What is a Souls?

oh no one can agree there either. but there are interesting dimensions to the debate.

i would say generally speaking in non interactive media genres are categories based on concurrent elements of style and plot and theme. the odd thing is whether or not its a taxonomy situation with genre below form, since clearly some genres appear in different forms (novels, short stories, plays, etc)

i think form influences genre but genre isn’t subservient to form i guess. but with video games or all other interactive media it’s tricky, because even though we borrow a lot of genres from film in particular (adventure, action, etc) there are obviously features unique to video games that complicate those categories. in a certain sense almost all video games are ‘action’ games, right?

but then there’s also the problem of the difference between imitation and genre, which i guess is going on here in trying to figure out what makes ‘souls games’ different. we might be resistant to calling it a unique genre because we can see the busy web you have to create to explain where the various elements of the games can be traced to other things that are clearly not in the same genre, and use them as an argument that dark souls (etc) is not a genre of its own.

but then you’re put in the weird position of having to argue that all genres are these monadic things that share nothing with one another, as though comedy owes nothing to drama and so on.

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What interests me about classification discussions is:

  • What elements make people group media together? What is essential before it ‘feels’ different? Can we examine those boundaries? I’m only interested in descriptive, not proscriptive labels.
  • Knowing elements that constitute a grouping, which are essential to create the experience and which can be changed? Pop art lives and dies on this, as you are forced to work within established veins while picking and examining bits to remove and steal in hopes of gaining those experiential attributes.
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I think this discussion can be useful insofar as it helps delineate the relevant games’ successes and in that delineation help developers intent on iteration better understand their own design practices. Beyond that it seems like it can only grow to be academic categorization for its own sake (which I guess is fun for some).

There’s talk ITT about stuff like shortcuts and the stamina bar but I think a vital part of these games is a notable degree of obfuscation and even arbitrary meanness to the design (contrary to the 100% unsupportable claim that the (“good”) Souls games are always Tough But Fair). If Nioh lacks either that would be a significant reduction of the formula imo

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On Berserk DC/PS2, I don’t think the PS2 one counts because it has too many enemies at a time. This is something I think is important in Soulslikes.

Genre is a way of reading.

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for better or worse, this is pretty much it - but that was the only (really) good part so that’s what i remember

Are video game genres ways of playing?

And are there paraliterary video game genres?

There are paraludic video game genres! Visual novels and twine games and fmv games!

Yes video game genres are ways of playing. If anything, it’s even more clear that’s what they are for videogames than in literature.

I mean this is an entire thread trying to codify what kind of experience the Souls series of games are, with the focus being mostly in how they are played and what mechanics and aesthetics signal that a game is Souls-adjacent.

In such stories, to read for such character depth is blatantly to misread the text

just stretch that towards the souls games for a moment. Imagine a hypothetical Skyrim player who tries Dark Souls to see what the big deal is and rejects it out of hands because it’s an rpg without explicitly listed sidequests, an epic main plot to ignore, a traditional open world, etc. They would be playing the game wrong. I know someone who literally feels that when he dies because he wasn’t paying enough attention to his surroundings, it is the game’s fault. That person is definitely trying to shunt Dark Souls into a genre it doesn’t belong to.

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So is “3d action rpg” not a genre because it doesn’t tell us enough?

Are musical genres listened to differently? Is the experience and expectations for the listener really the defining difference between Celtic folk music and hip hop, or is it differences in instrumentation, vocals, and subject matter. What about subgenres? Are we supposed to listen to grindcore and black metal differently?

Are we shelving Snatcher beside Zork, the Maltese Falcon, or the whack-a-mole machine?

If Dark Souls 4 is a musou game is it no longer a Dark Souls game? When is this all just really about marketing? Does the true Dark Souls stop there? And am I alright with musou being a codified subgenre because it’s so well entrenched?

I think I have to go back to work today.

Well, don’t you?

Do you go into a hip hop track expecting to hear complex melodies and weird instrumentation and being disappointed by their absence?

Did you listen to Discordance Axis first or did you start with more accessible grind or a generally more accessible genre before finding the appeal of the more niche stuff?

I mean it’s admittedly kind of a rhetorical cheat but reframing things from the perspective that genres are lenses that we use to understand works does free us up from questions of fuzzy genre borders or (in music especially) “is this a real genre?” Delany calls them interpretive codes and I think that’s totally fair. Black Metal is straight up unintelligible to a lot of people but they can kind of grow into it by listening to older metal and learning to interpret the music more remote from common experience.

And there’s neat liberties to be ahistorical with it. Delany doesn’t mention it explicitly in either of my quotes (I just cut it down to relevant definitions and examples) but it enables you to read Frankenstein as Science Fiction or Horror even though it existed before those genres were codified. And you don’t even have to make the preposterous claim that a genre existed 500 years before a word existed to describe it.

Gamebooks, Interactive Fiction and Hypertext all have broad similarities but were genres codified at different times in different media, and there’s nothing stopping me from evaluating Zork as a gamebook (and in this case it is likely a fruitful sort of misreading)

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Keep half expecting someone in this thread to call DotA a Diablo clone

quite a lot of years ago, I was making a point of movement being a constant that spanned all™ genres … but maybe back then it was easier to distinguish between genres when you are moving a spaceship from left to right shooting things (shump), a guy roboter from left to right shooting things (contra/probotector, a.k.a moving a guy from left to right … OK OK, sometimes also just beating them up (beltscrollers), moving and hopping a sprite from left to right (jump’n’run), etc. etc.

