Hustling Souls — Hard games and neoliberal catharsis

Thu 13 April 2023

"You are about to sacrifice something precious. Only so that you may be Lord. What a horrible thing to ponder. Your ascendancy requires sacrifice, whether you wish it or not. But how would the Lord, crowned so, be looked upon? Chosen Tarnished and would-be Lord, dare to tread the path of true rigor. Spare them, and singe your own flesh in their stead. If you are prepared to show resolve, and attain Lordship through righteous hardship, then heed the words of I, Shabriri." — Shabriri, Elden Ring (edited to lessen spoilers)

Games are difficult. By their very essence, they provide us with challenges and puzzles to be overcome and we in turn become more flexible in our thinking and abilities. This is why humans in all of history played games, like go, chess or ulama. Likewise, stories written, spoken or performed also have the ability to challenge our ways of thinking and to teach us how to overcome challenges — whereas the former challenge the recipient through active participation the latter challenge the recipient passively. This places video games in the unique position to simultaneously tell challenging stories while actively challenging the skill of the player. Even though there are video games that have no story at all (Tetris being, perhaps, the most well-known one historically) many games do include a narrative background and reason for the protagonist even when their stories are paper thin. Other games focus intensely on their narrative, reducing the mechanical challenge to a minimum. And then there are some games that focus on the player’s challenge itself, challenging the player’s mind to ponder the meaning of difficulty, time and existence.

Warning: This piece contains spoilers for Ellen Ring, Senior, Bloodborne, and the Dark Souls trilogy.

In the realm of video games no other series is synonymous with challenging gameplay as FromSoftware's Souls-games¹. Whereas other games try to be as frictionless as possible, offering varying degrees of difficulty settings to be accessible to as many potential consumers as possible, Souls-games eschew this egalitarian design ethos to provide gameplay for "hardcore" gamers. This isn't particularly new, in the video games market or outside of it: Puzzles like the Saturday New York Times crosswords or entirely blank jigsaws are designed to challenge the most experienced and abled players. They are, by design and essence, not meant to be consumed by everyone. However, when talking about jigsaw games, only few people would know that there even exist blank jigsaw puzzles. How is it, then, when the discussion is about difficult challenges in video games the reference point are FromSoftware games, known even far outside the video games aficionado bubble? Shouldn't they too be an insider tip shared in message boards dedicated to video game enthusiasts looking for bigger challenges like Mario kaizo hacks? Clearly, there have always been crushingly difficult video games. Anyone who can still remember arcades knows that these games were designed for you to fail so you'd drop another coin into the receptacle. Beating the last level in Tetris is as crushingly difficult as winning a Civilization game on the highest difficulty level, requiring an incredible amount of dedication to learn the game's mechanics and systems to play them in your favour. The equation of hard video games with FromSoftware games is, then, a historical curiosity.

The Souls series of games canonically starts with the 2009 Demon's Souls released on the PlayStation 3, itself a successor of FromSoftware's own obscure King's Field series and the first game directed by Hidetaka Miyazaki. However, only with the release of the first Dark Souls in 2011 did FromSoftware's games gain widespread acclaim. Between and after Dark Souls' two sequels the developer released three other games that are all colloquially referred to as FromSoftware's Souls-games. The studio’s greatest success yet is the 2022 Elden Ring which marries FromSoftware’s signature difficulty with open world game design a la Nintendo’s Breath of the Wild. The core gameplay of Souls-games is one of exploration and action combat mechanics where all enemies — regardless how "low-level" they are to be considered — are able to do lethal harm to the player's character. Accordingly, bosses are so overpoweringly difficult, able to fell the player in one or two swoops of their giant blades, that only with persistence and after multiple deaths victory is to be assumed. When the player is defeated they are returned to a checkpoint usually placed far away from the boss's location necessitating a backtrack so another try can be ventured. Crucially, all enemies are reset when resting or reawakening at a checkpoint so even if the player cleared an entire location of lesser enemies all of them will reappear.

