Through the philosophies of Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, and François Laruelle, this paper deconstructs the metaphysics of the sun that undergirds the worlds of the three Dark Souls games developed by FromSoftware, while also identifying the internal critique of this metaphysics that the Dark Souls games successively elaborate. Indeed, as inversions of the western fantasy model, the three Dark Souls games also labour to invert western philosophy, striking at the heart of Platonic idealism and its variations throughout history.

FromSoftware’s Dark Souls games (2011, 2014, 2016) and their spiritual successor, Bloodborne (2015), have creatively, and often subversively, utilized insectoid figures as key elements in their worlds, disrupting normative hierarchies of meaning and being throughout the fictional realms of Lordran, Drangleic, Yharnam, and Lothric. Even more obvious is the work undertaken in Team Cherry’s Hollow Knight (2017), an acclaimed “soulslike/metroidvania” that takes place in an entirely subterranean world populated by insects. In games intimately concerned with the status of “humanity,” insects (...) serve as both potent metaphors and actual agents of transformation, presenting us with an alterity that goes beyond the dialectic of same and other, identity and difference, to a real of generic and finite particularity. (shrink)

What is the role of play at the end of the world? As reports on the climate crisis become increasingly dire, we must ask ourselves what good it is to talk about games, and particularly those games that operate in a fantastic register. The question inevitably arises: why continue to play at all when the world is on fire around us? Indeed, as Emily Rose recently remarked in an article on RE:BIND, not only is the planet on the brink of (...) collapse, but the game industry, as it currently operates, is complicit in many of the unsustainable human practices that have led us to this point. The “abstract theatre of leisure-crafting,” as Rose phrases it, is not innocent. So, then, why play? This study takes up these urgent questions through close readings of developer FromSoftware’s critically acclaimed Souls series of video games: Dark Souls (2011), Dark Souls II (2014), and Dark Souls III (2016). In these games, the end of the world drives each narrative, but is also the thematic support for the basic gameplay loop that organizes players’ traversals of each gameworld. It is the contention of this paper that the Souls trilogy mounts a radical critique of political, epistemological, and ontological regimes that desperately cling to the status quo, proposing in their stead a myriad of new forms of existence that might be able to thrive in and through the apocalypse. These alternatives are born of affinities and agencies entirely other to, and often directly opposed to, the powers that have led the present world to its doom, and through play, the Souls games invite their players to consider such ‘minor literatures’ as legitimate alternatives to that which claims to be the only legitimate source of authority. In the opening cinematic to Dark Souls, we are told that “the flames will fade, and only dark will remain,” but it is precisely in this darkness that a fecund plurality of potentialities is to be found. (shrink)

In developer FromSoftware’s acclaimed Dark Souls trilogy (2011, 2014, 2016), the concept of “hollowing” occupies a central position in the broader thematic landscape of the games. Concerned with the fates of cursed undead in worlds on the brink of collapse, the Dark Souls games present hollowing—a violent, withering insanity—as the doom of all undead who fail to endure their brutal conditions. More than a mere fantasy trope, however, hollowing functions in each game as both a narrative and a mechanical instrument, (...) mobilizing the player-character to participate in the precisely designed ludonarrative circuits that the developers have devised. This study contends that it is this particular gameplay structure that reinforces an evolving theorization on FromSoftware’s part (if tacit) as to what constitutes human being. (shrink)

In his Phenomenology of Perception (2012), Maurice Merleau-Ponty describes bodily existence through the concept of “motricity” (100). The body exists for itself as a “dynamic” posture, a “situational spatiality,” a suite of possibilities that is always already disclosed as the “third term” in the perspectival structure of the world (102, original emphasis). If we apply this concept of the body to the animated bodies we see in contemporary video games—specifically, the bodies of player-characters—we discover video games to be uniquely recursive (...) systems that thematize motricity as a matter of game design. If the body is our “means of insertion” into our “surroundings” and, therefore, the concrete means of disclosure of the world in which we live (106), then the design of animated bodies sees this “means” made explicit as an instrument of play. The “motor project” (113) of the game itself feeds back into the “strange signifying machine” that is my body (114), disclosing the “several ways for the body to be a body” and thus the “several ways for consciousness to be consciousness” (125)—which is to say, the several ways in which I find myself involved in the “movement of existence” (139). To this end, this paper analyzes the character animation (and illustration) in Naughty Dog’s acclaimed The Last of Us (2013), and its prequel graphic novel, The Last of Us: American Dreams (2013), paying special attention to the “original intentionality” of motricity as it is presented in both works, the originary reference that “haunt[s]” every interpretation of the world of The Last of Us that we might offer (139, 140). (shrink)

