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Enjoying the Uncertainty. © The Author(s) 2024
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DOI: 10.1177/15554120241226837

Incompleteness Through journals.sagepub.com/home/gac

Narrative, Level Design

and Gameplay

Angelo Maria Andriano1

Abstract
The application of the Theory of Information to the works of art can show why incom-
pleteness and ambiguity offer a more engaging experience to readers and users. But
when ambiguity becomes a deliberate strategy of the work, it becomes difficult to
understand how to interpret it: in this article I argue that the correct way to interpret
a work that makes incompleteness the rule of its poetics is to analyze how that strategy
is conveyed throughout its basic grammar, without trying to solve the puzzles and con-
tradictions that incompleteness and ambiguity inevitably produce. This is a relevant
issue in the videogame Dark Souls as the basic elements of its grammar, level design,
gameplay mechanics and narrative, offer the player the experience of incompleteness
in different ways. In this article, I explain how the strategy of incompleteness works
in Dark Souls and propose a framework for a Zen-wise interpretation of the game
mechanics.

Keywords
incompleteness, lore-based narrative, narrative minimalism, agency, level design,
theory of information

1
Department of Philosophy, University of Milan, Milan, Italy

Corresponding Author:
Angelo Maria Andriano, Department of Philosophy, University of Milan, Via Festa del Perdono 7,
Milan 20122, Italy.
Email: angelomaria.andriano@studenti.unimi.it
2 Games and Culture 0(0)

Incompleteness as Strategy
Applying the principles of theory of information to literary texts and implementing the
concept of entropy of information developed by Shannon (1948), Umberto Eco (1962)
argued that the more “ordered” a message is, the more “trivial” it will be. Since order is a
measure of the intelligibility of a message, this also means that the more ordered a
message is the more it will be intelligible. Conversely, Eco argues, the less understand-
able it is, the more interesting and non-trivial it is. The notion of interest is used here to
refer to the variety of interpretations that a text can suggest. We also assume that the triv-
iality of a message depends on its probability. A holiday greeting card is extremely trivial
because it is an ordered message according to a rule that we are familiar with. We can
therefore summarize the criterion of textual interest in the rule of its improbability.
Literary texts are based on the following kind of assumption: since the rule that deter-
mines the interest of a message is the rule of its improbability and since the rule of
improbability is the lack of immediate intelligibility, the rule of poetry is to be found
in the meaning of the rule of lack of the immediate intelligibility. Eco (1962) argued
that the lack of immediate intelligibility can be achieved through the narrative device
of ellipsis, defined as the deliberate omission of an important part of a message,
noting that in the twentieth century the unresolved contradiction and ambiguity were
implemented as “deliberate features” in the poetics of many works of art such as the
works by James Joyce, the design of Bruno Munari and the cinema of Antonioni.
However, even though a story is uncomplete and elliptic, this does not mean that any
principle of order is taken away from the work of the artist. In order to properly
convey the message of contradiction and ambiguity, clarity must be exercised to the
extent that ambiguity is expressed in a controlled way. In this case, it is not just a
matter of chaos, but of the representative glorification of chaos. Any work of art has
blind spots of incompleteness, for there’s always something an author cannot realistically
control explicitly in terms of descriptive or ergodic effort (Van de Mosselaer & Gualeni,
2022). But what I will discuss is another kind of incompleteness. Not an inherent byprod-
uct but a deliberate strategy of digital texts. Jorge Luis Borges was one of the most prom-
inent advocates of this argument. In his comment to the XXXIII canto in Divina
Commedia by Dante Alighieri, Borges asks a question about the method of the interpre-
tation of the ambiguity of Alighieri’s deception of Ugolino della Gherardesca. He says:

The historical question of whether Ugolino della Gherardesca engaged in cannibalism in

the early days of February in the year 1289 is obviously insoluble. The aesthetic or literary
problem is of a very different order. It may be stated thus: Did Dante want us to believe
that Ugolino (the Ugolino of his Inferno, not history’s Ugolino) ate his children’s flesh? I
would hazard this response: Dante did not want us to believe it, but he wanted us to
suspect it. Uncertainty is part of his design. (Borges, 1999, p. 278)

Borges suggests that there is at least one kind of representation of uncertainty in the
literary text, which shifts the required clarity that a text must have in order to be
Andriano 3