Even though Souls-games usually have on the surface as deep a story as Nintendo’s Super Mario games (become strong by defeating level bosses to finally defeat the super boss at the end of the game) they insist on integrating lore that informs the player about the world and how it came to be the way it is now indirectly giving the player a narrative motivation for defeating the final boss. What ties the narratives of all FromSoftware's Souls-games together is the notion that absolute power corrupts absolutely and that immortality is not divine grace but condemnation. This is likely wilful irony as, of course, the game is about the player becoming the strongest character, so it is inferred that when the end is reached the player's power will corrupt them just as much. The nihilistic moral of the Dark Souls trilogy is that history is cyclical, as empires will rise and fall so will their emperors and so will the player. All of Bloodborne's endings see the player's character purged of power and/or agency. And even though the protagonist of Elden Ring will become the Elden Lord in one way or another at the end of the game, none of the world's they ultimately reside over is portrayed as particularly good.²

The story-reduced-to-lore narratives of FromSoftware Souls-games furthermore invariably introduce the player as in one way or another cursed, immortal beings that are at least in the case of Elden Ring outright shunned by their contemporary society. Whenever the player's character dies in Elden Ring they will return to a Site of Grace, where beautifully rendered golden waves are directing them towards the next target or milestone. Elden Ring is fascinating here because it displays its own limits to difficulty: whereas combat is still meticulously designed to be challenging other aspects are deliberately easy. Falling from heights usually incurs a temporary decrease of stamina but not a reduction to health. Similarly, to traverse the vast distances the player is given a magical horse early in the game, a horse that can be summoned from anywhere in the open (including battles) and that is able to do a fantastic double jump thus enabling the player to reach plateaus otherwise inaccessible. The vast emptiness of an Open World game could itself be a form of relentless challenge but Elden Ring by making use of the directional system of the Sites of Grace and the gift of a magical horse eschews that possibility. Even for the series known for its challenges what is and what isn’t designed to be difficult is a choice by the designers.

That most if not all Souls-like games are situated in an eldritch, post-apocalyptic world waiting for release is only logical if we accept — as the game makers seem to do — that these places constitute the ideal of the Hobbesian natural state. Pure anarchy where humans are reduced to predatory animals, everyone set against everyone, social norms and hierarchical order broken down. Only then, it seems, is it plausible that everything the player comes across is out to kill them, lethal force or brutal ignorance being the most rational options. Even a herd of goats will attack the player until all of their corpses lie beneath the players feet even when it would be their natural instinct and in their own interest to run away immediately. In a world that makes no effort to conceal that it wants to take and occupy it makes only sense to greet it in kind, to try and take as much as possible and carve out a path for oneself by hacking away at everything that moves.⁴

Indeed, the feeling of being constantly at the mercy of this hostile world is a feeling not at all unfamiliar for most people. In our jobs where we are trudging away at menial tasks that serve no one except — if we’re lucky — the shareholders; on our streets where we have to switch sidewalks lest we are molested — or worse — by strangers/policemen; on the social media platforms that are designed to incite us all; in our schools where we are cattled for indoctrination and learn how to subdue each other during the allotted breaks; in our bodies that are so normatively overloaded, they sometimes don't even feel as our own; in our families and homes — if we even have them —; people might be forgiven if they sometimes feel as though the only way to break free, to be relieved of this constant pressure is to lash out or to gain the upper hand on somebody else’s back. The notion of constant threat and oppressive power being enough to ask what all of this is for, if we will ever see a moment of triumph. It is this feeling games with excruciating difficulty are aiming at, to provide release and affirmation that, yes, you will triumph. But importantly, it is only through the existence of brutal resistance of the systems paired with the assured knowledge that one can finally overcome them that this virtual catharsis can be achieved. A game that provides you with godlike properties — say, a goat, that can wreak havoc everywhere without consequences — is nice but could never garner as much praise, as much catharsis than a game affirming the difficulty of existence and providing the means to still achieve victory.

