Dark Souls succeeds partly on imagination: Not because of what it tells the player, but by what it\u00a0chooses not to. #Kant<\/p>\n
In this text, Daniel Vella digs into Dark Souls as an example of games that tickle your imagination\u00a0by refusing to tell you the whole story.<\/p>\n
Our understanding of the world around us is guided by our senses: Because we can touch a\u00a0teaspoon and use it to stir coffee, we understand what a teaspoon is but what it does. But our senses\u00a0don’t tell the whole story, because there’s a lot of the world that we do not see, like electromagnetic\u00a0radiation, gravitational fields and the like.<\/p>\n
More succinctly, this applies to the world of art: You may look at a painting and deduce the artist’s\u00a0intent from the image, but there’s no telling if that’s actually what the artist wanted to convey to the\u00a0audience. It may be something completely different instead. Philosophically speaking, sometimes\u00a0art is understood strictly as a process, where the creator went through a specific set of steps to create\u00a0it and had one clear intent in mind, while others think of art is something more than that. Art that is\u00a0not just open to interpretation, but escapes it \u2013 in a word, sublime. As it’s understood in philosophy,\u00a0the sublime is intangible, beyond our understanding, so vast and ill-defined that we can never fully\u00a0understand what it is.<\/p>\n
So how does this apply to video games? Unless you have direct access to the game’s source code,\u00a0you can never really tell exactly how everything about the game world works and what its rules are\u00a0in explicit terms \u2013 you can only hope to interpret it as you play the game. Sure, your interpretation\u00a0can still be pretty close to the developer’s intent, but you’re still only looking at it from the outside.\u00a0Dark Souls especially plays with this phenomenon in unique ways, according to Vella: It’s a game\u00a0that never quite tells you exactly what everything does and what’s going on, and as such there’s lots\u00a0of room for interpretation and conjecture. You can look at a distant building and not know for sure\u00a0whether it’s just background decoration or a place you can actually visit. You can find items whose\u00a0function is never explained, but discovered \u2013 if they even have a function. You’ll have to personally\u00a0experiment to find out how central game mechanics work, like what Humanity is and what it\u00a0actually does. There’s even an item you can start the game with that tells you it has no useful\u00a0function, so of course in a game that’s so cryptic and full of mystery you assume it has to do\u00a0something, right? But it doesn’t. It’s literally useless. Except, of course, in provoking that sense of\u00a0mystery and wonder about it.<\/p>\n
This kind of sense of wonder about its world gives Dark Souls a unique position among its peers:\u00a0When other games are so willing to reveal their bag of tricks right away, Dark Souls is subtle and\u00a0mysterious, tickling that part of your brain that begs you to dig deeper and find out what’s really\u00a0going on.<\/p>\n
Title: No Mastery Without Mystery: Dark Souls and the Ludic Sublime
\nAuthor: Daniel Vella
\nPublished in: Game Studies, Volume 15 issue 1, July 2015
\nOriginal URL: http:\/\/gamestudies.org\/1501\/articles\/vella<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Dark Souls succeeds partly on imagination: Not because of what it tells the player, but by what it\u00a0chooses not to. #Kant In this text, Daniel Vella digs into Dark Souls as an example of games that tickle your imagination\u00a0by refusing to tell you the whole story. Our understanding of the world around us is guided […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":148,"featured_media":862,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ocean_post_layout":"","ocean_both_sidebars_style":"","ocean_both_sidebars_content_width":0,"ocean_both_sidebars_sidebars_width":0,"ocean_sidebar":"","ocean_second_sidebar":"","ocean_disable_margins":"enable","ocean_add_body_class":"","ocean_shortcode_before_top_bar":"","ocean_shortcode_after_top_bar":"","ocean_shortcode_before_header":"","ocean_shortcode_after_header":"","ocean_has_shortcode":"","ocean_shortcode_after_title":"","ocean_shortcode_before_footer_widgets":"","ocean_shortcode_after_footer_widgets":"","ocean_shortcode_before_footer_bottom":"","ocean_shortcode_after_footer_bottom":"","ocean_display_top_bar":"default","ocean_display_header":"default","ocean_header_style":"","ocean_center_header_left_menu":"","ocean_custom_header_template":"","ocean_custom_logo":0,"ocean_custom_retina_logo":0,"ocean_custom_logo_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_tablet_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_mobile_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_max_height":0,"ocean_custom_logo_tablet_max_height":0,"ocean_custom_logo_mobile_max_height":0,"ocean_header_custom_menu":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_family":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_subset":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_size":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_unit":"px","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight_tablet":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight_mobile":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform_tablet":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform_mobile":"","ocean_menu_typo_line_height":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_unit":"","ocean_menu_typo_spacing":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_unit":"","ocean_menu_link_color":"","ocean_menu_link_color_hover":"","ocean_menu_link_color_active":"","ocean_menu_link_background":"","ocean_menu_link_hover_background":"","ocean_menu_link_active_background":"","ocean_menu_social_links_bg":"","ocean_menu_social_hover_links_bg":"","ocean_menu_social_links_color":"","ocean_menu_social_hover_links_color":"","ocean_disable_title":"default","ocean_disable_heading":"default","ocean_post_title":"","ocean_post_subheading":"","ocean_post_title_style":"","ocean_post_title_background_color":"","ocean_post_title_background":0,"ocean_post_title_bg_image_position":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_attachment":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_repeat":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_size":"","ocean_post_title_height":0,"ocean_post_title_bg_overlay":0.5,"ocean_post_title_bg_overlay_color":"","ocean_disable_breadcrumbs":"default","ocean_breadcrumbs_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_separator_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_links_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_links_hover_color":"","ocean_display_footer_widgets":"default","ocean_display_footer_bottom":"default","ocean_custom_footer_template":"","ocean_post_oembed":"","ocean_post_self_hosted_media":"","ocean_post_video_embed":"","ocean_link_format":"","ocean_link_format_target":"self","ocean_quote_format":"","ocean_quote_format_link":"post","ocean_gallery_link_images":"on","ocean_gallery_id":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[237],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1032","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-game-research-highlights","entry","has-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tuni.fi\/playlab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1032","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tuni.fi\/playlab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tuni.fi\/playlab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tuni.fi\/playlab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/148"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tuni.fi\/playlab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1032"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.tuni.fi\/playlab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1032\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tuni.fi\/playlab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/862"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tuni.fi\/playlab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1032"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tuni.fi\/playlab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1032"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tuni.fi\/playlab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1032"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}