understood, from the object of the text to the strategy of the text. Therefore, even if a
text speaks of a case of uncertainty, the fact that it is written down in a certain way fixes
the uncertainty in a certain way forever. In its capacity to suggest ambiguity, strategy
can thus be perfectly clear. To properly understand a work in which ambiguity is a
deliberate poetic choice, it is imperative not to try to resolve the ambiguity, but to
understand the rules that determine its strategy and indicate its value as an epistemic
metaphor. An epistemic metaphor is the creation of a world whose mechanics symbol-
ize a certain image of the world. An author can create a world entirely dominated by
determinism and that would be an epistemic metaphor for determinism. If an author
creates a world whose primary mechanic is the unclarity of what is going on, it is
an epistemic metaphor for unclarity. One must be extremely clear in order to be
able to express lack of clarity. This is because a work of art can not only replicate
lack of clarity but also represent it. It can therefore respond to the rules of “represen-
tation,” other than those of “reproduction” (Vernant, 2010). As Eco (1979) claims,
every text can be read as a strategy to construct its ideal reader. A text gives the
tools to interpret it as it is a “lazy machine” which cannot provide its own clarification
without being infinite (Eco, 1979). Thus, we can argue that interpreting a text means
understanding when the interpretation must categorically stop because we are asking
the text for answers that it cannot provide. As Fassone (2017) argues about video-
games: “Being a player of video games does not consist in exploiting a possibility
space, as argued by proponents of a theory of open play, but rather in exploring the
impossibilities of a designed system, its borders and limits, the idiosyncrasies of its
rules in order to play with—and around—authority.” (p.16). A proper interpreter is
someone who knows which are the correct questions before knowing which are the
right answers. The misunderstanding between interpreting a work whose primary
ambition is to offer a sense of unclarity and trying to resolve the ambiguity a work
deliberately left ambiguous, is a huge issue in the community of soulsborne players.
Demon’s Souls (From Software, 2009), Dark Souls (From Software, 2011),
Bloodborne (From Software, 2015), and Dark Souls III (From Software, 2016)
directed by Japanese videogame director Hidetaka Miyazaki, are all part of the souls-
borne videogame sub-genre. The soulsborne genre has its origin with the release of
Demon’s Souls but takes on a central importance in the video game industry and in
the inspiration of a new model of game design with the release and commercial
success of Dark Souls, which takes the Demon’s Souls formula to a deeper level of
design layering, both in terms of level design architecture and narrative. The recurring
mechanics of Hidetaka Miyazaki’s games from 2009 onwards, combined with the ease
with which they have been imitated in other video games, for example, Mortal Shell
(Cold Symmetry, 2020) or Lords of the Fallen (Deck 13, CI Games, 2014) have led
to the birth of a new sub-genre with certain fundamental characteristics, such as the
mechanics of checkpoints and the respawn of enemies once the player decides to
rest at the checkpoint, the presence of an intricate 3-D world filled with enemies
with specific pattern of attack which varies depending on the enemy, the refined
pattern of many boss-fights and a lore-based narrative with great emphasis on the
4 Games and Culture 0(0)

geographical construction of the game world and the location and detail of the environ-
mental design. As Koster (2004) states, a videogame can be seen as a “learning tool”
which teaches the player about its own mechanics. According to his theory, fun in a
videogame derives primarily from the reinforced loop mechanism of learning how
the game must be played. Since a videogame can be described as a complex learning
tool, in order to interpret a videogame, we must ask which are the learning pattern that
are possible in a videogame. In this sense videogames can be seen as teaching strate-
gies which aim to create a specific ideal player, through the constraint of design. For
example, a specific ideal player of the World 1-1 in Super Mario Bros (Nintendo,
1985) learns the value of most important gameplay mechanic of the game, that is
jumping, through the mechanism of positive reinforcement given by the fact that a
coin is released when bumping one of the platform bricks in gold.1 The question
about soulsborne designed by Miyazaki is whether the ideal player postulated by
Miyazaki must fill the holes in the narrative or not, since they convey a non-closure
narrative, closure being defined as a strategy used “as a means of harmonizing a
story by tying its threads in one coherent knot and resuming stasis” (Fassone, 2017,
p. 43). In this article I claim that a good interpreter of a soulsborne game must not
be interested in the completeness of information but must accept the unclarity and frag-
mentary narrative of these games. I also argue that the fragmentary nature of narrative
is a special case within the overall design of these games. Soulsborne game in general
and Dark Souls in particular, design experiences that aim to propose a certain model of
agency based on the feeling of power deriving from overcoming terrible odds, but just
to invert the initial feeling that the game itself helps to suggest unveiling the feeling of
power as illusory. The resistances gameplay opposes to be mastered and level design to
be controlled must be seen, alongside narrative incompleteness, as structural features
of the game. In order to show how lore, level design and gameplay conveys the incom-
pleteness model by performing it, I will use Dark Souls as case study. I will examine
the role of level design, lore-based narrative and gameplay to show how they all
perform the incompleteness. Videogames are known to be a multifaceted medium in
the sense that it implements elements from various other media and structures them
around an idea of interactive design to model and storage compact forms of agency
(Nguyen, 2020). Each of the three aspects of Dark Souls I will analyze follow a
fairly different grammar to convey their message of incompleteness. A lore-based nar-
rative uses the ellipsis as a rhetoric device to create fragmentation, the interconnected
level design uses circularity as a mean to ironically denounce the illusions of vastity
of the player and the gameplay mechanics use difficulty, resistance to be mastered
and void strength as a meaningful device to suggest helplessness and vanity.
Fragmentation, illusions and helplessness. Each of them follows a different set of
rules but I argue that they all instantiate in different ways, specific to their grammar,
the experience of incompleteness on the level of practical immersion in the game.
But as Nguyen (2020) says about the striving games with esthetic value, playing
implies that the player will “alternate between two very distinctive mental states.
We must shift from the tightly practical attitude of games to the subtle and sensitive
Andriano 5

