Author: Ian

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Writing this essay was a painful process. The source of this pain was my fundamental disagreement with the prompt. The message I got from Wolf in White Van was essentially that there is no answer to the prompt. I struggled with trying to fake my way to an answer that I didn’t believe for about an hour. Then I compromised to trying to point out that interpretations depended on starting assumptions. Then, after several hours of very slow writing, I ragequit the prompt and started  writing what I actually thought. I came back later and stitched the essay back together and I got a result that I considered acceptable. After a few more cycles of editing, the essay evolved into its current form which I am very happy with.

In this essay I tried to bring in symbolism from the book and branch into not-quite-prose. This was a risky maneuver for an analysis essay, but I think it payed off.

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As many people who play Dark Souls do, I came into this project with very strong opinions on the lore, mechanics, difficulty, and art of Dark Souls.

I initially wanted to focus on the lore: how players are tricked into think they’re the hero, and will almost certainly complete entire playthroughs without ever realizing that they have been fooled into martyrdom for the gain of small group. I wanted to highlight the narrative structure of Dark Souls, which I would argue is truly unique.

These subjects, however, are not the material for a 5-10 minute podcast. I firmly believe that Dark Souls is a great work of literature, and as such, to try and analyze its story in its entirety in such a short time could not do the game justice (not to mention that it wouldn’t have anything to do with Bogost).

David initially wanted to do the podcast focusing primarily on the mechanics of Dark Souls, which I thought missed the most interesting parts of the game.

But what we each wanted to do had a common feature that led to the proposed term. My strong feelings are Dark Souls lore are not at all unique, and David’s strong feelings on the mechanics aren’t either. It became apparent to both of us that “strong feelings” pretty much characterize the Dark Souls community. From there we converged on the topic that almost every aspect of Dark Souls was built to create opinions and alignments that would foster the development of a community within and outside the game.

After that, there was almost no work to be done. We quickly created a list of evidence and talking points, each only about 3 words long. From there we started talking and recording, working our way through the points as the conversation progressed. I wouldn’t call our conversation planned, but we knew what we wanted to prove and we each had our own ideas how we wanted to prove it, so the conversation wasn’t much more than a normal conversation. Ten minutes later we had everything we need for our podcast.

We cut a few bits that we thought were less relevant or where someone misspoke, but we kept the vast majority of the recording.

At the onset, I wasn’t sure how to go about writing a podcast; now I realize that it really isn’t fundamentally different then writing on paper: Prove your point with words in a manner befitting the audience. It’s just free form writing on the spot.

Given more time (honestly, we started later than we should have) we probably would have brought in more points (we didn’t hit all of them on the list) and we would have brought in evidence from a closer reading of Dark Souls, rather than the overview that we did.

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When presented with the game Depression Quest, I assumed they picked the name simply because they couldn’t come up with an interesting or engaging name, but after playing the game I realize how appropriate this title is.

The title of “quest” is usually reserved for some Herculean task, dealing with some form of horrifying and insurmountable obstacle. In Depression Quest, this obstacle is simply being happy. It takes a long time, there are lots of ways to fail, and, even when everything is done as well as possible, you still don’t really succeed (so yeah – quest). The best you can be in this game is OK: you strive to be a functional person.

Given the role of a sufferer of depression, all you need to do is live life and not be miserable. The game very quickly makes it clear that you can’t just stop being depressed, blocking out many advisable choices that would likely be made by an emotionally healthy person. The choices necessary to become less depressed are always the most emotionally exposed and uncomfortable decisions, but play through in which you don’t acknowledge your depression will end with you being depressed, hopeless, alone, and even further from happiness than you started.

Depression isn’t something that you can just get over. That’s all the game really wants you to know.

 

 

So after a bit of research I’m fairly confident that I know why there is a plaque entitled LEROY on the walls of Manuel’s Tavern. This plaque represents a major part of TV personality LeRoy Powell’s career and life. It commemorates the beginnings of his career in front of the camera and also his death in 1999.

 

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When I first completed Dear Esther (that is, finished my first playthrough) I was very confused. I then read several interpretations and analyses of the game.

I’m still confused.

 

Dear Esther is a very straightforward game with a very opaque narrative. The player is given almost no choice in where to go and how to progress, as there is essentially only one way forward at any given time. Whenever there is a fork in the path, one can simply follow the timeless adage:

“go the way that dead-ends; there’s probably loot”

to find addition details on the story.

 

I know I’m supposed to address how the game establishes character, but the game, quite literally, doesn’t. It is unclear who the player character is, though they seem to be a depressed and guilt-ridden Englishman who is likely responsible for Esther’s death. The narrator never really identifies them self, but when describing other people, it is likely that most of them are the same person, i.e. himself. I won’t go further into my interpretation of the story,  because I am almost certainly wrong.

The setting is also fairly unclear. It is stated that the narrator is on an island near Scotland (Hebridian), much of the island is surreal and it is possible that the island is (by the narrators own implications) not real. It is clear, however that the time is reasonably modern, as shown by existence of the M5 motorway.

The game limits your understanding of the narrative by randomly selecting the snippets of text for the player to hear, meaning that you can only hear some of the narrative on a given playthrough. The game also features several difficult to interpret symbols/diagrams that serve to further confuse the player.

This game is extremely different from Gone Home (another exploration based story game). While Gone Home allows the player to formulate their own opinion/interpretation of their surroundings, Dear Esther forces you to be a bombastic English guy, who I can’t identify with in the slightest. Because the game forces the story upon (and out of) the player rather than those around the player, I couldn’t connect with the narrator at all and felt like my involvement in the story was worthless.