The incredibly popular Souls games developed by FromSoftware (and their imitators, colloquially referred to as Souls-like games) have followed a fascinating design trajectory since the release of the first game in the franchise, Demon’s Souls, in 2009. In many fantasy roleplaying games, the in-game capacity of the player-character is signified by a ‘level,’ which is typically increased through the acquisition of experience (‘xp’) during gameplay. The more the player plays, the more experience she gains, which increases the player’s level, and (...) thus makes her more powerful in the game-world. This is a common logic of progression, but in such a system the particularities of different play styles, abilities, and tactics are subsumed under an abstract metric of power, hiding the nuances of actual play from view. The Souls games, however, have steadily innovated upon this logic, changing how we play them and so requiring us in turn to think about the ways we navigate game-worlds—and perhaps even our own, by extension. This paper argues that this design trajectory can be schematized as a movement from power to skill, a shifting of player agency from an abstract or ideal domain to a concrete and material one. (shrink)

Using Maurice Merleau-Ponty's concept of "motricity" and Alva Noë's concept of "organization," this paper offers a phenomenological and enactive approach to tabletop roleplaying games (ttrpgs) as a form of poiesis, making---both auto-poetic, as defined by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, and sym-poietic, as defined by Donna Haraway. This self-making and making-with is not understood in the sense of either self-possession or self-realization, but as a mode of what Stefano Harney and Fred Moten call "fugitive planning," a planning with the potential (...) for direct action at the cosmic scale. This cosmic poetics is a poetics that rejects "the assignation of traits," as Legacy Russell beckons us to do, delighting in the glitched becomings of "generic difference." Bringing this theoretical constellation to ground, this paper examines select examples from the recent boom in independent "lyric" games, situating them in their experimental aesthetic context in order to derive a praxis for the elaboration of the poetics here described. (shrink)

Game development studio FromSoftware's work over the last thirteen years has been much concerned with kingship and rule—what it means to be a lord, and what happens to the land when lordship fails. Demon's Souls (2009), the Dark Souls trilogy (2011, 2014, 2016), Bloodborne (2015), Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice (2019), and now, Elden Ring (2022), each ask these questions in their own way, and each provide distinctly varied answers. But across all of these games—and especially across the 'un-trilogy' of Demon's (...) Souls, Bloodborne, and Elden Ring—the question of the sovereign is always tied to the question of the beast: that which rules over society and that which cannot live within it. This paper uses the discourse of the political animal inaugurated by Aristotle, and taken up by subsequent philosophers Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Derrida, to illuminate the work of deconstruction that FromSoftware's games perform. Through the constant shifting between the figures of the beast and the sovereign, and the torsion and ultimate destruction of this dialectical opposition, FromSoftware seeks to inaugurate a new ethico-political regime, one wherein the cyclical, consumptive violence of power is set aside in favour of a multiplicity of lines of flight beyond. (shrink)

Contra the capture of the radical impulse by the homogenizing marketing label ‘hopepunk’, this panel conceives of punk instead as ‘the lived politics of the negative’ (Muñoz, 2013). From this position, tabletop game play and design become potent refusals of the co-opting forces of the Global North, and concrete means for imagining and indeed realizing an outside and an afterward to the present crises shaping the conditions of our planetary existence. This panel mounts a challenge to colonial capitalist hegemony through (...) the words and practices of four tabletop game designers, blending craft, theory, and experience to articulate a pluralistic and ethical vision of a punk at home and flourishing in the ruins of this crumbling world. (shrink)