attitude of aesthetic appreciation” (p. 216). If Dark Souls produces the sense of unclar-
ity and incompleteness on the level of practical immersion through the strategy of frag-
mentation, unveiling illusions and helplessness of gameplay, it also suggests the sense
of enjoyment of the incompleteness on the higher level of reflection of esthetic appre-
ciation. Following Nguyen’s theory of agency in video games, according to which vid-
eogames formalize and compress agency models and set of rules to direct the action
(Nguyen, 2020), we could say that Dark Souls formalizes an agency model based
on learning to enjoy failure and the unresolved fragmentariness of the gameworld’s
meaning. Moreover, some argued that “computer games, of all types of games and
play, are most securely situated in the formal properties of a digital game code,
which is much more measurable and more determinable than that code’s pre-digital
analog: game rules” (Myers, 2010, p. 5). Assuming that the formal properties of video-
games are very well-defined, makes the challenge to understand how they can offer the
experience of incompleteness and openness, much more interesting to analyze.2

Lore as Structural Incompleteness

In this section, I will analyze how Dark Souls narrative conveys incompleteness
through the mean of ellipsis creating a lore-based narrative. The word “lore” refers
to a corpus of traditional knowledge about a specific subject held by a specific
group. It is widely used as a specific storytelling strategy in soulsborne genre as
well as in many other genres, for example, metroidvania. We should not confuse sto-
rytelling, lore and the various devices lore is delivered to the player. Lore is a specific
path taken by a storyteller, and it can be delivered throughout various systems: dia-
logue, cut-scenes, items descriptions, environment, puzzles and choice options
(Kemppinen, 2019). The lore is also different from the level of the plot of the game.
The plot is the succession of events a videogame is composed by and that every
player must come through to beat the game. The lore is not a series of events the
player is directly involved in, but a mythical background of the game world which
can enrich the understanding of the plot and drive its interpretation towards specific
points. It can be seen as a submerged story. Anderson (2019) argued that “lore acts
as a narrative context, usually operating as present manifestations of past diegetic
events, and it tends to appear through procedural design, audiovisual design and
written text descriptions.” In soulsborne videogames directed by Miyazaki, there is
always a narrative reason that allows their author to present a world in ruins. In
Dark Souls the “Age of Fire,” that is the age most of the events of lore are set in, is
finished long ago, such as in Dark Souls III. The story is set at the end of space and
time, where and when the many cycles of rekindling of the Flame have exhausted
it. This twilight choice is the premise that justifies the presence of the lore which
can be sedimented in the architecture of a castle or in the dialogue of a character or
in an item description, and from whose mystery the game world draws its atmosphere
of darkness, menace and tension, all stylistic features of Miyazaki’s games. For the
world around the player to speak of the past, it must have produced great works that
6 Games and Culture 0(0)

have stood the test of time sufficiently to suggest their greatness and at the same time
give the measure of their ephemeral value: the architecture in soulsborne videogames
by Miyazaki is primary composed by ruins of buildings once symbols of power and
richness. However, the twilight choice is sustained by a counter intuitive tone in the
narrative: Miyazaki decides to set his stories at the end of time and history, and at
the same time he adopts a style far from the typical epic tone of apocalyptic narrative.
Rather, his works can be ascribed to the decadent’s traditions in literature. The devas-
tation within which the player moves in the world of Dark Souls is so deep and stag-
nant as to be calming for the effect of general immobility it generates. The player’s
adventure is set in a world that has come to the end of its days, where all of history
is swamped in a horizon of fragmented nebulosity, and in which the eras are com-
pressed and intermingled. Few of the NPCs the player meets have sense, and the
past is but an unverifiable echo that survives only as fragmentary and incomplete
vestiges.
For example, in Bloodborne the most important events in the history of the game-
world happened in an undefined past when the Healing Church, a powerful institution
which controlled the administration of a special curative blood, ruled the political and
religious life of the gameworld. As players, you must recollect the clues of what hap-
pened in the past, even though the Church has now lost its power and the institution has
disappeared. One could say that in soulsborne videogames, there is history but no his-
toriography, with all the problems this asymmetry entails. This premises creates what
Vella (2015) called “undefined entities,” objects, situations and information the player
is not aware the function of. There’s no certainty about the information the game pro-
vides, because the player is not always aware of the interests behind the exposition of
the amount of information she can find. Many times, NPCs manipulate the player in
order to elicit her to take a particular path, only at the end of which, the player discov-
ers the actual value of it. In other cases, it is unclear what are the outcomes of certain
choices, and this increases the difficulty of sorting wrong and true information. It is the
case of the two Primordial Serpents in Dark Souls. They give two contradictory stories
about the lore of the world the adventure is set in and the scope of the adventure and the
general purpose of the story. Frampt works as a defense of Gwyn’s purposes. He tells
the player she is the successor of Gwyn’s power, a chosen undead to fulfill the task and
restore the power of the Flame. On the other hand, Kaathe tells the player a different
story. He says that the player that she is just a puppet in the hand of a conspiracy
plotted by Gwyn to destroy the humans and carry on his legacy. And there’s no
way to understand which one is telling the truth. In addition to this confusion, Dark
Souls has two different endings, depending on the choices of the player. This adds
an additional layer of confusion, since the general purpose of the story or the true
version of the lore is not clarified by a univocal ending which can be traced backwards
to follow the line of a true version. Even from an iconic point of view, the two
Primordial Serpents, seem to share the same body, extending its length towards two
different points: one above the ground, Frampt, the other one underground, Kaathe.
They represent a perfect visual metaphor of the stylistic choice taken by Dark Souls
Andriano 7

