5. The anthropology of Dark Souls fandom: mini-case study #2
Projects that depend on projects and make way for further projects.
The newsletter has gotten a bit philosophical lately, so let’s bring things back to earth. Today we’ll do another miniature case study in the style of Issue #1.
This time I’ll be talking about an obscure but flourishing niche in the videogaming world. That niche is a corner of the Dark Souls fandom, one that supports at least a few careers. I’d like to use this example to demonstrate a broader phenomenon that I find fascinating: nested, hierarchical relations wherein projects support projects which create the context for further projects.
Let’s start by talking about Macau.
Contextual preconditions
The island of Macau, originally a peninsula and a couple tiny islands, grew to 170% (!) of its original size by means of land reclamation.
Similar processes have expanded the shores of places like Singapore, Hong Kong, and Manhattan.
I like the metaphor. The earth carries you just fine, whether or not you know where it came from. Your existence is cradled by eons of context. The structure of your life may have been defined centuries or millennia before you were the wisp of an idea. (See Jesus, Aristotle, Hammurabi, etc.)
You can find a different version of this metaphor in the Icelandic village of Flateyri, which has an ‘avalanche dam’ protecting it. It’s a great visual depiction of contextual influence that makes something cool possible.
I want to talk about one of these cities built on reclaimed land - one of these villages built in the shadow of a dam.
Mapping Dark Souls fandom
We can start analyzing the example by splitting it into three tiers:
Tier 1 is Dark Souls, an influential videogame. (In our metaphor, this is the ‘new land’ on top of which the city of Macau was built.)
Tier 2 is a couple of Twitch streamers and YouTubers whose careers directly depend on Tier 1. (Metaphorically, perhaps their projects are the roads and essential services that make Macau livable.)
Tier 3 is a couple Dark Souls modders, who are running cool projects (but not full careers) based on the support and interaction of Tier 2. (Metaphorically, these might be the ‘non-essential services’, the leisure and entertainment (and casinos) that might make Macau a nice place to visit.)
Let’s get into it.
Tier 1: Dark Souls
Dark Souls (2011) is a popular videogame designed by FromSoftware employee (and later president) Hidetaka Miyazaki:
Dark Souls became very popular. The series and its spinoffs made a lot of money for a lot of people. Its success is sometimes credited to its old-school ‘no you don’t get training wheels, go fuck yourself’ brand of difficulty. Thus the joke:
While DS is a good game, in the cosmic scheme of things, it’s obviously tiny; it’s a single game by single developer which has made many games; that developer is one of thousands of developers; all of gaming is only a tiny sliver of the economy, a little village built on the backs of titanic beasts like Capitalism, Rule of Law, Technology and Leisure.
I mention that to give a sense of the true scope of where the ‘hierarchical dependence’ model may be relevant. That noted, Dark Souls will be the largest entity we talk about today.
What smaller entities does it nourish? What has been built on the foundation it provides?
Tier 2: LobosJr & VaatiVidya
Lobos JR
LobosJr is a Twitch streamer who focused almost his entire entire streaming career on Dark Souls.
The story goes that his popularity began when “he attempted to beat Dark Souls blindfolded with a ski-mask as his friends guiding him through the game by describing his surroundings. This ignited a series of speedrun challenges, with the next major event being his achieving a world record speedrun for Dark Souls using only a shield on March 20, 2013.” [source]
He has been streaming full-time on Twitch since 2015, and when someone recently asked him how much DS he had played, I heard him reply that he has ‘easily done over 10,000 hours’, while noting that the 10k estimate was already a couple years old.
… It’s hard to really fathom this number. Imagine watching your favorite TV show, three times in a row. Then imagine watching it again. Then imagine watching it again. Imagine watching it a couple times next week. Then imagine watching it for five years on repeat, back-to-back on a 9-5 schedule.
(This actually fits the pattern I noticed in Issue #1: a career which is technically easy, but emotionally brutal. In this case the brutality isn’t necessarily the brutality of self-expression, but of drive & repetition, and of maintaining good energy while you something for the billionth time. There’s something impressive here.)
Lobos is one of the better-known streamers on Twitch, with 372K followers as of this writing, and a YouTube channel with 359K subscribers. He’s known for his yearly St. Jude fundraiser, which raised over $250K this year.
Analysis
The main observation I wanted to make about LobosJr is that his career rests very firmly on ground produced by, well, Dark Souls - or more accurately, FromSoftware. This fits the ‘hierarchical dependence’ structure. That’s not to say that he couldn’t succeed at something else or spin his current career in a new direction - just that he got where he is by riding a particular wave.
And he knows it, at least if his brand is any indication. Lobos sells ‘metal art plates’ online, and one of the cooler looking ones features Lobos’ catchphrase beneath a sword-toting wolf boss from the Dark Souls universe. Judging from the glasses, the human silhouette is surely Lobos himself, in the guise of the Dark Souls protagonist.
We’ll come back to Lobos when we get down to Tier 3, but first I want to cover one more person at the Tier 2 level.