If this is the central ploy of these difficult games and we accept the greatness of the design therein then it is hard to imagine someone living in our world as it currently is who would not enjoy them. However, every time a new FromSoftware game is released a debate is stirred again how they are inaccessible to many potential consumers. The developer has famously reiterated again and again that they have no intention of introducing difficulty settings so to give players themselves the option to play the game at their own terms. But when asked about the inclusion of accessibility options, like the many different settings seen in The Last of Us 2 that realistically only serve impaired people who are otherwise unable to enjoy them, FromSoftware's director, producer and general face of the company Hidetaka Miyazaki dodges the question. This adamant stance by the developer to stand by its difficulty unrelentingly is commonly seen as a mark of quality that supposedly proves how FromSoftware games are the pinnacle in difficult video games design. What is particularly odd about this refusal is that other Souls-like games made by other developers regularly give players this choice. Where the regular debate about difficulty and accessibility settings in FromSoftware games always has protective voices demanding that such settings be not introduced other Souls-like games not made by FromSoftware are never criticised for including them. The protectiveness the game's creators and a non-negligible part of their fans have towards the games' designs is irrational at best and turns toxic at worst.

Why is it important for a games company to exclude a vast amount of potential players to buy their game? Why is it important for fans of the series to exclude a non-negligible amount of potential players from consuming a game if that game holds personal value for them? Isn't it more sensible, more human to share with others something that has meaning to oneself? Unless, of course, the exclusivity is the meaning, an artefact to create an identity around. An identity built around the ability to play and the consequent mastery of games with difficult combat simulations. An identity that clings to the catharsis embedded in the gameplay that has to be protected lest the identity itself is attacked or diminished. The possibility of any reduction in difficulty, be it through outright cheating or the inclusion of difficulty and accessibility settings, would be a betrayal to the promise of catharsis and so a betrayal of that identity. Succeeding in an openly difficult game is proof that one can triumph and is able to succeed no matter the odds stacked against one. Even if it means trudging away at the same menial task for hours on end and the potential of literally dying countless times on the way. In our world, these games are the ultimate power fantasy because they don’t just give power in an exchange for the player’s time they bequeath it unto the worthy, refusing to give it to lesser players, to quitters. In life — so the logic goes — there is no difficulty slider, no setting to make it easier, only your own perseverance.

Of course, that logic is inherently flawed. Our world has its own differences in difficulty and environmental settings. For a person with certain disabilities it is more difficult to do everyday tasks, women all over the world earn less than their male colleagues doing the same job, people of colour experience overt and covert racism on a daily basis, colonised people cannot live and cultivate their own lands, people from the global south playing perpetual catch up to the global north aka their former colonial overlords. Disadvantages and privileges are pervasive in our world and though the hardships of many could be lessened by few loosening their grip on their privileges, there will never be a world where everyone starts with identical opportunities.

It follows, then, that the basis and the identity on which notoriously difficult games, chief among them FromSoftware's, are built on is a lie — a lie that tells us that we all start as a blank slate and that it is up to us to forge our own success. It is a lie that negates any inherent differences, that it is not normal to struggle where others easily succeed. A lie that reinforces that all that stands between us and our victory are our own weaknesses that must be overcome, that must be purged. A lie that tells us that it is on those who fail and give up if they are left behind and that those who persevere are born to lead, to dominate, to subjugate. A lie that sees us all as equals in a rivalistic world. It is the world of capitalism, the world of colonialism, of imperialism, misogyny, domination, white supremacy, the world of hegemony.

It is a lie in the real world as there is no god-given or natural law that governs that humans need to see themselves and their surroundings in a rivalistic manner. We are just as capable to help each other and to see each other as allies where we can celebrate others' victories as much as our own. Not because we benefit from their victories but because we know how it feels to achieve something and feel enjoyment simply by knowing that the other feels the emotion of achievement. Parents know this, they experience it almost every day whenever their children learn something new or are excited for something mundane. We can be and we mostly are compassionate, empathetic beings, even if we might not always know how to act like it. We are told the lie about our rivalistic world and are conditioned and socialised to accept it, to reinforce it every day because it is the most effective way to conserve our world of differences with predetermined winners and losers while simultaneously obfuscating it, placing the blame on those who are continually crushed by the oppressive difficulty of our world.

And it is a lie within the games themselves which portray the player as the only character with agency and purpose in the world. Enemies wait eternally in the same spot so they can spring to life once the player comes close to them. The world already being locked in purgatory waiting for a hero to put an end to it all. Furthermore, the player is killed dozens of times before they are able to kill the boss once — who unlike anyone else in the game's world will remain permanently dead after killing them but one time. It is a skinnerbox type video game design where the gameplay goal is repeating the same task again and again to become as skilled as possible. Unlike obscure solutions in puzzle games that are at the best of times designed to foster cognitive flexibility the flexibility fostered by FromSoftware's is at the best of times that of reacting correctly as fast as possible — like a pigeon reacting to stimuli. As Reid McCarter wrote in his essay on Sekiro: the game is "about a beleaguered swordsman who can’t die until, with a lot of repeated practice, he perfectly understands how to do what his world asks of him." The player as an automaton, the machinisation of the ghost.