that is refusing to offer a synthesis of the contradiction but rather embracing it in its
unresolved confusion. As I said above, videogame as a medium implies a double alter-
nate state for the player: the immersive practical one and the reflection. However,
although the next elements of Dark Souls (level design and gameplay mechanics)
I will analyze can be framed in this theory of alternate state, narrative does not fit ade-
quately in the frame. Since it is conveyed above all by the means of written text in the
descriptions of items and dialogues with NPCs, narrative already is a reflective section
in the flow of playing. Thus, considering the case of lore-based narrative, the immer-
sive practical fragmentation and the incompleteness we experience while collecting the
lore, coincides with the awareness of the incompleteness and the suggestion to enjoy it
without any resolving answer, realized on the higher level of reflection. As I will show
in the following paragraphs, in other sections of the game the two levels are separated
and they work together to create two synergically interconnected strategy suggesting a
dream of completeness on the level of immersive flow, and denouncing the illusion the
flow itself creates about the dream of completeness.

The Illusion of Vastity in Dark Souls Level Design

I showed how Dark Souls expresses the feeling of uncertainty and contradiction
throughout its storytelling mechanics, creating a sense of incompleteness in the
player in the overall reflection about the game alongside in the practical exploration
of the lore. In this section, I will examine how level design conspires to create the
same feeling through the grammar of space and movement rather than discursivity
and language. As Smith et al. (2008), claim: “Levels are the space where a player
explores the rules and mechanics of a game; as such, good level design is critical to
the game design process” (p. 75). Level design is critical in teaching the player how
the videogame must be played. In order to do it, it can use illusion as a strategy to
convey the rules of the gameworld. In the history of art, perspective is the discovery
of a rule of projection in order to reproduce a 3D space onto a 2D surface. One can
call perspective an illusion of depth. As in the case of perspective, sometimes an illu-
sion is needed in order to give a proper image of reality. Vella (2015) argued that “it is
a feature of most gameworlds that they aim to give the impression of a represented
world that is much greater than the frequently narrow confines of the domain that is
actually modelled by the game system.” Dark Souls level design is structured above
the same principle: the open and interconnected map of Dark Souls seems extremely
wide to the novice. It is structured to give a sense of distance from the starting point
during the exploratory phase, of loneliness and the sense of being lost thanks to the
presence of multiple paths and the absence of a map accessible via a user interface.
Another reason is a gameplay one: the absence of fast travel in the early phases of
the videogame. This choice forces the player to walk by foot all around the world,
resulting in an expansion of the perception of spaces. In addition to this, the risk of
death and the difficulty of the videogame make the progress slower and more cautious.
In case of death and respawn, the player will respawn at the last checkpoint visited, and
8 Games and Culture 0(0)

she will follow again all the path long, and this will add another layer in the perception
of vastity: vastity through repetition of a long path the player is obliged to walk by foot.
As Vella (2015) explains:

After the initial, linear opening sequence in the Undead Asylum, the player enters
Lordran, the game’s proper milieu, at Firelink Shrine. A number of paths diverge in dif-
ferent directions, leaving it up to the player to choose where to go. This opening area is
located on a small outcrop of rock jutting out over a gorge whose bottom is shrouded in
mist. Above the player’s head, mountains reach upwards, their peaks out of sight. The
unusually vertical organization of the gameworld’s topography is on full display here,
with the gameworld suggesting an indefinite extent.

Dark Souls hybrid design, halfway between a pure open world and a rigid level
sequence, which seems to suggest a metroidvania inspiration, achieves an almost par-
adoxical goal for it performs vastness on the level of immersive practical flow, but only
to provide the experience of its perspective illusion on the level of reflection outcome
at the end of massive explorations of certain area. This happens because Dark Souls
deconstructs the topographical strategies of its own map through the mechanism of
shortcut: opening a passageway between two areas the player explored separately,
but which are connected by a passage that at the beginning of the exploration of a
certain area, was closed. The game obliges the player to explore each whole area
searching for the right path to open the shortcut. Once discovered, a shortcut makes
the path towards hot spot of the map extremely smooth and straightforward, and
their discovery suggests a sense of mastery to the player over a hostile world.
Therefore, the discovery of a shortcut works as a practical reward and even though
it is not a spatial advancement, it implies a movement advantage. The feeling of
opening a door that wouldn’t open when the player first found it, of taking a
blocked lift or climbing down a rusted staircase, gives a unique sense of fulfilment
and achievement, because it shows the player has conquered a hostile world that
resists the player’s control. However, the shortcut has not only a reward function,
but it also shows the player that instead of moving away from her starting point, she
has gone round in circles. The mechanic of shortcut has not only a reward function
but also an opposite function of anti-reward: uncovering the player expectations
about the game. Dark Souls level design echoes the lines written by T. S. Eliot
(1943) in Four Quartets: “We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all
our exploring/ Will be to arrive where we started/ And know the place for the first
time.” It is only with this turn that the player really controls the starting point and
the space around her. In addition to offer a sense of control over a hostile world, the
mechanic of shortcut is the key to defy the belief in the vastity of the gameworld.
The vastness of Dark Souls gameworld is illusory, but its subjective experience is
extremely diluted, and the shortcuts offer the concrete proof of the player’s illusion.
Dark Souls level design is a suggestion of vastness, not its realization. In order to
suggest the feeling of vastness in a videogame, there are two different ways:
Andriano 9

