Is Dark Souls the Pokémon of modern gaming?

The phrase ‘just like Dark Souls’ is a cliché, dull phrase that has been bandied about far too often. Gamers will rightfully groan when they hear these terms, as Dark Souls gets compared to increasingly unrelated and nonsensical games such as Crash Bandicoot and Cuphead. 

 

Is there more between Dark Souls and Pokemon than we think? Source: in-game screenshot

However, artistically, Dark Souls means and reveals a lot, and its effect on different players is profound. As a cultural phenomenon, Dark Souls is a game more than worthy of examination; in fact, its tropes parallel many other games including, unusually and controversially, Pokémon Red and Blue for the original Game Boy.

It may seem ludicrous at first to suggest this, but the original versions of Pokémon have a lot more in common thematically and design-wise with Dark Souls than one would think. There are many tropes in common between the two that are executed in an eerily-similar way. 

One of the most striking parallels between Pokémon and Dark Souls is in the way the open world is administered to the player. In Dark Souls, players begin with relatively few places to go in Lordran, but there are also areas where low-level, first-time players aren’t recommended to visit (the graveyard and catacombs). Additionally, free form exploration in Dark Souls is gated organically and appropriately by the game’s design and pacing. Shortcuts soon begin to open and allow easy traversal across the world, in interesting ways that reveal a kind of elegance in the map design. This gives the world of Dark Souls an authentic, memorable feel. On the same note, Kanto in Pokémon Red and Blue does many things similarly; free form exploration is allowed and designed into the game, where there is an elegance to the design guiding the player along, where shortcuts across Saffron City, and between Vermillion City begin to criss-cross the player along the world’s geography engagingly, lending the world more of a natural feel rather than a series of levels to be overcome. The way in which Cinnabar Island can be accessed from Pallet Town, the beginning area of the game, is executed with an applaudable design. 

Instead of being a linear progression, exploration and geography in both Pokémon and Dark Souls are handled as both a storytelling medium and a player reward, and the result is that both maps are authentic and offer their own exposition into the logic of the worlds in which players of both games reside. 

Not only this, but the way in which the game mechanics are designed between the two titles are also similar; in Dark Souls, if you keep getting back up after each death, and getting as far as you can into each area, and if you keep levelling up when you can, eventually the player will gain enough skill to beat the area, or they will level up high enough to fight through with less difficulty; theoretically, the game rewards persistence in its design. Although there is a penalty in how players will lose their souls if they don’t retrieve them from the spot where they died last, they will never lose the level-ups that they have already gained. In the same way, this kind of persistence exists in Pokémon, though with the easier design of the game it’s seen to less of an extent. Players may be punished after a loss in that they lose half of their in-game money, their Pokémon never become weaker throughout the game; keep getting up and eventually you will prevail. 

In many gameplay tropes, in their designs and mechanics, Dark Souls and Pokémon seem to parallel; the open-world design, gated progression barriers, shortcuts and geography, and in the very way that persistence pays off. Indeed, both being based on RPG designs, both will have many tropes in common in more obvious ways than this as well, ways that I would rightfully be mocked for pointing out as they are such simple and obvious tropes as part of RPG gameplay to begin with. However, I think one of the most important comparison points between the two games is in how their stories’ theming and styles seem to exist in parallel to one another. 

Okay, it’s clear from the outset that the games are vastly different in their style and execution; one offering a brutal, violent world where swords clash and people get driven to insanity by their failures, and the other offering a more child-friendly experience where people are much more co-operative, cute creatures play with children and you get given money if your cute creature beats others in competitive battle.

However, it is in how both stories found meaning in their player base that the parallels become clearer; how in both games, player growth seems to be one of the central points driving the game forward. Just as Dark Souls is a different experience for the first playthrough, so is Pokémon.

As Pokémon is a coming-of-age tale about becoming independent and celebrating the joy of doing so, Dark Souls presents a tale of learning the harsh realities of living, but also celebrating one’s persistence despite this lesson. That the latter game came out at the same time many of those who experienced Pokémon Red and Blue as children were starting out on their adult lives is all too fitting with this parallel. The lessons that Dark Souls teaches are particularly applicable to the same generation of gamers which Pokémon was aimed at years before. 

I speak about how the theming of Pokémon applied well to its main audience in another post, but I also find it fitting that both tales are equally relatable to their audience’s lives at the times they were played. At its centre, Dark Souls presents a harsh, punishing reality, where it can often be difficult to continue and where one’s ultimate purpose in all of this is shrouded in mystery. Moreover, it throws brutal, punishing challenge into the mix, testing even the most patient of players. The risk of losing all your souls and the crushing feeling that erodes at your patience and sanity is ever-present in the game’s system. But beyond this, Dark Souls is a game that celebrates players’ persistence and rewards those who keep getting back up. This is even mentioned in an oft-quoted critical review by Michael Thomsen of The Slate, which stated that:  

“There is real beauty in Dark Souls. It reveals that life is more suffering than pleasure, more failure than success, and that even the momentary relief of achievement is wiped away by new levels of difficulty. It is also a testament to our persistence in the face of that suffering, and it offers the comfort of a community of other players all stuck in the same hellish quagmire. Those are good qualities. That is art. And you can get all of that from the first five hours of Dark Souls. The remaining 90 or so offer nothing but an increasingly nonsensical variation on that experience.”

