‘Bloodborne,’ ‘Dark Souls,’ & The Unbearable Smugness of Games Culture
I tried to like Dark Souls and Bloodborne. I really did. If you actively enjoy these games, that is awesome. It’s just not for me. By all accounts, I should’ve liked it. I enjoy fantasy games, especially those that have—dare I say it—a darker twist. I like being challenged, and I like solving puzzles within games. That’s the fun of it for me.
That was the problem, though—these games (Dark Souls and Bloodborne, specifically) were not fun for me. In order to enjoy these games, in my experience, there are certain privileges that are necessary: time, money, and the dedication to the self-image as a gamer. The entirety of gaming as hobby, lifestyle, or whatever, requires these privileges. But in all my experiences as a gamer, these have not manifested so strongly as in the aforementioned games.
First, I’ll talk about the privilege of time.
You are thrown into the middle of the action of the story without any concrete idea about what is going on in the larger picture. It is easy to pick up the controls and hack away at enemies, but it was unclear to me as the player why any of what I was doing mattered in the larger narrative. Part of this apathy stemmed from the rate at which my character died. I know that this is a huge part of the game, and I know that “You Will Die” is the very edgy tagline of the Dark Souls series. It was more how the character dies rather than the frequency. The absolute loss of all the progress I made over the course of one or two hours would be completely undone by one lucky scythe to the face of my character.
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