Emotional impact is one legitimate criteria for judging the value of a piece of art. The value of a game like Dark Souls is at least in part due to the emotion in dredges up from its audience indeed, this is the case with many works of art. Think of Dark Souls as a self-esteem kit for people who can take marching orders from giant talking snakes called Kingseeker Frampt and Darkstalker Kaathe without withering a little inside.' Instead, the game is good because playing makes you feel good, and that goodness is amplified by the recent memory of having been very bad at the game, of taking wrong turns and mistiming attacks against zombies. 'What no one talks about when they praise Dark Souls,' he continues, 'is what it means-what immemorial questions of human nature its difficulty and disorder evoke. 'When making the case for Dark Souls, almost every defender stumbles into the affective fallacy, wherein the value of a work is tied to the emotions it dredges up from its audience,' writes Thomsen. The game is teaching you, but it's not teaching you anything worth knowing.'Įxcept, of course, the mechanics of the game itself the lore underlying the visually unique world of Lordran that creative director Hidetaka Miyazaki and the Dark Souls team has crafted the stats and other 'rubbish' that make any role-playing-game worth playing. 'As a player, you proceed not by thinking through problems but by randomly trying anything and everything until something haphazard sticks. 'Dark Souls takes so long to play because it refuses to tell you its basic ground rules, then kills you over and over again for failing to understand them,' Thomsen argues. Indeed, the reason you eat chocolate cake and the reason you eat pizza may be entirely different, and yet you may find you enjoy them both largely because of their differences. If you're the sort that prefers a hack-and-slash RPG like Dark Souls, play the bloody game.

If you're the sort who prefers spending forty hours reading Tolstoy, read Tolstoy.

In other words, Thomsen is making no sense. Saying that Dark Souls doesn't satisfy all the same thematic desires in a gamer that War and Peace achieves for its readers is like saying that your pizza isn't as chocolaty as that piece of chocolate cake you just ate and is therefore a complete and utter waste of time.

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