02-05-2023, 09:55 PM
I love FromSoftware and have for a while now. But the point of this thread is not to say that. The point is appreciation. I would like to have a thread devoted to better appreciating and sharing appreciation of what FromSoftware are and what it is they do. Their newfound mass popularity in the wake of the release of Elden Ring I believe has the internet due for this. I've been covering this subject in pieces in various places all over, and now would like to focus down and concentrate on one place. To get things rolling I'll share some writing here that I first posted on TunisBayClub about Elden Ring. I was about ten hours into the game when I wrote this, thirty in now, and my thoughts haven't changed.
Please feel free to post anything From or Elden Ring related or adjacent in this thread. This post is just to get things moving and give you all an idea of how I see the From Question.
This site's lack of interest in video games is a touch worrying. All sharp and cultured men should be fascinated with the bleeding edge of multimedia. Stupid people will never get it, but I think that with some lateral thinking we could correct the language we use around the subject and catch the attention of those with the capacity to see.
The average gamer is a rube who can't conceptualise a will behind anything in front of them and can only think in inherited terms. Maddeningly logocentric people. To most people "Video games" are totemic creations which are what they are and could only possibly be what they are. Really how rubes think of art in general, they can't understand or see expression or intention behind what's right in front of them. But they also don't even see what's right in front of them. They see the totemic whole before themselves, and then smash it down into familiar forms they've been told about by consumer guides and edutainment pop-media made by transsexuals.
The people see what they know, not what they see. And what they know is wrong and bad.
I started playing Elden Ring recently, and unlike most of the people playing it I'm familiar with what its creators have been doing since they first started making games. I'm going to write about both what the game does well as multimedia, and how everyone misreads it. I hope this doesn't get confusing.
Despite its enormous sales and the amount of hours its taken from so many people, I think the nature of Elden Ring as a work of media/art is entirely lost on virtually everyone observing it. They see what they know, not what they see. They see Elden Ring, and they interpret it as "video game". Having read around online it's very plain that the average person enjoying this game interprets it as World of Warcraft. A video game in the true sense. A series of contrived challenges to be completed for their own sake, with an equally meaningless layer of genre-babble covering the whole thing so that the wiki-writers and video essayists can tell you what things are. "Gameplay" with "lore". To a normal person Elden Ring (and all the preceding games beginning with Dark Souls) are about "fighting bosses". While the more cerebral gamer will tell you that it's about building a wiki worth of "lore" and "worldbuilding" through pieces which are scattered around in 3D space, with gaps where you have to figure out what happened. Of course they're both disgustingly wrong.
The consistent element across all FROM games is a fascination with phenomenal experience. New possible angles and experiences of fictional worlds. The point is not the content of the fictional worlds themselves, but the experience of encountering this world from the perspective of a lonely and lost explorer. This is possible in a game. More particularly, this is possible using existing video game conventions. Something Japanese games have excelled at for a long time is taking the mechanical conventions and contrivances of "games" and turning them towards expressive ends. It's a video game thing to be thrown into some weird hostile foreign environment where everything is trying to kill you and you are uniquely positioned to prevail over the forces aligned against you because you can come back and try again every time you die. FROM have you do that too. But in their later games it goes from total contrivance to a considered whole experience.
The experience FROM want you to have in every game is that of a weak and unwanted interloper in a strange world you can only appreciate from your ant-like point of view. That experience is there now, but it's lost on most of the people playing the game, who just see Ghosts 'n' Goblins with a way bigger budget. Crossed with World of Warcraft.
The point of the lore in FROM games is above all else to feel large. Incomprehensibly large from the perspective of the player, who is walking through the ruins finding smouldering embers of what once was and picking up shreds of incomplete recorded information piece by piece. This is interesting. The appeal and ideas are similar to old weird literary fiction, one of their games is rather explicitly a homage to Lovecraft, but they're able to go further with new tools. Garbage meme games made by Jews lie to stupid people and tell you a game about a father who loses his daughter is giving you that experience. Shit-eaters try to convince themselves this is half true, but it simply doesn't work. A game cannot perfectly convince you you are someone else, not any more than a movie can. FROM understand which sensations they can deliver, and which they can't. Weird fiction is a perfect tradition to pick up, because if there's something a game can do great. especially ones about navigating and surviving in elaborately constructed three dimensional spaces, as is popular in games now, it's make you feel lost and confused.
Demon's Souls to Elden Ring FROM have been using conventions of video games (contrived challenges in virtual space) and weird fiction (fantastical stories which are more about the strange sensations they suggest than the particulars of their events or worlds) to create a new class of experience which isn't really best appreciated as "video games" at all. It's a kind of interactive multimedia.
This is how you can view FROM games, but very few people do. What happens is, as I alluded to above, the parts are seen as arbitrarily connected modules, each of which serves as its own self sufficient point, appreciated as old media. The 3D space and its obstacles become "video game". Ghosts 'n' Goblins with a huge budget. Collect all the coins and get to the end as fast as you can. While the "story" becomes "lore". Regressing to something below old weird fiction where now the content and particulars are the point and people devote themselves to collecting fictional facts divorced from their multimedia framing. Becoming something like historians of made up events. There are people who have gotten rich doing this on youtube. One anyway.