A playthrough of Elden Ring includes a boss fight against Godfrey who is, we get to know if we put in the required work, just like the player a Tarnished on the quest to become Elden Lord.⁵ As all bosses in Souls-games are designed so as to be nigh impossible to achieve victory in the first attempts Godfrey wins by necessity many times against the player. In all of these parallel universes, so the world of Elden Ring would have us believe, Godfrey would in all likelihood become the eponymous Elden Lord again. However, the player by relentlessly hitting their virtual head against Godfrey will rewrite history by using force to make possible an unlikely reality in which it is the player, not Godfrey, ascending to godhood. The player presented as author, objectifying the enemy, trapped in a world that objectifies the player in turn.

What is lost in the discussion of difficulty and accessibility in Souls-games is the cultural basis on which the games themselves stand on. No setting or slider in the world will remedy this. Games that focus their gameplay mechanics on providing crushingly difficult combat by necessity focus their games on reproducing the crushing realities of our world based on exploitation and domination. One needs not look any further than how they perform the lie of everyone starting out as equals by providing a character builder that — depending on the resources of the game creators —  is more or less exhaustive (and time and time again fails Black people) to then prove that only through failure and pain, by playing to the rules of this oppressive regime will they prevail. They reinforce that people with disabilities or differing sensibilities are just as superfluous to this world as are acts of solidarity and ally-ship. The cost of the catharsis from our imperialist, capitalist and colonialist world Souls games seemingly provide is the affirmation of our world as the only possible one, the negation of any alternative. Importantly, there is a distinction to be made between escapism and affirmation. Because both can provide emotional catharsis, can momentarily purify and exorcise that which pains us so we get up and live another day. But if escapism is the temporary escape from a prison, as some like JRR Tolkien have argued then clearly affirmation must be the voluntary imprisonment of the self. The self-flagellation of the individual trying to re-affirm the rules of society. Souls-games do not provide mere escapism, they provide catharsis by affirmation. In a cynical twist to the famous saying by Friedrich Nietzsche: if you replay the nightmare often enough you will believe in the dream and the hollow promises that lie within.

Indeed, a thorough examination of Souls games could analyse them as gamified forms of (self-) discipline as formulated by Foucault. By both describing the world as this hopeless place and then pairing this nihilism with gameplay mechanics that punish the player for not acting accordingly with the world's premise the neoliberal mindset of a world without alternatives is exemplified. It does not matter how contradictory, un-self-explanatory or simply cruel any of it is, if you fail you failed because you acted irrationally against a system that is just objective fact. No other mechanic makes this more apparent than their invasion system. By enabling others to invade people's otherwise singleplayer experiences with the sole objective that they should kill one's own player character, the disciplining of the self to be obedient to the overpowering system is reinforced. It does not matter whether one wins against these aggressors all that matters is that the systems of oppression, of resistances against the individual are reinforced. Its a literal and wilful invasion of the private by agents of the public. Moreover, if these Foucaultian systems of discipline and punishment in these games were then interpreted through Mark Fisher's concept of capitalist realism the games would quickly reveal themselves as the neoliberal propaganda that they are. To be unapologetic, FromSoftware's Souls games are the pinnacle of neoliberal ideology and culture production and are only enjoyable perhaps even thinkable in our globalised and financialised 21st century with all its contradictions and shortcomings. If there is a single reason why these games are as successful as they are it's because they are the gamification of (living under) neoliberalism par excellence.