At the time of Dark Souls’ release, this all coincided with a generation of gamers entering adulthood, and finding it a harsh wake-up call to life, where many feel increasingly purposeless and depressed in a world increasingly indifferent to their struggles, and where many feel their souls being crushed by the hard reality of modern living. But, much as Pokémon related a coming-of-age tale that celebrated the time when gamers were gaining their first tastes of independence, so too does Dark Souls present a tale that resonates with its audience’s lifestyles, and celebrates continued perseverance in the harsh, punishing reality of the world and fittingly reveals such persistence’s reward. 

Is Dark Souls the Pokémon of modern gaming? Of course, I wrote this question in jest, as a tongue-in-cheek prod to videogames media headlines that present any moderately-challenging game as a Souls-like. As such, the answer to this question is a lot more complicated. But look at the parallels in both games; in their game design and in how this presents a loop such that obstacles can always be overcome with repeated effort, to their narratives that are fitting and resonating stories for their audiences. Looking at this with an analytical eye, it is hard to outright deny that there is some merit in comparing Dark Souls and Pokémon, and in how their experiences parallel one another.

Are Video Games Keeping You Unemployed: My Reaction

In my reaction to the article, ‘Are video games keeping you unemployed?’ I will, of course, state that I am biased toward video games being a positive influence. I have believed this most of my life, thanks to my own experience which I will go into. I also believe that video games are a force for good because of evidence that neurologically, video games are believed to cause improvements in various cognitive tasks. A simple Google search for ‘effect of video games on cognitive abilities’ will give you all the evidence you need to know. Here is a good article that summarises the current knowledge.

My first counter to the article is based on the previously-mentioned evidence; video games, if anything improve skills rather than damage them. My second, however, is anecdotal evidence. My third argument is that there are different, perhaps more explanatory factors at play than just video games.

The anecdotal evidence is this; video games helped me get a job. While I am not a ‘less educated young man’, quite simply, video games are expensive. At over £40 a title, as well as online subscription fees, hardware purchases and DLC, it is impossible to maintain any kind of gaming habit like what the article describes without a large investment of cash. We need jobs to get this kind of money. The economic research behind this article tries to combat this by stating the average cost of a video game as $0.55, and while this is supposed to be based on data, many gamers will laugh in derision at this kind of information. The kind of gaming that the economic research is trying to draw conclusions from is different from the kind of gaming that it is trying to criticise, it seems. To be closer to the real cost of games as a ‘luxury leisure item’, then the research could be better served by looking at the average cost of the mainstream, AAA retail title that comes out on a modern console, not smartphone apps.

My personal experience of video games helping me to get a job was around the time Grand Theft Auto V came out for the Xbox 360. I was a cash-strapped student at the time, despite living responsibly and not being a big drinker, I was in heaps of debt and had no money to fund any kind of serious gaming. The release and hype around GTA V, however, got me fed up with not having the money to fund my gaming. I really was looking forward to the game, and it made me get a job so that I could afford to buy it near to its release. If other gamers are like me, then they would find the expense of video games a pressure to find employment, not something that keeps you out of it.

Of course, there is the fact that many of the points in the article show that there is a bigger problem than ‘those pesky videogames’. It cites evidence on people who are not in education or employment: “Essentially, a lot of young, non-college educated men are living in their parents’ basement playing video games all day.”

The issue here is correlational and my problem with the article is that it is citing the most emotionally-charged of the factors at play in order to draw interest; video games. It does this despite there being an important factor described just a few words into the sentence. ‘Non-college educated men’. I think that this in itself shows that there are a lot more issues at play here than video games.

There are a lot of factors, economic, psychological and social, that go into the phenomena of individuals not in education or employment. Not only is the world economy still in dire straits, but businesses are not willing to employ young people. This is a wide systemic problem that is far more damaging than video games could be toward employment prospects. 

Everybody knows the old catch-22 of ‘we won’t hire you without experience but you cannot get experience because we won’t hire you’, but this is actually a serious and widespread issue that is not getting any easier. As many of ‘those pesky millenials’ are now coming into their thirties, the rampant ageism of big business is going to lead to a major financial issue soon. 

Not only that, but there are an incredible amount of psychological and social issues at play in this phenomena that is a lot harder to wrap one’s head around, that it does the underlying problem a disservice to simply ask “are video games keeping you out of a job?” I actually think that the consumption of video games, as enabled by the poor parenting strategies being described in the article, is actually a symptom rather than a cause.

That is not to say there aren’t issues with gaming that could contribute; over-consumption of video games and addiction is a real problem, as are those ‘video game apps’ as described by the research underlying the article, which are mostly designed to be as addictive as possible and are made unethically to siphon money from players in nasty, cynical ways. 

But I think that the article is being awfully reductionist in its portrayal of the problem, and ignoring the wide array of issues that underlie the social phenomena being described. By doing so, the article gives off the impression of being no better than the big news scares that happened over video game violence in recent memory; such media sensationalism is not helpful to anyone, gamers or not.