This the second part of a series on the postmodern philosophical ideas in the Souls games, using Dark Souls as the chief example. The first entry is here. This entry is largely spoiler-free.
Fragments of Knowledge
The one thing that makes Dark Souls a definitively postmodern game is its approach to narrative. There is no narrator, no cut scenes, not even a linear sequence of scenarios with story-relevant objectives. Information is distributed throughout the world in three major forms: character dialogue, item descriptions, and setting (including spatial relationships, environment designs, and enemy placements). Aside from the player's journey and a few NPCs, the story in Dark Souls is largely the history of its world. Tricks of time travel and undeath allow us to see historical settings in an unchanging, ruined legacy of their past.
Lorehunting, as the process of understanding the story in Dark Souls is called, is in large part the history and archaeology of Lordran. It resembles science in practice and philosophy. Evidence in the game is collated and recorded in hyperlinked wikis that aspire to be comprehensive and objective. This evidence is then organized to advance hypotheses about aspects of the story, which raises questions that send people back to find more evidence. While the game itself is a finite text, hypotheses posed by lorehunters can be validated by later content, including patches, developer interviews, expansion content, and sequels. In that sense, lorehunting shares a central ambition of science: testable predictions.
Some hypotheses are relatively well-supported by the evidence in the game (often when hidden evidence questions or overturns ideas the game itself has led you to believe). But in many other cases, the evidence is simply too thin and ambiguous to be confident. This is the case for many of the most fundamental and important questions in the series, and it is quite intentional:
I think different gamers will have different interpretations of that, especially depending on which ending they reach. That’s something deliberate on our part. . . . I like reading about how gamers interpret or think about the story and world of my games. So I don’t want to rob them of that space for open interpretation. That, after all, is part of the fun I get to have after development. – Hidetaka Miyazaki, Bloodborne Strategy Guide interview
I think Miyazaki sort of underplays the ambition of his games here. If the storyline is ambiguous, that isn’t just to leave us guessing so Miyazaki can laugh at how far off base we are. It goes hand in hand with the games' moral ambiguity. Moral values are clearly subjective to some degree, and while this is not a particularly common premise in a medium with an unfortunate tendency to systematize and quantify morality, it’s not the most contentious idea. But the status of truth in Dark Souls makes a much more unusual statement: we no more have access to historical truths than we do to moral truths.
One of the general premises of postmodernism is to unseat supposed benchmarks of truth. Without absolute reference points, truths are only ever true relative to an arbitrary and conditional frame of reference. In literature, this means that the author’s interpretation is no more valid than any other, and the meaning of the work is created by each reader as they consume the work.
Postmodernists argue that this applies to everything, all works of literature as well as reality itself. So how is Dark Souls unique? By fragmenting its narrative into a thousand hidden pieces, phrasing every clue with plausible deniability, and by leaving its timeline muddled and self-contradicting, Dark Souls makes the postmodern idea that readers construct narrative literal as well as philosophical. It almost invites the comparison to science (particularly in Bloodborne, where Truth and understanding are key themes), and presents itself as an epistemological statement. We’ll take a look at what it might be saying, but first we need to take a look at some philosophy of science.
The application of postmodernism to the metaphysics of science caused an acrimonious debate between postmodernists and scientists. Science is above all concerned with mitigating human foibles of thought and observation to access the most objective understanding of reality possible. The postmodern position, known as constructivism, argues that this is delusional. Science is a human institution, as are the mechanisms it uses to combat subjectivity, and every fact it produces is at least as much a product of human imagination as it is a reflection of an objective truth.
There are variants of this position. Weak constructivism is content to acknowledge the social factors shaping science in its historical evolution, but doesn’t call into question the assertion that facts reflect objective reality. Strong constructivism asserts that, at the very least, we can’t access objective reality, and at its most extreme, that science bears no relation to it. In a strong constructivist position, the “realities” described by science are contingent on the particular histories of the people and institutions that describe them.
There is a scientific technique that involves creating a mathematical model of a given system. Based on a hypothetical understanding of how the system works, scientists statistically generate a world that is complete within limited parameters. One purpose of such models is to test analysis methods: when we generated the world ourselves, we can actually compare our interpretations against the truth. In a traditional perspective on literature, this is how we can understand fiction: it presents itself as a sample of a complete world, and while it may take several close readings to put all the pieces together, there is one true story, as envisioned by the author. The author is to the fiction what God is to the universe: the ultimate arbiter of its rules and facts. As we have already seen, Gods in Dark Souls do not share the privileged authority ascribed to the Christian God.
As a piece of fiction, Dark Souls is a microcosm universe: we know exactly how lorehunting hypotheses relate to the “true” story of the game. And, based on what Miyazaki has stated, in addition to the ambiguities of the lore itself, we see that that relationship aligns with the strong constructivist position. There is no true narrative in Dark Souls. Every fact is contingent on the narrative held by the player. While many of these are widely shared, many others are “facts” only when supported by a few other pieces of evidence that point to the same conclusion.
There are many clear differences between lorehunting and science (a topic I plan to explore in another post). I’m not sure that Miyazaki and FROM Software hold the strong constructivist position themselves, much less intend to proselytize the idea to their fans. Miyazaki has explained his games' unusual storytelling in interviews.
When Hidetaka Miyazaki was a child, he was a keen reader, though not a talented one. Often he’d reach passages of text he couldn’t understand, and so would allow his imagination to fill in the blanks, using the accompanying illustrations. In this way, he felt he was co-writing the fiction alongside its original author. - The Guardian
Ambiguity is evocative, especially when used alongside some of the best art and design work in the medium. The experience Miyazaki is trying to present is not unlike the best parts of the experience of doing science: finding new, revelatory theories that make new sense of a familiar world. Like scientists, we engage the evidence in Dark Souls and construct theories to explain it. It's not just that the story means something different to every reader--that's true of every artwork. It's a careful balance of information, presenting the familiar and the obvious alongside the nagging feeling that we're only scratching the surface. The ability to walk this line is a big part of what makes the Souls games so mature, tasteful, and unique, and their constructivist epistemology is an indispensable premise of that experience.