In Elden Ring, the Shabriri Grape serves as a focal point for the metaphysical speculation that has become distinctive of the studio's oeuvre under the tenure of game director and now company president Hidetaka Miyazaki. As the player-character blindly pulls on the threads of Queen Marika's Golden Order, woven as they are throughout the Lands Between, they find themselves inducted into a metaphysical investigation. Elden Ring toys with questions of ontology and subjectivity that challenge the idealist branch of the Western (...) philosophical canon, and in so doing introduces a ludic torsion that requires its players to come to terms with notions of the real and its organization that go back to the beginning of recorded critical inquiry. Elden Ring, redoubling the stylistics of its forebears, is distinctly hermetic in its narrative construction, and consequently it requires of its players a hermeneutic sensibility, a willingness to engage in the interpretation of the textual traces scattered throughout its gameworld, traces such as those which accompany the Shabriri Grape. To follow the guidance of this "yellowing, oozing eyeball," to set off in pursuit of the "distant light" it reveals, the player-character must go to the limits of their knowledge, indeed to the very limit of knowledge as such, to the original scission or abyss from which the world of Elden Ring was born. (shrink)

After seven years of development, the final act of Cardboard Computer's Kentucky Route Zero was released in January of 2020 to widespread acclaim. Hailed by the games scholar and critic Trever Strunk as a "novelistic accomplishment," Kentucky Route Zero has consistently surprised and delighted players with its clever writing, subtly realized characters, and moody set design, while also challenging these players by continually innovating upon both its gamic and literary conventions across its five acts and five interludes. Inasmuch as Kentucky (...) Route Zero might be described as "novelistic," however, the game remains a game, requiring players and readers alike to reconsider what such descriptors as "novelistic" might mean within the interactive space of digital games. To this end, the proposed paper examines the literariness of Kentucky Route Zero, presenting a preliminary framework for more in-depth studies of the game as a literary work. (shrink)

Since Demon's Souls (2009), game development studio FromSoftware has demonstrated a concern with subjectivity---a concern that is expressed materially through their mechanical interrogation of the ludic subjectivity that emerges in video game narratives. From game to game, FromSoftware has steadily dismantled the essential or metaphysical subject of play, substituting it with an ever more complex and entangled subject that finds itself embroiled in and compromised by the myths and plots that drive each game's overarching story. By nesting moment-to-moment gameplay loops (...) within the broader narrative metastructures of these games, chaining these loops together into thematic systems, FromSoftware has worked to challenge conventions of roleplaying game protagonaity, supporting their narrative aims at the tactile level of interaction. Building on prior empirical research focused on Demon's Souls (2009), Dark Souls (2011), Dark Souls II (2014), Bloodborne (2015), Dark Souls III (2016), and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice (2019), this paper brings FromSoftware's latest title, Elden Ring (2022), into the discussion, undertaking a close reading of the mechanics and items that make this new game distinctive, and which continue the design trajectory of the preceding titles, a trajectory that now spans nearly a decade and a half of game development. (shrink)

This paper responds to the call "For Planetary Governance" written by Benjamin Bratton and issued by The Terraforming and Strelka Mag. Through a hermeneutics of the nuclear facilitated by Martin Heidegger, Jean Baudrillard, and Patrick Jagoda, it examines the atomic bomb as the final symbol of a nationalist, metaphysical age of spirit, and the initial structure of a postnational, antimetaphysical age of control. Progressing from Baudrillard's nihilism through Jagoda's ludology, this paper then deploys David Graeber's critique of bureaucracy to interpret (...) the generalization of control in the intermediate international age, a generalization that prevents passage to the ethical planetary governance Bratton solicits. Finally, Jagoda's theory of experimental games is placed into conversation with Legacy Russell's glitch feminism and Fred Moten and Stefano Harney's critique of governance in an attempt articulate a combinatorial science of play and planning suited to a properly antimetaphysical and ethical planetarity. (shrink)