• the large-scale repetition of modules of the gameworld

• the small-scale creation of an interconnected world

The first case seems to aspire to the creation of the vastness as actual endless juxtapo-
sition. No Man’s Sky (Hello Games, 2016) is a procedural example of how this aspi-
ration can be interpreted through level design. I argue that this is a brutal way to use
level design to convey the performativity of infinite. The second case is like the strat-
egy in action in Dark Souls. As others have noted: “this sense of a totality that cannot
be perceived, that can, in fact, hardly even be conceived in its entirety, finds an echo in
the category of aesthetic judgment that Kant identifies as the sublime” (Vella, 2015). In
this way, the vastness remains entangled in the circular architecture of Lordran, which
becomes a perfect crystallization of the concept of its impossibility and of the illusion
attached to it. The meaning formalized by the level design of Dark Souls becomes the
impossibility of the realization of vastness. In this sense, the mechanism of creating the
perception of vastness, is like the esthetic feeling of sublime as described by Immanuel
Kant. Since sublime is a sense of loss of control over something much more powerful
than the spectator, perceived from a safe spot, I argue that the level design of Dark
Souls suggests the feeling of sublime. This is because the level design of Dark
Souls offers the player the performativity of the loss of control of the space around
her. The experience of sublime is created by the fact that playing a game “requires anal-
ysis practiced as performance, with direct feedback from the system” (Aarseth, 2003,
p. 5). Thus, in a game there are both the component of analysis from a safe spot, and the
component of performativity of playing something behind the control of the player.
The alternate state Nguyen talked about above and that I am using as a framework
to interpret the strategy Dark Souls uses to create meaning. In Dark Souls, the emphasis
given to the loss of control is extreme and the moments of rarefaction to recollect the
analysis in tranquility are well inserted and give rhythm to the game. In addition to
provide the performativity of vastness perception, the game also provides the aware-
ness of the illusion about it, defying the expectations of the player. These two
aspects could seem contradictory since one states the overwhelming experience of
vastness and the other one states the reward of the control of a very compressed
world, but they are two parts of the same strategy, that is making the player discover
her impotence in relation to a world that follows rules she cannot entirely control, by
repeatedly contradicting her expectations. Think, of all areas, of Sen’s fortress, a place
full of deadly traps, the true test for those who wish to reach Anor Londo, the city of the
gods. The ominous and oppressive darkness of the fortress could have never hosted the
presence of mid-checkpoints in the middle of the area. For this reason, the only check-
point of Sen’s Fortress is set at the end of the level and can only be discovered after a
whole exploration in a straight run without dying. In this case the game space manip-
ulates the player perception, game style and movement, because she is obliged to
extreme attention and to use a safe-style gameplay in order to succeed in conquering
the level and advance to the next one. This creates a sense of illusory vastity that is not
matched by the actual vastity of the game, and that is then disproved as illusory at the
10 Games and Culture 0(0)

end of the exploration. Moreover, Dark Souls level design is developed vertically
rather than horizontally. This allows for more compactness in space, but it also
stretches the experience, as it is almost never possible to descend quickly into the
depths. This made it necessary to make fall damage particularly punishing, to give a
sense of the depth of verticality. As a result, distances that appear to be reachable
by jumping down often turn out to be deadly. It would be wrong to say that Dark
Souls level design embodies vastness, but it certainly erects a monument to the unsuc-
cessful attempt to harness it. The level design of Dark Souls performs the mockery of
wanting to control it all and it is designed to give the player the sense of the impossi-
bility of her ambition of exploring an infinite space, because the player’s expectation of
having explored a vast space, and the merit that would come from it, turns out to be an
illusion. We can see here the double state required to the player in a clearer way than the
way it emerged in my analysis about the narrative elements of Dark Souls. The practical
immersion in the game seems to suggest a form of control through the device of shortcut,
but the reflection on the structure and intricacies of level design works as unveiling the
illusion of the player about vastness. But the awareness of the illusion, exercises that
form of acceptance of one’s own incompleteness. In this case, incompleteness is not
found in the game itself, as it was for the narrative, but in the player’s illusions about
the structure of the world, which mocks her with its vertical and circular design, creating
the perspective illusion of vastness. The agency model proposed by Dark Souls in rela-
tion to space and movement on the practical level, and the reflection about the design
that conveys it, can be seen as aiming to create in the player the Negative Capability
described by Keats (1899) as the ability to be in “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts,
without any irritable reaching after fact and reason” (p. 277).

