Honors College Art & Science of Emotions Fall 2017 (12:00 p.m.) The Burn Journal | Page 11

The Video Game We Love to Hate
Author: Nicholas Musienko
Children of the 1980’s grew up in the soft glow of a CRT screen. Their hands were glued to
joysticks and gamepads. The piles of quarters weighing down coat pockets were the fare to a dungeon-
crawling adventure or a galaxy-defending escapade. Arcade games like Gauntlet and Space In-
vaders provided an outlet for eager gamers everywhere, providing an escape from reality. Video games
soon invaded every facet of popular culture – soon people were catching “Pac-Man Fever” and pro-
claiming it everywhere they could, be it radio, television, or even simply their own social circles. Soon
video games evolved into the video games we know today, and the old arcade games are still treasured
today, particularly for their difficulty. Game developers designed arcade games to eat quarters, requir-
ing multiple tries to make it any real distance into the game. Home console games were designed for
the rental market; more difficult games required more time to complete them, and thus people were
more susceptible to renting them for longer. Over the years, as arcades and Blockbusters became obso-
lete, so did the necessity for making difficult games, and so newer games were much easier than their
predecessors. One new game, Dark Souls, abandons this trend, and managed to build its reputation on
its exceptionally hard gameplay. Evoking the arcade games of yesterday in its difficulty, Dark
Souls tells the story of a “Chosen Undead,” tasked with a pilgrimage to reignite the First Flame, extin-
guished at the end of the Age of Fire. At every point in its journey, Dark Souls was painstakingly craft-
ed to be massively infuriating. As such, anger plays a massive role in the narrative of the game, and in
the game design itself. From Software uses this emotional state generated in the player to drive them to
complete a depressing and bleak game, demonstrating the futility of emotions, of anger and hate, feed-
ing into a cycle of never-ending madness.
One of the key elements of the game is that of humanity itself. Humans in the Dark
Souls universe are either doomed to die a miserable death or they find themselves cursed, bearers of the
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