Dark Souls is like owning a cat. Everyone loves cats, and you especially love yours. He is intelligent, fun, and endearing. You could never ask for a better cat. You love that little guy, and he loves you. Your cat only has one flaw. Every 4 minutes he claws you in the face. No reason, he just does. Every 5 minutes. Even at night. You recover, get 3 minutes of sleep, and then he scratches you again. And you love him. Dark Souls design choices are unique in that they allow the player to learn through playing the game. The gameplay teaches the player how to play. It utilizes death as a tutorial. This type of design choice is something VaataVidya calls implicit game design. It [implicit game design] is when a game doesn’t tell …show more content…
you how to complete an objective. Hell, it may not even tell you what the objective is. It’s when a central game mechanic is hidden, but still in effect. It’s implicit, it’s cryptic, and it’s actually part of the game to puzzle it out. (VaataVidya, 2013) When a player is thrust into Dark Souls (much like Ornstein’s lance into your chest cavity), the game tells them how to move, how to swing a sword, how to block, and that’s about it.
The player finds no up-front tutorials, no hard-to-miss explanations, no guides on the stat system, but is simply shoved out into the world and given boundless agency to explore. I believe Dark Souls is a success because it doesn’t help the player, and instead lets the player teach himself through observations about the world. I love that. I love when a game doesn’t hold my hand. There is always enough information at the player’s fingertips to solve any problem the game has to offer. Dark Souls doesn’t give direction, but any of the innumerable directions you move in hold unique, compelling …show more content…
experiences. The game begins in a cell as a body is thrown into the dungeon from above, with the only way out through a locked door.
Hovering above the corpse is a single, glowing orb. In the background, you hear a dull “thud…thud…thud” echoing through the cellars. As you activate the orb, a key enters your inventory as the pulsating ball simultaneously fades into the void. The key unlocks the door, and you are on your way. Looking right, you glimpse a grotesque demon creature tromping through a mammoth-sized underground cell, like the one you’ve just exited only far larger. The first time I discovered this, my inner monologue went something like, “Wait, what’s that? There is something glowing in there! Oh…oh no, that is an item. That means I’ll be fighting this monstrosity.” The first few moments of Dark Souls are absolutely crucial. They show that hovering orbs contain desirable commodities, they establish the ability to interact with items and doors in the game, and they teach you how to read the stunningly good level design via well-placed
items. Most places you can see, you can get to…See how there’s an item up there? I believe it is an item you can kind of faintly see twinkling. So right there’s a promise. It’s telling you, ‘Look, here’s a place you can get.’ They [the developers] do this a lot. It’s a really good technique of theirs; the choice to make souls [items] white, bright, moving, and shining means that as designers, they can lead you to wherever they want. (Extra Credits, 2015) Extra Credits is a game design YouTube channel, and their Side Quest series is one where they play through Dark Souls and meticulously comb through the design decisions that went into this AAA title. As is apparent, the designers of this game thought out every level in excruciating detail. From the brief tutorial area on, you’re given near-boundless freedom in the game world. After being dropped at the main bonfire (bonfires act as checkpoints in the game), you can go in any direction you desire. And while there are some invisible borders and locked doors in the game, none of them are immediately evident. You’re able to defeat some of the end-game bosses having only just taken baby steps, and while this choice is masochistic in nature, it is most certainly a choice that is yours to make (albeit an excruciatingly difficult one). The main bonfire, Firelink Shrine, branches off into seemingly hundreds of directions. But in reality, there are only 6 main paths. Due to some unique and creative level design, the area surrounding Firelink has a plethora of rabbit trails and small paths that lead to loot, enemies, or a mix of the two. It was a blatant design choice, one that drew me into Dark Souls and made me want to play more. As James of Extra Credits puts it, One of the things that’s really interesting to note is what this is as a new player experience, because there are a million ways to go. It’s actually pretty daunting. There are actually a very limited number of ways to go, but it feels at the outset like there are so many. (Extra Credits, 2015)
This article is a narrative. It does not aim to analyse the topic. It describes the author's experiences at the mortuary and the resulting disturbing thoughts she had.
First-person shooter is a video game genre centered on gun and projectile weapon-based combat through a first-person perspective; that is, the player experiences the action through the eyes of the protagonist. The first-person shooter shares common traits with other shooter games, which in turn fall under the heading action game. From the genre's inception, advanced 3D or pseudo-3D graphics have challenged hardware development, and multiplayer gaming has been integral. After masses of video game evolution, along came the call of duty series.
The book “The Dark Is Rising” has been challenged to be banned from the American Canyon Middle School. The Dark Is Rising has won Five series contemporary fantasy novels for older children and young adults. The Dark is Rising is a good fantasy book for people to read because it has a lot of good action from the characters. The character “Will” needs to go on six magical signs. The Dark Is Rising is a great book to read. People should read the book if they like action and fantasy.
Even though the Day of the Dead and Halloween are both offshoots of all Saints' and all Souls' Days, their tone couldn't be more diverse. Halloween's images of skeletons and spirits emphasize on the frightening, gruesome, and ghoulish parts of the celebration. Society jolts, if delightfully, at the alleged terrifying spirits intimidating the living realm. On Day of the Dead, the focus isn't on personal menacing spooks, it's on celebrating with one's family alive and dead and recalling those who are no longer alive. It's on seeing death as another phase succeeding existence, rather being confronted with
Everyone was here, mom, dad, siblings, they called for me knowing I was the only survivor of this house of horrors. I knew the monsters that laid beneath the house. I enlisted the help of Brucie a few months ago, she was here to repair this broken home, and guide the spirits to their rightful place. Earth isn't for the dead, yet they are still here acting as though they're alive and they didn't die three long years ago. When the house is silent you can hear the organ being oh so gracefully played.
