My sense is that most of my subscribers don’t play a ton of video games, so I’ll try to write about my experiences of play in a way that works towards my readers while trying to stay interesting for those of you who do know the medium.
Like a lot of players, I’ve been pretty invested for the last couple of months in a game called Elden Ring, produced by a Japanese developer called From Software.
I often struggle to explain what video games do for me as a medium. The academic field of game studies has a lot of ideas about this thought, but they’re all over the place. Games are defined by their interactivity, by the agency of their audiences. Games are defined by contingency, by the choices that players make. Games are defined by their visuality. Games are just like other kinds of texts. Games are procedural. Games are a subset of fun. Games are a unique kind of human culture that preceded and gave rise to ritual, and there’s little difference between physical games and digital ones.
When I’m in the mood to play the game of definitions, I can, with an eye to intellectualizing my own cultural habitus. But it helps more to build up from what you know you like and what you know you don’t, to think about specific experiences. Elden Ring is a game where I love 75% of it so very much and feel complicatedly ambivalent about the rest of it.
From Software is best known for its “Souls” games—Demon’s Souls, Dark Souls (three games) and Bloodbourne. Elden Ring is definitely in the same vein and yet it’s much more than that.
The Souls games are known primarily for three things. First, achingly difficult gameplay that forces players to die many times in the same fights until they become proficient at a particular battle or at navigating through a particular area. Difficult enemies or “bosses” have distinctive attacks that very few players can overcome on first encounter, but also the general environment in Souls games is full of unexpected ambushes and obstacles as well as a host of quirks and secrets that players pretty well have to uncover in order to progress.
The second thing they’re known for is not providing much information to players about how to develop their character. For very old-school players like myself, they almost harken back to graphically simpler early games that nevertheless had complex and non-intuitive mechanics and no tutorials—a prospect that was much more daunting when sharing information on the Internet was more difficult. In previous Souls games, I found that I simply had to read online clues and advice in order to make any headway at all. But they’ve also evolved to have an increasingly interesting and amusing model for multiplayer experiences: you can use a limited vocabulary to leave messages for other players warning them of dangers ahead, informing them about secrets, trying to maliciously trick them into jumping off cliffs, and making juvenile if indirect sex jokes. You can play in limited ways alongside a friend, but that invites third parties to “invade” your world and attack you—and you can invite other players to help you out with a difficult boss fight.
The third thing that is pretty consistent across all of From’s games is their aesthetic. All of their games take place in spiritually and morally exhausted worlds full of ruins, despair, deception and abandonment. You’re alone and your character has no particular personality. There’s a sense of doom always: you go on because you have no choice. There are vague goals but they’re usually fairly abstract and hazy until very late in the game. You interact with non-player characters but usually just to get something from them that you need or want. Most of the characters you meet end up dead even if you mean them well or want to help them.
Sounds like fun, right? Well, Elden Ring is, at least for me, while the other Souls games have not been quite so much, even though I’ve played them. The reason is that Elden Ring is one more thing that the other Souls games are not, and that’s what folks call an open world game.
What does that mean? An open world is a game that puts few constraints on the player in terms of where they can go or what they can do next. If I were to make a list of attributes that really draw me into a game, this property would be absolutely at the top of my list. There is nothing that grabs me more than a big world that I know nothing about when I start where my character can go anywhere and do anything (within the limits of what the game engine is capable of representing or enacting).
Game designers know that there are a lot of people like me, so open worlds are frequently touted in promotional copy. Much of the time, it’s a broken promise. Many ostensibly open worlds really don’t qualify as such. Either you effectively have to do exactly what the designers want you to do in the order they want it done or there’s not actually that much variety to the world—ostensibly different places are mostly just copies of many other locations. Or while you can go anywhere you want, most of the world is lifeless and inactive—it’s a fully-dressed set but there’s nothing happening there.
The games that are genuine no-fooling open worlds are Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls and Fallout series. You can go anywhere you want (almost) even if it’s a really bad idea when you’re just starting out (e.g., you’re going to die if you do), almost anywhere you do go there’s something there that isn’t necessarily part of a quest or a mission, there are random events and enemies at some locations.
There are other games that are close to the open world ideal—No Man’s Sky, Red Dead Redemption II, The Witcher 3, Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Cyberpunk 2077. And now Elden Ring, too.
