The Very Brink of Destruction: The Sublime in Dark Souls

Abstract

This article deals with the aesthetic category of the sublime as it can be seen in the 2011 videogame Dark Souls. In my view, the sublimity in Dark Souls arises from the clash between the player’s knowledge of the game and its mechanics, and the game’s tendency to challenge this knowledge by presenting the player with challenges and vistas that are directly opposed to their knowledge of the game. In my discussion of the sublime, I use sources by Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, and Philip Shaw. For my discussion of ludology, I pull mainly from works by Espen Aarseth and Markku Eskelinen.