The Light-Dark relationship is prominent throughout the story and demonstratively uses the polar opposites hope and despair. The relationship between good and evil is the most basic example of this symbolism. In Beloved, it
According to the Oxford Dictionary, neo- means “new” and pagan means “a person holding religious beliefs other than those of the main world religions,” but what exactly are these people and what do they do? “Neo-Paganism is a group of contemporary religious movements influenced by or claiming to be derived from the various historical pagan beliefs of pre-modern Europe” (Lewis 13). “Paganism is a polytheistic nature religion. It is re-creating ways of relating to the earth and all its inhabitants which express human relationships with all that exists. It is a sense of being “at home” on earth” (Harvey 1). One of the most important aspects, if not the most important aspect of these modern movements is the use, according to Dennis Carpenter, of “a universe that is interconnected… and the material and/or spiritual universe are one” (quoted in Lewis 50). Some of the concepts of neo-paganism are “the idealization of nature, the perception that primitive people and peasants live lives that are in harmony with natural forces, and the imagining of an early polytheistic religion where nature itself is sacred” (Magliocco 39). Combining the importance of nature and the lives people live is “the earth and the body,” which, “ is central and celebrated” (Harvey 126). Displaying within the religion, “at their seasonal festivals pagans regularly renew their relationships and deepen their intimacy with the environment, nature,” and “the festivals teach ecology” (Harvey 126). Neo-Paganism is more rooted in environmentalistic behaviors through rituals and mythology rather than non-religion or science.
Not many consider death and the fear it conjures something to celebrate, but the sole purpose of El Dia de Los Muertos and Halloween is to cheerfully confront these themes. One might view a skull or skeleton as a symbol of death, but for many Latin Americans, these things are looked upon in a positive light. They exhibit a unique stance concerning the dead, and death in general, by facing these things with fun and humor instead of horror and fear (Halloween and Festivals of the Dead” 195-209). Likewise, the Ancient Celtic viewed death and darkness much differently than many modern societies. The Celtic tradition believed that darkness could bring forth life just as much as it could bring evil and death. In celebrating Samhain, people were comforted by the thought that their souls could never truly be gone (Trevarthen 6). During Samhain,
In Dante’s Inferno, the punishment for a sin is the representation and reflection of the sin itself. The law of Dante’s Hell is symbolic retribution, which means that the specific attributes of the sin--how it was committed, by whom, and its effects--are concretely embodied in the specific nature of the punishment. This paper will attempt to show, by going through the geography of Dante’s Hell, how the sins in Dante’s Inferno are related to their punishments.
...se many of their attachments to nature are dormant, and pose and obstacle to the individual to break past their shell. Nevertheless, the potential is always there, the real question is, can the person bring themselves to discard their inhibitions? In the sinister the difficulty is greater. However, in those who are righteous, walking into the unknown becomes an adventure, a righteous person will also be more readily able to accept their spiritually while attempting to capture the beauty of their surroundings. Like the never ending circles of the universe, there is never a limit to the amount of people who can accomplish this, because every person is capable of reason.
Throughout my research, I could reach the conclusion that boarding schools were a form of ghettoization that deliberately acted as concentration camps. Native American children were rooted to educational and social standards that they did not understand and were maintained in confinement on reservations. It was also the case on boarding schools where children slept in dormitories. According to Geoffrey Paul Carr’s thesis, 'House of no spirit': an architectural history of the Indian Residential School in British Columbia, “the dormitory provided a key means for effecting sociocultural dissolution, separating the student cohort according to age and gender.” The creation of dormitories was aimed to produce separateness among brothers and sisters,
Justice is one of the major building block that society is built upon. It gives people a sense of retribution when they have been wronged. In Dante’s Inferno, justice is served in the supernatural realm. Throughout this play, the reader is exposed to the inner working of hell and the nine circles of specialized punishment it is composed of. Justice, in Dante’s Inferno, differs from justice in the mortal world in that it is decided, not by humans, but by God. However, it is not God’s justice that is portrayed in this divine comedy. While this divine comedy depicts justice coming from God, the justice in the Inferno is based on Dante’s personal views of the severity of the sin and the sinner. This paper will examine this issue by looking into the life of Dante and the potential reasons for his rankings of the sin pertaining to specific circles of hell.
were very good selections for me to chose because they held great meaning behind dark
Darkness is a huge motif in The Heart of Darkness. Almost every other page is filled with some imagery relating to the dark or low visibility. It is well known in literature that darkness has negative connotations. The dark is associated with dirtiness, ignorance, and death. Being in the dark is not a good place to be, however, this is where Conrad places us.
We are afraid of the dark, not of the dark itself but of the things that come along with it, and as though our captors have sensed this fear, the room is as black and icy as a winter night, and it wreaks of death and decay. Our bodies are splattered in a non-smelling liquid that causes the soft carpet were on to cling to our skin, moaning and weeping have slowed until almost inaudible. The first day the room was filled with screaming and begging, but now 5 days later it’s nearly quiet except for the agony of the people that have struggled and slowly are bleeding out.