Of course, there’s a fine line here, but everyone seems to agree that moving a chess-piece from left to right != moving Blanka from left to right.




more recently, I remembered that notion again and re-thought it, 2016 version then:

Moving guy dork in Souls-title 1-3 from left to right in 3D is obviously different from moving Nico Bellic from left to right in GTA4, or fallout4 guy … or is it?
Townsfolk are less likely to act like souls-folk/F.O.Es, granted, but technically seen, movement still is kinda the same when you’re an avatar that looks somewhat like a human-being thingy. Run forwards, jump, etc. … OK, strafe-mode is not supported by each avatar, so yeah.
Kinda the same.

So … a decade later, I start to think that it pretty much is defined by the way how the world reacts to you/your avatar. Gonna ponder 'bout that for a while now…

This is the wrong place to make that assumption.

In this thread, the only differences between Call of Duty and Hogan’s Alley are graphical.

It’s fair to note that the camera mechanics in 3D games are as impactful as top-down/side-on choices in 2D. GTA uses 3D platformer camera, which has a lot of intelligent logic and will try to frame from behind but not require it; the analog stick moves the character relative to the camera’s perspective (i.e., up is towards the top of the screen, not the character’s front).

Souls games get a lot closer to a 3rd-person shooter camera: the user is assumed to be almost always placing the camera, rather than letting it auto-solve, so while it’s possible to get side-on camera angles it’s discouraged. Using the camera is further encouraged by placing the action buttons on the shoulders like a shooter.

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[quote=“BustedAstromech, post:55, topic:3943, full:true”]
It’s fair to note that the camera mechanics in 3D games are as impactful as top-down/side-on choices in 2D.[/quote]
that’s a good point here, wow … for whatever reason I haven’t considered the camera as a possible genre-defining element yet. Thanks for pointing that out!


And even though (or maybe: because?) I cannot stop myself from doing slow pan-shots w/ the right stick in a lot of games, be it SotC, RPGs, Watchdogz or racing games, that didn’t occur to me, huh.




So, connecting the dots now, I started to wonder when VR hits it™ big time, maybe, somewhere in the future … then we’ll have a new way of cam control, right?
And rather than just doing some head tracking stuff in racing games and Ace Combat, it might make for new genre-defining possibilities, hm.

Yeah, VR makes the act of looking a mechanic and a positive action carrying meaning.

Watch people playing Budget Cuts (stealth VR) and you’ll see a good use of crouching and leaning and the beginnings of “don’t look at the scary thing”. Slenderman-esque mechanics will be powerful in VR.

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I know it’s Mark Brown and he really doesn’t need the hits, but I still think this video gets at some important points regarding this subject:

The main reason that I’m embedding this video is to share the parallel he draws with the development of the “roguelike” genre, and the way that he contrasts this with “Doom clones”. As said above, the genre’s first spark is a game that does something so novel that it spawns imitators. These clones will usually err on the side of being too similar rather than too novel. As a consequence, players and critics discussing the nascent genre will often assign criteria for evaluating a game’s adherence that is either too restrictive or too numerous by comparison to those employed for mature, thriving genres.

This can be seen really easily in the example of Metroidvanias, immersive sims, and MOBAs; these are also “genres” in that they have a set of codified characteristics, but they’re stuck in that limited embryonic stage where most of the games are still just aping their progenitors.

Mark also points out that this process trends to focus attention on just one or two forebears at the expense of other games that were operating in adjacent areas before the genre was identified. The premiere example for me is Thief, which is a little bit prototypical for both stealth games and immersive sims, and yet which has been rather bypassed and ignored by the direction both genres have moved since then.

Mark’s solution to all this is to advocate against the restrictive view of genre, in much the way I thought diplo had been doing so in this thread. Genres like platformers and FPS games suggest ways of interacting not unlike Delany’s ways of reading without discriminating against titles that deviate too far from their canonical formulae. As such, I agree that the Souls genre as I am interested in it refers broadly to those games whose objectives and activities sprawl haphazardly along unexpected and unadvertised avenues, and in which progression or exploration is sufficiently work-like that cooperation between players (online or otherwise) is necessary to achieve desirable outcomes… but the beauty of a mature genre is that I can use that as my operating definition without limiting anyone else from defining the genre in their own way, and the disagreement over edge-cars where these definitions clash is what drives the discourse and keeps the genre alive.

Reaching for a game of similar influence as Dark Souls, I’m thinking of Zelda. Zelda was a synthesis of smaller innovations with no genre-defining essence, and every succeeding game appropriated different aspects of it. Instead of defining a genre it reshaped everyone’s expectations about what a game can and should be. Prior to Zelda games were either bite-sized arcade action experiences or plodding huge RPGs. Zelda took influences from both and defined a new way of playing (the console game as a whole, really). Zelda, like Dark Souls, established a new overall structure, a new flow of pacing, new types of satisfactions, cognitive engagements and emotional beats.

It’s interesting to compare Zelda to Nazo no Murasame-Jou. The latter has a very similar top-down perspective with room transitions, but it’s linear, much faster paced, and resets all progress whenever you die. Murasame-Jou was a very well-executed game in the arcade tradition that remained obscure, whereas Zelda took basically the same game engine and created a startling new synthesis. Interestingly both Zelda and Dark Souls felt the need to greatly slow down the pace of their parent action genre.

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Nazo no Murasame-jou is interesting observation. I think Castlequest-Metroid can be used as a similar comparison with the Nazo-Zelda to bring out the specific Metroidvania’ish qualities of Metroid that made it so unique. Or is there anything else pre-Metroid besides Castlequest?

Demon’s Souls (and Dark Souls, by association) came right out of the King’s Field games, which were more of dungeon crawlers than outright action games. It was really a significant heightening, rather than a slowing down, of pace.

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