The Vanity of Strength in Gameplay

I claimed that we can interpret Dark Souls level design and lore-based narrative as
complex tools that teach the players the futility of their ambitions, beliefs and illusions,
the game itself generates leveraging the desire of control of the player. In this section, I
will discuss “the role played by the game’s elevated kinaesthetic difficulty in prevent-
ing the player from obtaining complete knowledge of its cosmos” (Vella, 2015). Since
a videogame conveys its message in the most basic terms at the level of the gameplay
mechanics (Koster, 2004), in order to understand the poetics of Dark Souls and the
value narrative and level design develop, gameplay must be analyzed to understand
how solid and interconnected each section of the game is with one another. Two
main aspects of the gameplay must be analyzed:

• the emphasis given to the combat system and the levelling system which has direct
implications in the narrative of the game
• the emphasis given to the exploration of the gameworld, which has direct implica-
tions in the level design of the game
Andriano 11

The combat system in Dark Souls is based in an inescapable way on the presence of
stamina, which, by limiting the number of consecutive blows that can be thrown, in
combination with the tight and pressing pattern of most of the enemies against
which the player fights, define an extremely methodical gameplay that depends on
paying special attention to not running out of available stamina. Both components
shape the game’s narrative and provide details both explicitly and implicitly about the
plot and the history of the game world in which the adventure unfolds. The exploration
phase is structured around the search for items scattered around the game world often in
locations that are even more difficult to reach the more important the objects are for the
unravelling of important plot or lore details. This exploratory structure allows a continu-
ity with the combat phase and an integration that uses combat as a mean to the resolution
of a puzzle posed by the exploration phase. An enemy might hold an object required for
the advancement of the game or simply an object that contains details of the game
world’s history. As others have already noted about Dark Souls, “the topography of
Lordran is structured in such a way as to constantly reveal to the player’s gaze areas
for possible exploration that she cannot yet reach, promising more to the world that
remains unknown tempered by the frustration of its remaining out of reach” (Vella,
2015). This delineates two different interests: one purely ludic, for the advancement
of the adventure, the other more narrative, which depends on the player’s curiosity
and is not necessary for advancement even though it is necessary to unveil the mysteries
of the story. However, it is often the case that the player has no way of knowing in
advance which of the two objects she will be facing. This uncertainty depends on two
factors: the interface minimalism of Dark Souls, which does not make use of maps avail-
able to the players, nor of specific markers to be placed in the game space at the interface
level; and the intricate level design, which often makes the player lose track of where she
is, favoring exploratory attention even of what will turn out to be only dead ends or side
streets. Soulsborne videogames designed by Miyazaki stimulate the immersion by
“branching paths and dead ends, which encourage players […] to mentally map the path-
ways of the environment” (Calleja, 2011, p. 80). The player experience of Dark Souls is
meant to create an atmosphere in which the player can be apparently interpreted as a
hero. The epic battles, the power-up mechanics (level-up with souls) and the progression
rhythm of the game seem to suggest this conception. However, there are other features
that suggest a different perspective. I explained how the defy of the dreams of complete-
ness happens at two different levels of lore systematic incompleteness and level design
illusion of vastity. We can see the outcomes narrative and level design produce in the
light of the interpretation of gameplay mechanics. In order to analyze the outcomes nar-
rative and level design produce on the interpretation of gameplay I shall analyze the
ending of Dark Souls. There are two possible endings in Dark Souls:

• after defeating Lord Gwyn, the player takes his place as fuel to the Flame and rekin-
dle it
• after defeating Lord Gwyn, the player takes her way out the Gwyn’s arena and the
Dark Age settles in
12 Games and Culture 0(0)

In both cases we do not know anything of the future. Even in the second case, when the
player finally becomes Lord of Men, the player does not experience nor prefigurate her
power. As well as in the first case, in which the player only becomes another martyr of
a conspiracy whose nature the player himself is not certain of. In both cases the uncer-
tainty and incompleteness of information is unavoidable. As a result, the outcomes of
gameplay are anti-climactic because the player is more powerful, but she does not
know the ultimate reason why she has acquired this power, other than to be able to
beat the game itself. That is to say, the game requires from the player the strength
to look deeper and more clearly at the lack of a definitive answer the game itself
has to offer. Being more powerful has not a real purpose other than itself. This
implies being more powerful is void from a narrative point of view. In this sense,
gameplay conspires with narrative in order to create a sense of futility and a critique
of the desire of total control of the game, when the player discover the delusional nar-
rative implication of gameplay. So, I showed how even gameplay, interacting with the
movement and spatial configuration of the gameworld and with the narrative implica-
tions of the player’s actions works by leveraging the double nature of the medium:
from an immersive practical point of view gameplay revolves around the search for
power and control, but from a reflection point of view, it ultimately designs not
actual control over a hostile world, as Doom (iD Software, 2016) does for instance,
but a sense of helplessness and void power. Even though level design, narrative and
game mechanics work following different grammars and rules, they all suggest the
same message of incompleteness and unresolved contradiction and in order to do
this they all use the same structural strategy, offered by the double alternate nature
of videogame medium.
In so far, I claimed that Dark Souls suggests enjoyment along with the awareness of
its own incompleteness on the higher level of aesthetic reflection of the actions the
game requires the player to perform. Yet, it could seem that this is not a claim
based on any explicit strategy of design. Talking about what the game mechanics
are is something, talking about the meaning of them is something else entirely.
There’s no direct suggestion that the game is telling the player to enjoy the actions
it requires to perform. It could be that the game wants from us despair when we
realize the nature of the agency it sculpted for us. But I argue that to properly
answer this dilemma about what the game asks from us in terms of interpretative reflec-
tion of its own requested agency models, we should analyze the narrative framework of
the game. Specifically, I argue that we should be entitled to consider the game’s request
as a request for despair only if it has the characteristics of a tragedy. So, my next ques-
tion is whether the game is a tragedy or not.

