With our discussions this week about the roles failure can have within a game's mechanics and procedural rhetoric, I think it would be interesting to discuss the Dark Souls series. If you haven't heard about the games, they are third-person action role playing games set in a dark fantasy world and notoriously known for their difficulty (for some perspective, the games use the phrase "prepare to die" in their marketing). The plot of the series is somewhat complicated but within the first game, the player character is human existing in a world populated by both gods, demons, and beastly monsters. Therefore, in-line with other dark-fantasy plots, the game world is inherently hostile or indifferent to the human species. It is within this brutal world that the player takes the role of a undead, a human that has been cursed by a certain god to serve as an undying, reviving tool to secure the preservation of the gods rule over the world. From the start of the game, the player starts as a "failure," rather than playing as the "chosen hero," they play as an expendable tool. In fact, one of the most common enemies are "hollows," other undead who have given up and been driven insane from the cycle of life and death. Within the gameplay, failure is unavoidable as well. Fighting certain enemies or bosses, the player is forced to learn the combat system and optimal strategies from trial and error. Though the games are full of failure, as mentioned during lecture, the true diagetic failure is giving up on the game as the player character never truly dies, this translates to the player character then becoming a hollow.
The difficulty of the games, combined with the somewhat humanistic concept that true failure is giving up and the games' system for cooperating with other players to help their progression, has caused certain individuals within the Dark Souls fan community to consider the series as a metaphor of sorts of having to live with mental health issues such as depression. There are several YouTube videos and internet articles detailing personal stories of how the games have encouraged individuals to persevere against the symptoms of acute anxiety and depression. I can definitely understand the rationale, but I can also see how individuals may interpret a liked medium/game to fit a certain purpose. What are your opinions on this?
Here are some of the videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=viP4psS3MUQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExAT42tE4Qk