Cured by games that make you suffered

Once you see this title, you might feel like this article will be a player who is master in “Dark Soul” series telling you how the games like Dark Soul gives you sense of achievement when you beat the challenge. But the truth is, although I love challenges in game, but I never played games like Dark Soul or Sekiro before Eldern Ring comes out.

 

For me, game should be relaxed and light, not as Dark Soul which always makes player concentrate on the game every second. But as Hidetaka Miyazaki’s games have a loyal fan base, there must be a reason behind that, so I decided to try the Eldern Ring.

 

Unlike most games, which the main character is full of power, these games require you to survive, fight, and die in a world full of danger. Miscellaneous monsters can kill you if you're not careful, not to mention BOSS battles that can take hours or even weeks to get through.

 

While some manufacturers pursue visual and effect realism, Hidetaka Miyazaki's work may be closer to "reality".

 

His games are often ridiculed by players for its extremely difficult and inconvenient guidance. Many of the seemingly anti-traditional, anti-game designs in games can be answered with the same answer: Isn't that just the way things are?

 

Some players may complain: Your character has an energy bar, and running with a sword consumes energy that needs to be restored and is too hard.

But isn't that the reality? When you have unlimited opportunities and no risk to make a choice, there is no cost and no timing to make or break a move.

 

And some may complain: Boss battles are so hard that I can't get past them without knowing how to do it.

But isn't that the reality? When we are faced with a big problem and have no idea how to solve it, naturally we will soon encounter setbacks until we practice, think, and find a way.

 

the other may say: The map is really just a map, it doesn't tell me what I'm going to do, there's no location, there's no sign, there's no navigation, and I have to listen to passers-by to tell me where I am?

But isn't that the reality? Map is not a territory, map is the abstraction of reality, before modern people rely too much on GPS and navigation, you do need coordinates and orientation judgment, as well as the guidance of passers-by, sometimes may get some misleading information.

 

The list of "isn't that what reality is?" certainly doesn't go on indefinitely, but in the hyper-dimensional space of video games, Hidetaka Miyazaki has built an incontrovertible palace of his design principles (stamina slots, slow starts, strong penalties, strong bosses, weak numbers, fragmental narratives, complex box-court loopback levels, etc.).

 

In a sense, Miyazaki opened the door to environmental storytelling in videogame, much as Ulysses introduced modern literature to its interlocking, chaotic space-time and free-flowing stream of consciousness. Video games have gone from being told like fairy tales (i.e., "once upon a time... ) to the beginning of the unique literary narrative.

 

It is in this situation that the character played by the player often comes from an ordinary background, without a grand background, and is not the saviour of the world. Whether we come or go, the world goes on, isn't that the reality?

 

This is completely different from the entertainment logic of typical games: the game serves as an escape from reality, softening and feeding back to a garden of dreams more intensely. In the face of soul-bound works, "games serve as a sharp knife to escape". As Simon Parker reveals in an interview, current traditional games "often please their players with childish power fantasies, but the virtues of Miyazaki's work are failure, patience, and hard-to-find accuracy."

 

As mentioned above, most players' spending and playing habits are more like those of children whose tastes are spoiled by sweets. Chests should be rewarded (not monsters or traps) The battle should be like killing a thousand people (not getting killed by a dog while walking down the road), and the map should tell me where to go to get what (instead of learning to read maps, understand directions, and memorize directions).

 

In this sense, we may be surprised to find that Hidetaka Miyazaki's work reveals a truth in its "unique" and inhuman difficulty: We used the imagination of the game may be distorted and domestication, we think this work is so difficult, precisely because a lot of games today are always teases and in a variety of ways to please us, for the game in the world and what should be training has been developed and expected: it ought to be beautiful and happy, full of pleasure and a filter.

 

The game feeds on the player, and the player feeds on this external organ like a giant baby, hiding the difficulties and uncertainties of life into it. Because life is short, games should be more rewarding than difficult.

 

But maybe games can also make you face reality, and even ordinary people can overcome the seemingly impossible little by little, and that's what "difficulty" gives the effort meaning.