Honors College Art & Science of Emotions Fall 2017 (12:00 p.m.) The Burn Journal | Page 13

velopers is its own kind of revenge, a way of “activating the brain’s reward circuitry,” further incentiv-
ized by the reward of further progression (Chester). The other added hate and anger incentivizes the
positive emotions as well, as they provide respite from the negative emotions.
In its beginning, Dark Souls introduces itself as a game of choices. The player gets to design
their character, pick what skills they want to emphasize, arm themselves with their choice of weapon,
then set out completing the game in any way they desire. This feeling of choice, though massive, is just
that, a feeling. Progression through the game is little more than hacking and slashing one’s way to the
area’s boss while dying repeatedly, kill the unfair and overpowered boss while dying repeatedly, then
move on to the next area and repeat the cycle. There is very little, if any variation to that formu-
la. Enemies still need to be dealt with at close range and combat is very high stakes and dodge-based,
regardless of the chosen class. There really is nothing special about Dark Souls that has not yet been
done before, and yet From Software found a way to make the game eligible for most “Best Game of All
Time” lists by driving the player towards the most favorable outcome, story advancement. In this way,
From Software speaks to the futility of anger and fear; those emotions drive people to act irrationally, to
do things they might not do otherwise. No one wants to be experiencing constant anger and hatred,
yet Dark Souls persuades people to do just that. The Dark Souls take on emotion sounds like that of the
Stoics, that “the only good is virtue and that the only evil is vice,” that unless a situation explicitly re-
quires an emotional response, there should not be one (Wagoner). If one were to adhere to something
closer to the Stoic view of emotion, then they would not have played so much of the game and been sub-
jected to so much of the emotional torture.
Dark Souls manages to leverage the natural human response to hate and anger to drive the player
to complete the developer’s quest despite a world literally designed to get the player to quit. The me-
chanics, the gameplay, every single aspect of the game comes together to create an environment that is
hostile both physically to the player’s character and emotionally to the player. The game uses this envi-
ronment to preach a lack of emotional response unless when necessary, lest they become overwhelmed
and driven crazy like the Hollowed. In this Dark Souls claims that every human being in the real world
is cursed, doomed to irrationality at the hands of anger and hatred. This curse carries various similarities
to the “Pac-Man Fever” of the 1980’s, where people stood stuck at arcade machines, mindlessly feeding
quarters into them. The difficulty of old arcade games kept people coming back for more, turning video
games from a cult classic to a mainstream phenomenon. These classics are still must-plays for many
people, and the difficulty of the games keep them relevant. They might not make games like they used
to, but Dark Souls proves that new games can be just as classic as the old ones.
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