However, such a critical view condemning all games with extreme challenges would be neither fair nor enlightening. The truth is that the experience gamified in Souls-games is often enough cited by marginalised people as a way to grapple with the hardships in their lifes. Especially transfeminine fans of Souls-games liken the struggle in them to both coming to terms with transness and their eventual transition. On the other hand, the same is often said about other games, other difficult games, as well — when these are far more open, far more honest in what the hardship is supposed to represent. From the (admittedly heteronormative) love letter embedded in Super Meat Boy to the coming-to-terms with mental health issues and transness in Celeste there are numerous examples of difficult games comparable to the difficulty of FromSoftware's Souls-games that view the challenge as something to be overcome — not because it is our right but because we can despite the sheer impossibility of it.

Celeste is indeed a great game for comparison as the unforgiving challenge of it is just as baked into the story and world as it is in FromSoftware games. But instead of focussing on the despair of it all Maddy Thorson chose the format of a very difficult platformer as a way to tell a story of empowerment. In the 2018 2D platformer the player is controlling the protagonist in her quest to reach the summit of a mountain, the eponymous Celeste. The game does not want to transport the message that the world is a cruel, anarchic free-for-all where only the strongest reach the end. Instead, in a more or less on-the-nose kind of way it teaches the player that only by working through internalised ideas of (un-)worth and expectation will we be able to overcome the challenge. By being squarely about the main character Madeline coming to terms with her own anxiety and mental health issues it eschews the notion of everyone starting out as equals. This is reflected in the very premise of the game: Madeline's reason to climb Celeste mountain is an intrinsic rather than an extrinsic motivation. She tries to prove to herself that she can do it, not because riches or power await her there. The game invites the player to engage with the protagonist not as an empty shell but as a full person and by so doing invites the player to reflect on their own hardships. While Celeste is focused on mental health similar marriages of gameplay mechanics and story are entirely possible concerning other issues.

Extreme challenges are a mechanic not a genre. If you are intent on challenging your players as brutally as possible it is important to be unambiguous that the story you are telling is about overcoming hardships not simply living through them. That these hardships are unique to and just as unique as the individual trying to overcome them. That we all have different forms and types of challenges, some of them very visible, most of them completely invisible. That it is neither good nor bad to fail or triumph but that every one of us has the strength and courage in themselves to overcome whatever struggle it is we are fighting with. That when we reach the summit one day what awaits us is a world of more opportunities (and new challenges) not a place where we can rest and wait for our eventual and necessary demise. For these are the stories that foster hope in us that tomorrow might be a better day and that we can do this. Because we can.

It is equally important to recognise that when a video game is adamantly ambiguous as to its story's core⁶ and unwavering in its ignorant stance on inclusivity it might quite likely be because the game does not want to foster hope but simply relish in despair. Reinforce and reproduce instead of teaching patience as a tool for overcoming. There is no moral argument here. The existence and enjoyment of FromSoftware's Souls-games is not morally reprehensible just as it isn't a badge of normative excellence. If people can find an analogue between their own life's hardships and overcoming excruciatingly difficult challenges in a video game so as to be able to look back and say: "I did this, I got here. And I got here by the strength I have in myself and the support system I have built around myself". Who can claim these works of art should not exist? There is a myriad of reasons why people would enjoy these game mechanics, or enjoy any kind of media. Beating every single boss in a FromSoftware or any other Souls-like game is a personal achievement, of course. Just as it is an achievement to play through Tetris, winning in the highest difficulty of a strategy game, completing every New York Times crosswords for a year, hiking across Europe, graduating from any kind of school, raising a child, caring for a loved one, going to work every day, getting out of bed. Or climbing that mountain.

What is important, though, is to interrogate why we do and enjoy the things we do. If we play these kinds of games because we feel we have to because they reflect onto us how the world around us already is then maybe what we actually try to accomplish is to verify the validity of it all. Still beholden to the idea that not everyone deserves to see a good ending for themselves — not seeing the harsh world as something to be overcome but something to be embraced. It is important to not herald the games that reproduce the harshness of our world as the best kind of games simply because they do so in the most obvious and visceral way, lest we rob ourselves of the opportunity to understand how we can make this world a better place. A better place for those struggling the hardest under our current systems just as much as for ourselves, our neighbours and everyone, really. Video games are meant to challenge us not to affirm the slanted believes we already hold against our better judgement.

