The accomplishments of a novel might be lost on an inattentive reader. A sluggish spectator may misinterpret a film’s themes or narrative. Only a video game, on the other hand, may penalize an audience’s flaws. If a player misses a leap, falls to an opponent, or fails to complete a level, the game may refuse them access to the remainder of the task, delaying progress until they pass the test or quit in defeat.
Hidetaka Miyazaki, a video game developer in his late forties, has probably punished more people than anybody else. You play as a loinclothed wretch in Dark Souls, the 2011 fantasy game that made him famous, sprinting through sewers and hiding in forests. A gigantic wolf, pugilist mushrooms, mephitic marshes, and a sword-wielding spider assault you. If you fail to deflect an aggressor’s lunge or fall over a rampart, you are met with a redundant message: “You Died.” You’re resurrected alongside ablaze as it fades, one of a sequence of checkpoints placed around this weird, vaguely medieval landscape. Every one of your adversaries has also re-spawned.
The average gamer will return to the firelight several hundred times. Games sometimes entice their players with infantile power fantasies, but Miyazaki’s art values failure, patience, and hard-earned perfection. You can’t just pound the buttons and expect to win. Each adversary is powerful and intelligent; their assault patterns must be carefully watched and countered, and your stamina must be controlled. A battle with a knight is not the same as a scuffle with a pack of wolves or horseback combat with a soaring dragon. Even the smallest slip in attention can be disastrous in even the most routine interaction. Struggle, like life, is imbued with truth and consequence.
Dark Souls and its successors have become well-known for their ego-shattering difficulties. Their reputation extends beyond video games: “The Dark Souls of ‘X'” is a meme that is used to describe any extremely difficult undertaking. (A teetering heap of filthy plates? “Washing up’s Dark Souls.” “I’ve never been a particularly skilled player,” Miyazaki said lately via Zoom. He was seated in his office, a book-lined room in Tokyo’s Shinjuku district. “I perish a lot. So, in my work, I aim to address the question, “How can I give death meaning if it is to be more than a mark of failure?” “How can I make dying more bearable?”
Miyazaki is a quiet person who seldom does interviews and canceled our meeting three times. However, his technique has proven to be quite popular. Members of the public voted Dark Souls the greatest game of all time at the Golden Joysticks, the longest-running video-game awards event, last year, beating out classics like Tetris, Doom, and Super Mario 64. Miyazaki’s games have sold almost thirty million copies, and his latest, Elden Ring, which will be launched on Friday, is one of the year’s most anticipated titles.
Nonetheless, for every vanquisher of Miyazaki’s creatures, there is another who sighs and lays down the controller. “I feel guilty to anyone who believes there’s just too much to overcome in my games,” Miyazaki explained. He grinned as he clutched his head in his hands. “I simply want as many athletes as possible to feel the joy that comes from triumphing over adversity.”
