Dark Souls as Networked Hyperlinked Text / Creating Community Through Dystopia
Submission Type
Paper
Start Date/Time (EDT)
18-7-2024 4:45 PM
End Date/Time (EDT)
18-7-2024 5:45 PM
Location
Hypertexts & Fictions
Abstract
Dark Souls (2011) was a transformative moment for the video game industry that solidified FromSoftware as a leading developer, inaugurated Hidetaka Miyazaki as a video game auteur, and established the increasingly popular Souls-like genre. Yet, Dark Souls has been relatively underappreciated in Game Studies. This presentation seeks two major interventions: (1) position Dark Souls as the preeminent networked hyperlinked text, and (2) argue the game’s dystopian digital world allows players to engage in an imaginative world that cannily explores life after late-stage capitalistic destruction and global iniquity.
Despite being single-player, Dark Souls contains a networked server that enables certain optional multiplayer elements including soapstone messages, bloodstains, and phantoms. Players can leave short notes for each other that are helpful, playful, or deceptive; other players will periodically appear as nearly translucent phantoms that allow the player to briefly view other player’s simultaneous actions; and the bloodstains show the final few seconds of other players’ deaths. These multiplayer elements turn Dark Souls into a networked game that reminds players they are not alone in this arduous journey. Further, Dark Souls functions like a hyperlinked text because the game’s deliberately obtuse storytelling and intense difficulty nearly demand that first-time players leave the game and search for community and clarification in online guides and wikis. Through these hyperlinked interactions, Dark Souls has developed a rich community; there are dozens of YouTube essays and online posts where players describe how entering the community enabled them to overcome intense personal hardships. The game’s rich online community must be contextualized within its narrative, which describes a world locked in an apocalyptic cycle of continuous degradation because of the self-serving decisions of the ruling class. The passionate Dark Souls community reveals the appetite among gamers to imagine a world after the degradation wrought by late-stage capitalism.
Recommended Citation
Anderson, Austin, "Dark Souls as Networked Hyperlinked Text / Creating Community Through Dystopia" (2024). ELO (un)linked 2024. 8.
https://stars.library.ucf.edu/elo2024/hypertextsandfictions/schedule/8
Dark Souls as Networked Hyperlinked Text / Creating Community Through Dystopia
Hypertexts & Fictions
Dark Souls (2011) was a transformative moment for the video game industry that solidified FromSoftware as a leading developer, inaugurated Hidetaka Miyazaki as a video game auteur, and established the increasingly popular Souls-like genre. Yet, Dark Souls has been relatively underappreciated in Game Studies. This presentation seeks two major interventions: (1) position Dark Souls as the preeminent networked hyperlinked text, and (2) argue the game’s dystopian digital world allows players to engage in an imaginative world that cannily explores life after late-stage capitalistic destruction and global iniquity.
Despite being single-player, Dark Souls contains a networked server that enables certain optional multiplayer elements including soapstone messages, bloodstains, and phantoms. Players can leave short notes for each other that are helpful, playful, or deceptive; other players will periodically appear as nearly translucent phantoms that allow the player to briefly view other player’s simultaneous actions; and the bloodstains show the final few seconds of other players’ deaths. These multiplayer elements turn Dark Souls into a networked game that reminds players they are not alone in this arduous journey. Further, Dark Souls functions like a hyperlinked text because the game’s deliberately obtuse storytelling and intense difficulty nearly demand that first-time players leave the game and search for community and clarification in online guides and wikis. Through these hyperlinked interactions, Dark Souls has developed a rich community; there are dozens of YouTube essays and online posts where players describe how entering the community enabled them to overcome intense personal hardships. The game’s rich online community must be contextualized within its narrative, which describes a world locked in an apocalyptic cycle of continuous degradation because of the self-serving decisions of the ruling class. The passionate Dark Souls community reveals the appetite among gamers to imagine a world after the degradation wrought by late-stage capitalism.
Bio
Austin Anderson is a PhD candidate in English at Howard University whose work focuses on race, class, technology, and power. Austin’s dissertation is entitled “Racial Recursivity: Play, Blackness, and History in Contemporary Video Games” and explores the use of Blackness as a narrative device in contemporary video games. He received his MA in English from New York University, where his thesis explored the consumption of global minorized literature by hegemonic power groups through the case studies of Langston Hughes and Namdeo Dhasal. He received his Bachelors in English from Texas Wesleyan University. Austin is also the current co-chair for the MLA Committee on the Status of Graduate Students in the Humanities where he advocates for the needs of graduate students, particularly those from marginalized backgrounds. His work has been published in academic journals including Popular Culture Review, The Comparatist, and ASAP/J as well as academic edited collections like Bodies of Water in African American Literature, Music, and Film and the forthcoming Routledge’s Victorians and Video Games. His website can be found at this link.