There is a ray of hope for FromSoftware's genre of difficult games: Every FromSoftware game that is colloquially subsumed under the Souls-banner⁷ features a form of multi-player messaging system with which players can leave small messages asynchronously to other players. Most times, this messaging system is used to convey hints and warnings for others so they can be prepared for a surprise attack or find the solution to an obscure battle/puzzle. Other times it is used to put little jokes for other struggling players, knowing they will smile, briefly easing the burden.⁸ The success of Demon’s Souls and its successors must be attributed to this online feature just as much as to its reliance on combat difficulty — maybe even more so.

When, one day, we find ourselves in a world where cooperation and empathetic helpfulness is seen as the norm and the notion that everyone is a rival in a free-for-all game is viewed as entirely absurd maybe then we find that what remains of the difficult games of today is the mechanic of helping each other in tough situations.

fin

1. This piece uses the term "Souls-game" as a shorthand to describe all of Miyazaki's FromSoftware games and sometimes to refer to other games made by other studies that are styled very much after FromSoftware's Souls-games. It is neither meant nor used as a genre descriptor for genre definitions are a fool's endeavour. ↩︎
2. Sekiro is a curious narrative deviation from the other Souls games. Whereas the protagonist of Dark Souls, Bloodborne or Elden Ring are empty canvasses, available for the player to paint and inject meaning into as much or little as they want to, the protagonist of Sekiro is a character with a defined past and history. Much like other games in Sekiro the player is following and guiding the (male-coded) protagonist along his fated story. However, it is the protagonist's place in the game world, his personal, individual, unique history to society and the people in it that drives the story forward, the game itself bearing the name of its hero. In Sengoku-era Japan, a time of civil war and social upheaval not unlike the 30 years war in Europe but five times as long, Sekiro is tasked to protect an entrusted ward, a job the player sees him failing twice just in the prologue. For him — he himself but a lowly orphan and mercenary — the well-being and continued survival is literally his life's work, his own survival inextricably linked to that of his noble ward.³ Sekiro makes the class struggle of Sengoku-era Japan — inherent to the game's narrative — physical by placing named nobles at the top of the highest mountains or buildings, places monks in a temple situated on a cliff well below the castle but still on high, and a frenzied Wild Ape — a crude dehumanisation of those on the lowest end of society's hierarchical system, with the symbol of his oppression (a sword) still protruding from his back — at the lowest point of the game's accessible world. Even when killed, another notch on the shinobi's post on his way to the end, the ape returns, never able to get the deserved rest, just as undyingly bound to the fate and systems of the world as Sekiro himself. Should the player finally guide the protagonist to one of the game's three endings they will find that the hero can but repeat what others have already done in the game's world long before him. In the world of FromSoftware's Souls-games everything is cyclical. Resistance is, even for the one destined to repeat it, futile in the end. ↩︎
3. Curiously, Sekiro's ward is often referred to as the Divine Heir. Seeing how the first emperor of Japan is supposed to directly descend from godhood it is clear that Sekiro's ward is likened to be the heir to the emperorship. Thus it must be understood that he is at the top of nobility. ↩︎
4. The only being actively running away from the player after sensing their danger in Elden Ring is a dung beetle (it is a lizard with a crystal on its back in the Dark Souls trilogy) — who drops especially precious loot if the player should manage to destroy it before it can escape. ↩︎
5. Which in his case means re-becoming it, for Godfrey used to be the Elden Lord until he was deemed useless and lost his grace in the process. ↩︎
6. FromSoftware has been praised for their use of indirect storytelling informing players by way of environmental clues and using item descriptions to further the narrative. While the company has to be commended for trying to tell stories in a specific video game way (as opposed to replicating the storytelling style of movies so many AAA video games tend to do) the resulting ambiguity of their narratives serve just as much their neoliberal conception of the world as their challenging gameplay does. Their games' refusal to be entirely understandable, sometimes going so far as to be virtually nonsensical or contradictory, is just another way to resist the player. So that when the player has finally given up mastering the games' challenging systems for one day they can still mentally engage with the incomprehensible plot and lore of them long after the controller has been put away. It is the Lost-ification of video games, colonising the player's time even when nothing is rendered. ↩︎
7. When Sekiro was released it didn't have this system although it has been patched in since. ↩︎
8. It is also chock full of juvenile "jokes". But then again, trolling and other anti-social behaviour are very real phenomena that can be widely observed and are nothing specific to Souls-games. ↩︎