Beyond Nostalgia: Video Games in Your 30s
What's the deal with Dark Souls?
I finally beat Dark Souls this month. This was two years in the making and I am very happy about this!
Dark Souls is the famous game in which “YOU DIED” shows up on the screen every 17 seconds as your under-skilled character takes on a monster 38 times its size.
It is one of those games that is not at all fun, until it is.
I became intrigued by it in 2022 when Elden Ring came out. I had learned that players waited 6 years for Elden Ring, after playing through Dark Souls 1, 2, and 3. The wait was not in vain: it’s a masterpiece.
Suddenly, I was in rooms filled with very intense energies, as people felt the embodied satisfaction of dying a million times, and then Doing the Hard Thing of skillfully moving with just the right technique to jiu-jitsu a foe way out of their league.
Dark Souls is important. Many people had spoken about how it has helped them through hardship. These were people in their 30s and 40s. It seemed that there are some real wavelengths from the trials of the world that the Dark Souls series is particularly great at metabolizing.
I was told that I could play Elden Ring, but if I wanted the OG experience, I should play Dark Souls Remastered.
Why should I play Dark Souls? “Because this is a perfect game.”
I’ll be honest — I gave up pretty quickly. And then I gave up again for two years. I was told that one of the keys to staying in the game is sinking some time into killing a lot of weaker enemies early on, over and over, to increase your health bar. This way, you have enough health per attempt to learn how the larger enemies move before dying immediately, and you can actually start beating bosses and progress through the game.
Even after doing this and beating my first boss, I still reached a seemingly-insurmountable battle (I think walking to the second boss) by about hour 15.
Years later, I wanted to be in that arena again. Its set of dark feelings tied to a massive community felt like something I wanted to be in touch with. Maybe I had collected enough of those trials from the world that I wanted Dark Souls to help me metabolize.
The thing I did not realize until I beat Dark Souls was how nice it is to be in a community of people who had beaten Dark Souls. People talk about the bosses by their names, and have similar emotionally charged memories about reminiscing on the battle.
It also unlocks for you the entire genre of “Souls-like games” — many of which are very fun. Dark Souls but now you are Pinnoccio. Dark Souls but now you are a crab.
On the second try, I was brazen about asking for more help. I was fortunate enough to have my Magic Guide nearby who had beaten the game several times already, and knew its strange secrets. I had no idea at the time that nobody actually beats this game without a guide. When you originally bought it in 2011, it came with a guide. You are supposed to use it. The game is large and there are no markers for where you are supposed to go.
I asked for help not because I felt guiltless or because of any practical desire not to spend too much time on it — rather I was nervous that if I put it down again, I may live my entire life never beating it.
And then I would have lived an entire life never having beaten Dark Souls.
And then I beat it and I had a lot of fun!
I had never felt any need to make a defense of video games. They are fun. If you have the time and the interest, as long as you are not neglecting your life and responsibilities, why not?
Dark Souls is probably the first video game I had ever beaten as an adult (apart from the puzzle games Portal 2 and Superliminal — which are fantastic). It was the first game that I had beaten that seemed like it had a certain kinds of very intense artistic weight and in its gameplay “save the world” stakes. I had actually set a goal to play an “adult” video game after becoming fascinated by The Witcher III.
Secretly, I did worry about become “obsessed” as I had for Sonic Adventure 2 Battle and Grand Theft Auto in my youth. But as Xbox and PlayStation kept releasing fancier systems, I felt like I was missing out on something.
Roger Ebert has an essay in which he talks about video games in principle never being able to be art — or at least not in the lifetime of any gamer currently living.
I not only disagree — I am confident it has already happened many times.
If I were interested in writing a defense of gaming, then this would be the collection of reasons we have so far:
Video games can be art
Video games can metabolize confusing hardships
Playing a video game that is important to others can teach you real empathy through connection with what other lifestuff other people are metabolizing
Video games can let you make mistakes, over and over, without hurting anybody, and can let you feel accomplishment
I don’t think that Dark Souls is the only game with special properties — in fact, I think it’s particularly well suited as both an escape and a training for people who have pressures to need to perform perfectly in certain ways.
I am currently cataloguing other games and other properties they may have!