No Mastery Without Mystery

“No Mastery Without Mystery: Dark Souls and the Ludic Sublime”

“by Daniel Vella”

“Abstract:”

“Prominent critical perspectives on games have adopted ontological framings of the game object, and, linked to this, a privileging of games’ procedural nature, focusing on the game system in itself as the source of meaning.”

“This paper argues that these discourses align with what Jacques Rancière termed the “representative regime” of art, and that, instead, much can be gained by adopting the perspective of the “aesthetic regime”, which considers the artwork not as an objective system or logos, but as an object of thought for its recipient.”

“Such an understanding allows us to align the philosophical aesthetics of Kant, Ingarden and Iser with preliminary work done in the field of game hermeneutics, with Arsenault and Perron’s concept of the “magic cycle” of game play, and with a phenomenological approach to the game object.”

“This will let us theorize games as aesthetic objects, mental constructs developed by the player as she engages with the unseen game system — which, in turn, allows us to suggests that what may be called the “ludic sublime” is a crucial aesthetic moment in the player’s engagement with a game, defined by the player’s drive towards mastery of the game coming face-to-face with the impossibility of obtaining complete, direct knowledge of the underlying system.”

“Finally, the concept of the ludic sublime, and its aesthetic implications, will be framed through an analysis of Dark Souls that will demonstrate the aesthetic mechanisms of the ludic sublime in action.”

“Keywords: Phenomenology, hermeneutics, aesthetics, sublime, proceduralism, interpretation, Dark Souls.”