MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

FromSoftware’s Dark Souls role playing games (RPGs) are an unlikely commercial success, a dark fantasy epic with a complex control scheme told through an intentionally obtuse narrative. The fan community has emerged to collaboratively construct knowledge about the games – passionately debating lore, crunching numbers for character builds, and sharing the secrets that they find within the games – to the point where experienced and new players alike have become aware that the paratextual resources around the games are something akin to required reading or viewing.

The Dark Souls games are examples of collaborative storytelling between the individual player, the developer, and the community of fans. Kirkland (2009) noted that collaborative storytelling in games could perhaps be described as a situation where the narrative is “reliant for its complete unfolding upon players performing in a particular way (p. 72).” Thus far there has been very little scholarly research that has focused on the Dark Souls series. Vella (2015) used Dark Souls (2011) as a framing device for the “ludic sublime,” a moment in playing the game where the player must realize they cannot obtain complete mastery over the game’s systems.

The proposed paper is a close examination of the collaborative nature of these games. Specifically, I will analyze how the community of fans participated in constructing the mechanical understanding and narrative of the most recent game in the franchise, Dark Souls 3 (2016). To do this I will employ a textual analysis of the online content created by the fan community on two sites, the Dark Souls 3 subreddit and the Fextralfe Dark Souls 3 wiki, as well as discussions between members of the community on those sites.