VaatiVidya
You have to be a certain type of nerd to know that The Lord of the Rings isn’t a standalone work. And no, I’m not talking about The Hobbit - I’m talking about The Silmarillion, the wizened patriarch of the Tolkien corpus, a tome of biblical scope describing the millennia of history and cosmology surrounding the events of LOTR.
Nobody does it quite like Tolkien, but the Dark Souls universe goes respectably deep when it comes to lore, history, and even cosmology. What’s odd about this is that to most players, the game might seem almost plotless! I’d bet that most players probably finish the game without really knowing that there is a story.
In Miyazaki’s minimalistic style, only the barest edges of the tale are told to the player directly. But if you look at context, the clues are there. For example, if you glance at this magic wand (or ‘catalyst’) instead of forgetting it in your character’s backpack, you have the opportunity to read:
This story of the flooded city and the corrupted Kings is important to the events of Dark Souls, but if you don’t read the description, there’s no particular reason why you’d discover this. Players who look deeper have the opportunity to connect these dots, and discover a deep, satisfying, and specific lore, told ambiently and indirectly through flavor text and setting.
Of course, this is a rather involved process. What if you don’t want to do all that work yourself? Or maybe you want to check your work, or simply re-experience the magic of the oddly tragic Dark Souls universe?
Enter VaatiVidya, another creator living in the shadow of Dark Souls’ dam. Vaati makes YouTube videos where he dives into the lore and backstory and subtleties of DS that players might have missed while playing through the game. His approach is distinctive; listening to about 20 seconds of this video will be enough to give you a sense of his slow and methodical narrative style:
His voice is great. And apparently I’m not the only one who thinks so - he’s carved out a following of 1.58M YouTube subscribers after making over 250 videos along these lines.
Not bad at all.
Analysis
Vaati basically only works on Dark Souls and immediately related games, as far as I can tell, and so fits the bill as a person whose career is largely ‘downstream’ of the work done by FromSoftware.
Tier 3
The characterizations of Lobos and Vaati are meant to show the phenomenon of a career or ‘life activity’ which depends on context produced by some larger, ‘prior’ entity.
Can we go further? If FromSoftware’s Dark Souls is the foundation on which Lobos and Vaati are built, are Lobos or Vaati a foundation on which further things are built? I know more about Lobos, so let’s focus on him.
HotPocketRemix & Grimrukh
Down the rabbit hole we go!
Here we find another tier of creators: HotPocketRemix & Grimrukh, independent developers of Dark Souls mods. Mod developers make it so that if you want to play something almost just like Dark Souls, you can install a mod with alternative content - not official content by the videogame company, but something invented by a community member.
HotPocket & Grimrukh developed Dark Souls mods which alter some of the basic mechanics of the game. I won’t get into the details, but HotPocketRemix made something like an ‘ultra hard mode’ for Dark Souls, which imposes increasingly difficult conditions on the player as they advance through the game, and Grimrukh’s mod changes Dark Souls into an almost arcade-style experience with far greater replayability and a bunch of randomized parameters.
Modding takes a lot of work and technical skill, and may not pay for itself unless the creator does something special. But HotPocket and Grimrukh figured out how to do something special: get their mods featured by LobosJr during his 2018 and 2020 St. Jude fundraisers.
When I saw this, I was pretty impressed. Look at all the functional interactions coming together! Thousands of viewers go online to chill and watch Lobos play DS, modders get to show off their creations to fans, Lobos helps hype the modders’ work and encourages people to donate to them, and everybody raises money to fight cancer. Yes, the main activity is centered around video games, but on net it’s an incredibly wholesome interaction that maybe even does some good in the world. The yearly tradition feels almost institutional in character.
Analysis
Dark Souls modders are not ‘big deals’ as measured by online popularity. HotPocket has a YouTube channel with about a thousand subscribers, and Grimrukh’s online community seems to be a subreddit with about 1800 readers. Since they arguably depend on people like Lobos to make their projects truly functional, I’d say the modders fit into the ‘hierarchical dependence’ model.
And I think these modders know where their bread is coming from. In a nice touch, Grimrukh’s recent mod included a wolf NPC named Lobos Jr. And one of the rewards for beating his Dark Souls mod during the St. Jude fundraiser was heartwarmingly called the Heart of St Jude:
LobosJr encounters the modded ‘Heart of St Jude’ item while on stream.
Conclusion
These hierarchical dynamics exist in all kinds of social systems, great and small.
Perhaps in the ‘spiritual abstract’ - at some early time, work is done to ‘clear an area’ for life. A domain is settled, a standard is established, the swarming entropic chaos is pushed away - perhaps not forever, but at least long enough for life to acquire a foothold.
To make sure it didn’t just apply in this one obscure case, I made myself think of a couple more examples where I think the phenomenon shows up. I’ll wrap with these:
Sports leagues, where something like the NBA or NFL supports not just teams and players at one level, but also college, high school, and younger age sports teams and leagues on a secondary and tertiary tiers.
Wars of unification, where the upstream work of ending a period of warlordism (a la Augustus Caesar), can enable a downstream period of security and prosperity (the 200-year Pax Augusta).
Intergenerational finances, where financial success in an earlier generation can give later generations a buffer in times of struggle or a financial basis for business endeavors or supporting a family.
Further application is left as an exercise for the reader.