Is Dark Souls a Tragedy?

As a work whose primary interest, both at the level of narrative, level design and game-
play, is the performativity of the feeling of incompleteness, Dark Souls is an implicit
reflection about the theme of completeness and control of reality on the level of what
Andriano 13

we above called non-practical reflection. The expectation of a powerful control on

reality is the theme of many works in the history of art, and it is mainly expressed
in the search for immortality. As Klotz (1979) argues, the history of myths and liter-
ature “demonstrate the almost obsessive need for human beings of all cultures to
come to grips with their own mortality by opposing it, psychologically and aestheti-
cally, with stories of its being overcome”. The search for immortality is a remedy
for the incompleteness we perceive in everyday life and the symbol of the frustration
of the ambitions is the occurrence of death as the final obstacle for every effort to reach
any kind of objective. There are many examples of this pattern in the history of liter-
ature: an ambitious hero is confronted with the limits of reality and the main answer to
the awareness of limits is trying to overcome them in a definitive way, thus overcoming
the prince of all limits, that is death. It is a pattern starting from the first recognized
myths from any culture, from Chinese one to Greek one. The legend of the Holy
Grail, the Epic of Gilgamesh, the hybris of Oedipus and the ambition of Faust are
the main examples of the western literature about the search for control which is a
form of the search for immortality. The ambition can take various shapes in the
history of literature, but one of the most common one is the search for immortality
or great power, a surrogate of the immortality as power gives the illusion of control
over time. However common, the theme of the search for power and immortality
has many outcomes in various traditions and it is judged in different ways. There is
one tradition, for example, that explores the catastrophic consequences of the
dreams of completeness, immortality and absolute control. Within this tradition
about the issues connected with the desire for immortality, I will consider two main
interpretations of the frustration derived from the impossibility of fulfillment of
dreams of infinite power and death being overcome: Greek Tragedy and Zen
Buddhism. The sense of the tragic is a function of the awareness of the limit accom-
panied by a desire that cannot accept that limit. The tragic outcomes of existence
arise from the discrepancy between reality and mental expectations, in which our aspi-
rations grow out of control. The tragic is not a character of reality but belongs to the
way we semiotically relate to it. In this sense we can interpret for example the tragedy
of Sisyphus: the tragedy is installed not in the mere actions performed by Sisyphus,
neuter in themselves but in the social and linguistic interpretation we do of his condi-
tion as human beings. As Camus (1942) argues, the world in itself is not reasonable or
unreasonable, but the absurd derives from our desire of clarity which is disappointed
when confronted with reality. Since the world in itself is neuter, beyond the good and
the evil, the tragic outcome of reality depends on our assumptions about what reality
should be. Tragedy is a function of our desires. A player of Dark Souls could be
tempted to put the game in the framework of tragedy or at least in the framework of
absurdity as described by Albert Camus. Since Dark Souls is a game in which level
design, game mechanics and narrative conspire to suggest the intuition of control
only to defy it when it peaks the belief of it being possible, it follows the tragic
scheme of expectations, disappointment and desperation. However, Dark Souls is
designed to punish desperation as well as over-confidence. Dark Souls proposes a
14 Games and Culture 0(0)

symmetry that is not explored in the tragic scheme. From desperation follows the
reluctance of action and stagnation, which are punished in Dark Souls because in
order to advance, one must be defiant towards the game. At the same time,
however, Dark Souls punishes overconfidence, as it leads to inaccurate risk assessment
and slows progress, especially at points where difficulty is concentrated, such as boss
fights. Dark Souls is designed to force the player to balance the blindness of safety and
the desperation of inaction through a system of constant adjustments. Since Dark Souls
punishing design entails a symmetry between overrating ability as well as underrating
it, it cannot be put in the framework of a tragic interpretation. Let’s see if it can be put
in the framework of a Zen-like interpretation.
This means that we are not entitled to see in the game a suggestion of the feeling of
despair in response to the awareness of the agency models it requested from the player.
I argue that, vice versa, it can be put in the framework of a Zen-like interpretation, and
that that frame entitles us to read the game as a complex learning tool toward enjoy-
ment of the failure, incompleteness and ambiguity.