You can’t quite go anywhere you want from the outset, and the path through many locations is ultimately fairly controlled, though it takes some time to fully grasp that. (Sometimes you are expected to jump off tall places or leap huge gaps on your horse; sometimes that’s instantly fatal. It’s not always clear which until you try it.) But unlike the other Souls games, if you’re stuck on one area or one fight, you can go galloping off in another direction. A lot of the time you can go through huge areas in any way you want. You can sneak around enemies or plow into them. (The latter is often a bad idea, though: everything in the game can kill you quickly if you’re careless.) There are tons of environmental secrets and hidden ways to navigate the landscape. Some enemies only appear at certain times of day.
The combat mechanics are also a bit more open than in previous Souls games, which tended to require highly optimized strategies for most fights. The game still punishes you quickly for trying to rush through something carelessly but I found that once I got the hang of the kind of character I was playing, I could actually intuitively beat some bosses on my first try. Others, well, like almost everyone else, I have found myself stuck at times trying the same battle over and over again.
There’s a pleasure to that too—the relief you feel when you finally get the hang of it and win one of those fights is enormous. The challenge of the combat also creates a tremendous feeling of tension as you move into a new area where you don’t really know what to expect. As with all Souls’ games, Elden Ring sometimes reminds me of the old coin-op game Dragon’s Lair, where many players plunked endless quarters into the slot in order to memorize their way through a long series of prompts that, if you did them all right, let you watch a so-so (and rather sexist) cartoon adventure animated by Don Bluth’s studio. If you did it wrong, you got to watch Dirk the Knight die in various amusingly agonizing ways.
Elden Ring and its siblings aren’t quite as aggravating or shallow as that even at their worst but they do have a feeling of operant conditioning in the worst Skinnerite sense—hours in, you can feel really captive to the “just one more try” sense. They also do feed a kind of gamer-subculture vision of hierarchy. It is hard not to feel a kind of awe at watching a famous Elden Ring player whose character wears nothing but a pot on their head and a loincloth beat the hardest fight in the game again and again on behalf of other players. (I was a fortunate beneficiary of this player’s skills after failing to get past it on my own.)
What I ache to explain for anyone who doesn’t play games is “what is the pleasure of an open world”? Why don’t some games count in my understanding of the genre? In Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, I can travel around classical Greece at the time of the Peloponnesian War, but I think at best it’s “open world adjacent”. It’s that kind of lifelessness I was describing earlier, that sense that you’re travelling through a set. You’re told when there’s an interest point that has a purpose to it. It’s fun and the visuals can be dazzling but there’s some other kind of uncanny valley going on.
Elden Ring’s world is mostly dead too: but that’s the point of it. It’s a world broken by squabbling demigods, scoured by literal rot and monstrosities. Most everywhere you go, there’s something hiding that wants to kill you, but there’s still a sense that you’re witnessing various creatures and soldiers go about their business whether you’re there or not but also consequentially reacting to your presence. The first time I came across a slow-moving procession of guards with tame ogres hauling a treasure wagon I felt like I’d accidentally run into the middle of something real. (Yes, of course, as you play you discover that it’s on a loop and it recurs, just as you eventually realize that what looked like completely spontaneous fights between wizards and dragons in the game Skyrim were random events that recurred as you explored the world.)
I still dream that someday someone’s going to make procedurally-generated agent-based AI that will allow me to travel through an open world and meet somewhat rounded or fully-composed characters and enemies that I’ve never come across before and will likely never see again as such. (There was a sub-system in the otherwise not very good Shadows of Mordor game that felt close to this.) And desire for what I crave is what has led some players into the madness of dumping lots of money into the likely-never-finished game Star Citizen. It may be that the allure of the open world is what Edward Castronova argued fueled some of the interest in multiplayer “virtual worlds” (and what Mark Zuckerberg is ineptly trying to play towards with Meta): a sort of lotus eater’s wish to get out of the world we’re in and find a more composed, more involving, more imaginative world where even dying is interesting. I don’t think it’s quite that for me, but when I am grabbed by an open world, the psychological experience feels a bit the same as any time a new hobby, project or intense interest grabs me and soothes all the other distractions away for a time. I don’t know whether that is good or bad; it feels simply that it is as it is.
Image credit: "Dragons Lair 2" by numb3r is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.