Fantasies of Adequacy: Mythologies of Capital in Dark Souls

Abstract

Dark Souls, FromSoftware's 2011 action-RPG, has become synonymous with extreme difficulty. The game's success and influence despite its ostensibly niche appeal make it an outlier in an era of increasingly accessible gaming. Yet in eschewing accessibility Dark Souls offers a different, compensatory appeal. Through an analysis of the game's aesthetics from philological, economic, and postcolonial perspectives, this research argues that Dark Souls’ gameplay constitutes an economic fantasy. The game's difficulty can be overcome in the manner celebrated by capital: hard work. Moreover, this fantasy offers a level playing field, a quantitative accounting of progress, and the opportunity to be better than one's neighbors. Dark Souls offers a fantastic economic simulation in which all of capital's demands are justly and predictably rewarded. It both legitimizes the mythologies of capital and invites players to content themselves with the precarious labor of the loyal employee rather than the power of the owners.