Dark Souls as a Zen Practice

It is difficult to speak of Zen as a single monolithic block of ideas, starting from the fact
that Zen by its very nature resists a clear conceptualization of its founding principles. I
claim that Zen answers to the same issue as tragedy: the discovery of the impossibility
of fulfilling the infinity of ambition. But where tragedy answers with desperation, like
Oedipus blinding himself, or Romeo killing himself at the sight of his beloved, appar-
ently dead, the Zen adept answers to the discrepancy between reality and desire in a
disinterested way. The Zen adept can do that because she gradually came to eliminate
desire from her life, and to do so she had to depersonalize herself, as desire, expecta-
tions and ambitions are functions of subjectivity. The path of Zen leads to a progressive
“coincidence between subjectivity and objectivity” (Hofstadter, 1979), not in the sense
that objective reality tends to conform to the structure of subjectivity, but the reverse.
This is why Zen insists on the concept of stepping outside oneself in order to achieve a
degree of depersonalization and lack of desire. As Camus claims the discrepancy
between reality and ambition is caused by our language for language multiplies the
virtual possibilities of humankind, but they do not correspond to the translatability
in action of that virtuality. Where the tragic hero destroys himself in the delusion,
the Zen adept accepts her condition because she reveals reality as non-sense, as well
as our ambition to control it in a complete manner. Since Dark Souls is structured
to create a sense of epic fulfillment of tremendous challenge against terrible odds,
just to reveal the vain nature of the conquers the game itself makes possible, it is
close to the Zen tradition which tends to denounce the non-sense nature of ambitions
and desires and the overall message of the game can be summarized in the critique of
the nostalgia for a never experienced absolute control. Dark Souls offers room for
action to fuel the ambition of the player and has a number of mechanics that
suggest the empowerment mechanism as the hinge around which the whole game is
Andriano 15

structured. But the game creates an expectation only to deny it in order to make more
powerful the performativity of its massage against the mechanics the game itself pro-
poses as key mechanics. In this sense I found a peculiar irony in the mechanics of the
game that is very similar to the Zen monks’ sarcasm. In many koan, they are depicted
as the masters of paradox and unusual situations. There are also many koan with a dis-
tinctive structure: they propose a situation only to prove it wrong according to the prin-
ciple of Zen, just like Dark Souls proposes a situation (in which the player is strong and
complete) which is then proved as sarcastically wrong. Finally, Dark Souls combat
design, especially when it comes to important boss-fights, can create the flow experi-
ence many have pointed out as an experience, videogames have the features to instan-
tiate (Procci, Bowers, 2011). Flow experience is also associated with meditation
practices such as Zen meditation (Rufi et al., 2016). I claim that Dark Souls design
is structured to create a sense of depersonalization as described by Zen tradition. As
a result, Dark Souls can be interpreted as a critique to the nostalgia of absolute
control, and it makes the player feel the disappointment occurred when reality defies
desires and expectations. Dark Souls design in terms of narrative, level design and pun-
ishment mechanics of gameplay, performs the incompleteness, while obviously com-
plete from a formal point of view being a completed and commercially published work.
However, it uses incompleteness as a narrative strategy at the level of practical immer-
sion in the game to point the illusion of the player in the reflection phase that alternate
the practical phase. The traces of what Henry Miller (1977) talking about Mishima
called the “splendour of melancholy”, live on in Dark Souls, making the player feel
the sense of victory gained at the cost of great effort, and then mockingly showing
the futility of it all in a Zen-like distance acquired from one’s own efforts.
That distance, I claim, is the trace that entitles us to see the request for enjoyment
out of the agency models the game designs, based on incompleteness and ambiguity.

Conclusion
Dark Souls setting seems to suggest a tragic-like and epic tone of narrative. However,
I showed how gameplay, level design and narrative can create a sense of anti-climactic atmo-
sphere which denounces the ambitions of absolute control of the world at various levels,
shifting the tone of narrative from epic tradition to the decadent one. I argued that this atmo-
sphere is close to the Zen philosophy interpretation of ambitions and desire of absolute
control as depicted by Camus. As Vella (2015) says, Dark Souls demonstrates how
“even after extended play has resulted in mastery of the game, there remains at least an
opening for the possibility of surprize and further revelation.” “Mystery” prevails over
“mastery” (Vella, 2015), and only accepting the unresolved openness of the work, we
can interpret it properly. Dark Souls leaves the player not to the melancholic acceptance
of frustrated desire, which would denounce a constraint to the aspiration of absolute
control, and which would be a correct interpretation if and only if Dark Souls stopped on
the level of incompleteness suggested on the immersive practical flow. But since videogame
requires a double state from the player, we should interpret Dark Souls as a work designing
16 Games and Culture 0(0)

the enjoyment of uncertainty, that is the only means to overcome the illusion of absolute
control. It makes possible to instantiate a certain performance and then reflecting critically
about it, denouncing the illusions the performativity of immersion produced.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of
this article.

ORCID iD
Angelo Maria Andriano https://orcid.org/0009-0001-9987-2321

Notes
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v = zRGRJRUWafY
2. Some of the ideas expressed here appear in a different form in some of my articles about
souls - like games on the Italian website Silicon Arcadia.

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Author Biography
Angelo Maria Andriano graduated BA at University of Trento, in Philosophy of
Science with a research in the field of the philosophy of the free will, with prof.
Federico Laudisa. He worked on the thesis at Sorbonne University Paris 1 with
18 Games and Culture 0(0)

prof. Max Kistler for an abroad research project opportunity. Then he moved to Milan
where he is currently enrolled in the MA program about aesthetics and
phenomenology at University of Milan. He is deeply interested in the way the mechan-
ics of works of art convey specific message from purely mechanical operations. His
other interests are in film studies and epistemology. He has a YouTube channel
called “F For Frame” about the formal aspects of films and how narrative is delivered
by the formal choices of a film.