Elden Ring is a fantastic piece of multimedia weird fiction. In these pieces of work a 100 year old tradition is not only alive but running on a bleeding edge of presentation and popularity. Elden Ring is not "Open World Dark Souls". Elden Ring is multimedia Clarke Ashton Smith.
Please feel free to post anything From or Elden Ring related or adjacent in this thread. This post is just to get things moving and give you all an idea of how I see the From Question.
This site's lack of interest in video games is a touch worrying. All sharp and cultured men should be fascinated with the bleeding edge of multimedia. Stupid people will never get it, but I think that with some lateral thinking we could correct the language we use around the subject and catch the attention of those with the capacity to see.
The average gamer is a rube who can't conceptualise a will behind anything in front of them and can only think in inherited terms. Maddeningly logocentric people. To most people "Video games" are totemic creations which are what they are and could only possibly be what they are. Really how rubes think of art in general, they can't understand or see expression or intention behind what's right in front of them. But they also don't even see what's right in front of them. They see the totemic whole before themselves, and then smash it down into familiar forms they've been told about by consumer guides and edutainment pop-media made by transsexuals.
The people see what they know, not what they see. And what they know is wrong and bad.
I started playing Elden Ring recently, and unlike most of the people playing it I'm familiar with what its creators have been doing since they first started making games. I'm going to write about both what the game does well as multimedia, and how everyone misreads it. I hope this doesn't get confusing.
Despite its enormous sales and the amount of hours its taken from so many people, I think the nature of Elden Ring as a work of media/art is entirely lost on virtually everyone observing it. They see what they know, not what they see. They see Elden Ring, and they interpret it as "video game". Having read around online it's very plain that the average person enjoying this game interprets it as World of Warcraft. A video game in the true sense. A series of contrived challenges to be completed for their own sake, with an equally meaningless layer of genre-babble covering the whole thing so that the wiki-writers and video essayists can tell you what things are. "Gameplay" with "lore". To a normal person Elden Ring (and all the preceding games beginning with Dark Souls) are about "fighting bosses". While the more cerebral gamer will tell you that it's about building a wiki worth of "lore" and "worldbuilding" through pieces which are scattered around in 3D space, with gaps where you have to figure out what happened. Of course they're both disgustingly wrong.
The consistent element across all FROM games is a fascination with phenomenal experience. New possible angles and experiences of fictional worlds. The point is not the content of the fictional worlds themselves, but the experience of encountering this world from the perspective of a lonely and lost explorer. This is possible in a game. More particularly, this is possible using existing video game conventions. Something Japanese games have excelled at for a long time is taking the mechanical conventions and contrivances of "games" and turning them towards expressive ends. It's a video game thing to be thrown into some weird hostile foreign environment where everything is trying to kill you and you are uniquely positioned to prevail over the forces aligned against you because you can come back and try again every time you die. FROM have you do that too. But in their later games it goes from total contrivance to a considered whole experience.
The experience FROM want you to have in every game is that of a weak and unwanted interloper in a strange world you can only appreciate from your ant-like point of view. That experience is there now, but it's lost on most of the people playing the game, who just see Ghosts 'n' Goblins with a way bigger budget. Crossed with World of Warcraft.
The point of the lore in FROM games is above all else to feel large. Incomprehensibly large from the perspective of the player, who is walking through the ruins finding smouldering embers of what once was and picking up shreds of incomplete recorded information piece by piece. This is interesting. The appeal and ideas are similar to old weird literary fiction, one of their games is rather explicitly a homage to Lovecraft, but they're able to go further with new tools. Garbage meme games made by Jews lie to stupid people and tell you a game about a father who loses his daughter is giving you that experience. Shit-eaters try to convince themselves this is half true, but it simply doesn't work. A game cannot perfectly convince you you are someone else, not any more than a movie can. FROM understand which sensations they can deliver, and which they can't. Weird fiction is a perfect tradition to pick up, because if there's something a game can do great. especially ones about navigating and surviving in elaborately constructed three dimensional spaces, as is popular in games now, it's make you feel lost and confused.
Demon's Souls to Elden Ring FROM have been using conventions of video games (contrived challenges in virtual space) and weird fiction (fantastical stories which are more about the strange sensations they suggest than the particulars of their events or worlds) to create a new class of experience which isn't really best appreciated as "video games" at all. It's a kind of interactive multimedia.
This is how you can view FROM games, but very few people do. What happens is, as I alluded to above, the parts are seen as arbitrarily connected modules, each of which serves as its own self sufficient point, appreciated as old media. The 3D space and its obstacles become "video game". Ghosts 'n' Goblins with a huge budget. Collect all the coins and get to the end as fast as you can. While the "story" becomes "lore". Regressing to something below old weird fiction where now the content and particulars are the point and people devote themselves to collecting fictional facts divorced from their multimedia framing. Becoming something like historians of made up events. There are people who have gotten rich doing this on youtube. One anyway.
Elden Ring is a fantastic piece of multimedia weird fiction. In these pieces of work a 100 year old tradition is not only alive but running on a bleeding edge of presentation and popularity. Elden Ring is not "Open World Dark Souls". Elden Ring is multimedia Clarke Ashton Smith.