plugged onward in good faith, assuming that a narrative payoff similar to Demon's Souls was waiting for me at the end, an ending sequence that was the final key to decoding the moral politics of its crypto-gothic mythology. Instead I got an almost immediate staff roll followed by an auto-restart / auto-save.

Demon’s Souls let you keep your end-game save if you wanted to poke around. But Dark Souls literally forces you to replay it, over and over, to solve its narrative riddles. If the game were 10 hours long - like Silent Hill, Deadly Premonition, or other similarly cryptic story-driven games - this might be good, but it’s 100+. Who the fuck has time? Really? You really expect me to devote every evening I have for a year to solving your fucking riddle? You gotta be joking.

Demon’s Souls, while also cryptic, didn’t seem like such a fuck-you to the player when it came to stumbling upon its key narrative components. If you paid attention it was hard to miss, and its climax that put a lot of its more puzzling bits into perspective. But Dark Souls... even if you do figure it out, there is no pay-off at the end. At first I thought it was just the ending I got, but I looked at the other ending on YouTube and it was almost as slight.

I didn't expect answers, but I did expect the core questions I had about Lordran to be addressed and given illuminating, perhaps decisive context. What happened to the world? Did you really end the curse of the undead? Was Gwyn and the fire-worshiping religion he founded, which seemed to have created as many problems as it solved, morally better than the alternative... a dark world ruled by men, without the gods? The game is right to leave this question unanswered, but I expected an inkling of what the consequences of these two paths might be, how their pros and cons might play out. Instead the game just jerks you back to be beginning without being able to process anything new.

In a way this all seems like an extension of the same “problem” the game has with its difficulty design. I still maintain Dark Souls isn’t as fair as Demon’s Souls, in spite of what the developers say. It has more cheap deaths, more things that are impossible to predict, more riddles that seem designed to fuck with you. In the first game you got the feeling that they weren’t trying to be especially difficult or cryptic. It was just a beautiful, strange, brutal game world that had its own dark logic, a logic that wasn't very difficult to decipher and, once deciphered, ensured you would both survive its challenges and experience most of its content.

Dark Souls is a classic example of people listening too much to their own press. Demon’s Souls didn’t need to be bigger. It didn’t need to be harder. It didn’t need to me more cryptic. It was brilliant the way it was. The extra weight just makes the whole experience flabbier, looser, more unwieldly. Sure it is obviously by the same minds as the original, which is why it has the same seductive draw, and a lot of the same great elements, but in the end it’s too much - way too much - of a good thing.

Dark Souls took a LOT of my time. A lot of my life. Demon’s Souls did too, but when the credits rolled on that game I had a warm feeling that all that time was well-spent. It was because of that feeling that I got up and immediately wrote my essay on the game that was eventually published. This, what you’re reading now, is what Dark Souls prompted me to write when the credits rolled.

I may one day write about the game’s good points - about how brilliant its non-linear level design is, how awe-inspiring the world is as a narrative object if you manage to explore all of it, how its multiplayer system feels like a cynical morality play, and how, in the end, its inversion of 'good' and 'evil' is subversive in ways most games can't imagine, let alone attempt – but I don’t feel like it now.

Right now, I don’t want to play video games anymore.

Interview with Marc "Mahk" LeBlanc

Part 8 of a continuing series, where I interview members of the now-defunct but highly influential Looking Glass Studios (1990-2000), which wrote the book on 3D first-person narrative game design throughout the 90s, in such games as Ultima Underworld, System Shock, and Thief.

This week is Marc "Mahk" LeBlanc. Marc was a programmer/designer at Looking Glass for most of the company's life, and was one of the major voices in shaping the overarching design aesthetic of the company. This is partially what lead to Marc being a thinker, writer, and educator on game design, developing the MDA framework (Mechanics, Dynamics, Aesthetics) as a simple tool for creating emergence-centric games. I talk with Marc about his time at Looking Glass, how he remembered dealing with simulation, fiction, and emergence across various projects, and how those lessons and strategies have filtered out into the rest of the games industry after the company folded.

If you ever wanted to know how performance-enhancing drugs can help you in System Shock or what the exact difference is between the design philosophies of Deus Ex and Thief, give it a listen.

Download the podcast here.

Blog Anxiety

I've been having a real problem updating the blog the past few months. This is because I've been busier this year, in terms of travel and projects, than any other year in recent memory. Since March I've been to Spain, Singapore, Montreal, Holland, Texas, and have been bouncing back between Boston and New York it seems like every other week. In this time I've begun several blog posts, but haven't been able to finish them properly.

At this point my backlog is fairly massive, including some stuff from last year. I've got articles on Epic Mickey, Minerva's Den, Ocarina of Time 3D, Catherine, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Dark Souls, and one on the overarching politics of Metal Gear that I've been tinkering with for months.

I feel like the "window" for many of these has passed. Ideally, you want to get out posts when the game in question is still topical. On the other hand that's weird of me to say, since I often write about older, obscure games that have nothing to do with what's "hot" in gamer circles (and pride myself on the fact). Clearly it wouldn't be out of character for me to publish them anyway.

I'd like to release all these articles by the end of the year, in addition to the final Looking Glass podcasts, the next few of which are finally finished and coming (Mark "Mahk" LeBlanc is next). I plan to release an article a week, even if I have to force myself to post some of the above articles in a less-than-ideal form. 

This is a blog after all, I often need to remind myself. My style (I've come to realize) tends toward the shape, length, and voice of traditional print media essayists. I read a lot of early 20th century political writing like George Orwell and Bertrand Russell, and for film criticism my touchstones are people like Pauline Kael Jonathan Rosenbaum.

What these people do isn't so different from what bloggers do, but print media, being less ephemeral than digital media, does have the added advantage (or disadvantage, depending on your perspective) of being "final" in a sense a blog never is. You want to polish things off, be absolutely sure you put your best foot forward, and be as certain as possible that what you publish might have some value for posterity.

It is this mentality I have trouble letting go of online, and I'm not so sure this is a bad thing. I once saw Arianna Huffington interviewed on The Daily Show, calling herself a blog "evangelist", and claiming you don't have to filter yourself online. You just post your thoughts, as messy as they are, and keep going, free from having to edit or polish. Blogging is just raw, uncut thought.

John Stewart seemed to think this was a bunch of crap, arguing that we have editors for a reason, and doesn't it makes sense to at least try to make something good - to revise it, to scrutinize it, to streamline it, to improve it - at least a little bit before you publish it? Huffington was having none of this, of course, but Stewart didn't seem convinced. Neither am I.

While it's obviously possible to tinker too much, I do think a degree of old fashioned print media self-scrutiny is useful. I dunno about you, but I tune out quickly when a blogger just seems to be writing their stream of consciousness thoughts on a topic. I expect a writer to parse their own mind, to exercise some discretion and select the best bits for my consumption. I want a statue. Not a slab of rock.