What might university instructors learn of pedagogy when their work is approached from the perspective of production? More specifically, how might the university classroom be transformed when instructors actively shift their focus as educators away from pedagogy and toward production? Drawing on two academic years of hands on video game production work with students in their second, third, and fourth years at Trinity Western University, and informed by Jacques Rancière's critical project first articulated in The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1987), and more (...) recently elaborated upon in the The Emancipated Spectator (2008), this paper argues that an educational paradigm of 'production,' counterposed to an educational paradigm that we can loosely and imprecisely describe as traditional 'pedagogy,' makes possible a transformation of the university classroom from a domain of stultifying explication into a domain of emancipatory exploration. With further theoretical support from Michel de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life (1984), and Stefano Harney and Fred Moten's The Undercommmons (2013), this paper proposes tactics whereby teachers might short circuit the professionalization of academic instruction and the commodification and alienation of its students, so fostering emancipatory and egalitarian learning environments that encourage students to take hold of the means of production themselves. (shrink)

To borrow from Katherine Isbister, a games researcher and educator, one of my primary concerns when it comes to the study and design of games is "how games move us." Isbister's invocation of "movement" has a double meaning---that is, to be moved as both an emotional and an embodied experience. Indeed, in chapter three of her book, "Bodies at Play," Isbister explores precisely this intersection between feeling and the body. Following Isbister, this talk examines both games in developer Naughty Dog's (...) post-apocalyptic oeuvre: The Last of Us (2013) and The Last of Us Part II (2020). It is specifically interested in the way in which Naughty Dog subtly attempts to move the player through the extrinsic motivator of PlayStation trophies, and the way this movement has evolved in the seven years between releases. It is my contention that the marked difference in emphasis in trophy design between parts one and two of The Last of Us indicates a change in ethos on Naughty Dog's part that brings (at least some of) the ludic aspects of the sequel in line with the themes that it tackles. (shrink)

This paper uses Quentin Meillassoux's After Finitude to re-read Martin Heidegger's Being and Time, Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness, and Jacques Derrida's Voice and Phenomenon, with an eye toward releasing the subject from its correlationist, anthropocentric basis in traditional readings of Heidegger's dasein. By beginning with Meillassoux, and with the help of Gilbert Simondon, this study resituates the possibility of the subject in being, as one possible movement of being, rather than as a distinct power over and against being.

“Economy,” the opening chapter of Thoreau’s Walden, is a lengthy exploration of the conditions of existence of the New England settler. Before encountering his famous wish to “live deliberately” (83), readers of Walden are confronted with Thoreau’s sardonic treatment of the so-called “serfs” of Concord, Massachusetts, and immersed in his economic theorizing (7). For one whose thought has influenced the likes of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., Thoreau’s repudiation of his community might come across as aloof and asocial, (...) a privileged detachment from the concerns of ‘common’ or ‘everyday’ life. This paper argues, however, that far from being a disavowal of sociality, Thoreau’s economic theory operates within a different field of the social, one with roots in the oikonomia or “household management” of Aristotle’s Politics, an economy intimately concerned with care and provision. While modern political economy emphasizes entitlement and contract—which is to say, property—the economy that Thoreau depicts in Walden is one of the home, a shared practice of material space. By engaging with the discourse of his contemporaries and his culture, Thoreau is able to provide his readers with a model for resistance that does not reproduce the conditions he seeks to dismantle. (shrink)

This study of Avery Alder and Benjamin Rosenbaum's Belonging Outside Belonging system for tabletop roleplaying games (ttrpgs) follows in Jacques Rancière's project of ignorance, as set out in The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1987) and as continued in The Emancipated Spectator (2008). With Rancière's politics as a framework, this study works backward from Ian Bogost's Persuasive Games (2007) to his Unit Operations (2006), and then to Alain Badiou's Manifesto for Philosophy (1989), in order to recover the radical politics undergirding Bogost's distinct method (...) of game criticism. Badiou's Manifesto, going beyond Bogost's primary philosophical source, Badiou's Being and Event (1988), clarifies the political stakes of Badiou's ontology, allowing us to return to the present with a more robust politics of procedurality motivating our critical work. From here, Alder and Rosenbaum's Dream Askew / Dream Apart (2018) furnishes us with a provocative model of emancipatory procedurality suited not only for radical play but radical design, challenging the limits of Bogost's "persuasion" as an activist paradigm. (shrink)

In her essay "Reclaiming Animism" (2012), Isabelle Stengers writes that reclaiming "means recovering, and, in this case, recovering the capacity to honor experience, any experience we care for, as 'not ours' but rather as 'animating' us, making us witness to what is not us." It is this notion of animation that mobilizes this paper on Jesse Ross's tabletop roleplaying game Trophy Dark (2021), and which informed my own experience as simultaneous game facilitator and game design instructor for a class of (...) fifteen undergraduate students. With a group split roughly in half between students with varying levels of experience with Dungeons & Dragons (and solely Dungeons & Dragons) and students with no tabletop roleplaying experience whatsoever, Trophy Dark, and specifically Ross's incursion "Witchwood," made for a group exercise in this animative witness to the "not ours" and "not us" of which Stengers writes. Rather than adopting a rationalist, critical separation from the play experience, or a romantic, reflective immersion in the play experience, this particular group of students discovered in Trophy Dark a vehicle for the "active," "transformative," and indeed "metamorphic" experience that Stengers describes, using the chosen incursion as an instrument for the shared dramatic failure that is "playing to lose," as advocated in Trophy Dark's player's guide. Stengers awakens her readers to a "rhizomatic" materialism, or a materialism of the "milieu," and together in the Witchwood we encountered the same. This paper charts the contours of our adventure. (shrink)

Herman Melville’s posthumously published novella, Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative), is the tragic tale of a naïve young sailor impressed into the British Navy who, after being falsely accused of mutiny by a commanding officer, lashes out at his accuser and inadvertently kills him. The captain of the ship, though fully aware of Billy’s essential innocence in the matter, convicts him anyway, choosing to perform his duty as an officer and servant of the king. Billy is hanged. Order is (...) restored. Billy Budd, Sailor, is not, however, an apology for the law. Melville’s novella is remarkable in that its conclusion only complicates the issue, tangling the narrative in contradiction and ambiguity. As legal theorist Robert Cover would say, the law is a text, a narrative like any other, and as such the law is a cultural object, which is to say, a human object. The law does not exist eternally, nor does it exist outside of the humans that execute it. Melville recognizes this, and in concluding his tale in the way he does he consciously exposes the messiness, complexity, and contingency of the law as a human institution, challenging the rule and the letter that seek to order human beings as computable units. Law as ideology, as eternal myth, takes on a character diametrically opposed to the fluidity and changeableness of human beings. Such a form of law cannot account for growth or transformation, nor difference for that matter, and so must expunge the incalculable from its midst. Blood is shed. Thus the law, supposed arbiter of justice, becomes a petty banker, servile to an economy that views humans only as uses and values, as capital-producing subjects. Today, as blood continues to be spilt in the name of empire and economy, Melville’s narrative could not be more pressing. (shrink)

This paper takes up Bethesda Game Studios' Starfield (2023) as an aesthetic artefact, carefully attending to the thematics of the game's narrative in their operation as structuring "thought patterns" for the player's experience of the game, thought patterns that give form to the "sensible fabric" of the game and so constitute an imaginary or "distribution of the sensible" that requires critique (Rancière, 2013). Utilizing the aesthetic and material-economic theories of Nicolas Bourriaud, Jacques Rancière, Jussi Parikka, and David Graeber, this paper (...) examines the aesthetics of the techno-ecological imaginary that Starfield institutes, close reading the play of perspectives into which the game invites the player-character, and analysing this play in its problematic orientation to the key dramatic revelation of planetary catastrophe that occurs late in the game's main campaign. If, as climate and games scholar Benjamin Abraham writes (2022), "[b]ringing the climate crisis 'home' to all of our lives, all of our workplaces, all of our hobbies, is the necessary first step in acting to reverse climate action," then illuminating and critiquing Starfield's deployment of such a crisis will help players, scholars, and developers alike take the first step in learning to pay attention to the very "modes of perception" that prevent us from effecting real change in the global technological systems that have brought us to the brink of planetary collapse. (shrink)