Dark Souls- User-Game Synergy
Released back on September 22nd of 2011, Dark souls was produced by fromsoftware and is the spiritual successor to Demon’s Souls. It redefined the industry following its release by breaking through the mediocre stagnancy the industry was in back then by bringing back the oldschool brand of fair handed but brutal difficulty that had not been seen since the 90s and combined that with innovative game design, a unique user interface a rich lore.
i could talk about how much this game means to me and what makes it brilliant ill stick to the point of this essay, the user interface. the HUD and inventory system takes notes from a lot of RPG games including the use of the classic stat points (vitality, dexterity, intelligence, strength etc) that can be upgraded for the in-game currency of ‘souls’ this can only be done at ‘bonfires’ which serve as your checkpoints during the game, which leads us to one of the core mechanics, death. whenever you die during gameplay you lose all of your accumulated souls and have only one chance to go and retrieve them but the catch is you are sent back to the last bonfire you rested at which can be close or very far, this conditions you to be afraid of dying in game instead of shrugging it off as a minor annoyance and reloading a save (you cant do this in dark souls as your data is constantly being autosaved) this makes the bossfights and even standard enemy encounters nail biting as even the weakest of enemies can kill you if you arent paying full attention.
integral to playing this game is knowing your enemy, especially the bosses. each enemy type and boss has unique attack patterns and animations/wind-ups that you have to read, anticipate and learn so that you can dodge, parry or put your shield up accordingly and exploit them when you see a gap in their offence/defence although no matter how much you learn keeping focused and reacting quickly in a heart pounding battle is key to survival. what ties this all together is the way dark souls never directly tells you the story, you piece the lore and world together from npc dialogue, item descriptions, music, environment and visuals which in turn makes you invested in the npcs and even boss characters, telling a beautifully tragic tale of loss and decay.
to summarise, dark souls has a good UI because the game expects just as much from the player as the player expects from the game and creates a certain kind of synergy between player and gameplay that i’ve never experienced in anything other than a souls game.
The relationship between game design and human-computer interaction
understanding how our brains interact with technology is integral to understanding good game design. as can be seen by the graph model i chose to represent this, games have an added advantage of interactivity over other forms of media, bringing the player directly into the experience first hand. one essential thing is knowing why and when we choose to play certain games and for what reason, for example mobile games and some pc games, flash games etc are usually only played when were bored and trying to pass the time on a train, on a bus, waiting for a doctors appointment, waiting for a huge download to finish or 3ds max to render and so on.
HCI has its foundations in cognitive science, as such it is built around similar core principles (neuro science, linguistics, philsophy, psychology, anthropology etc) and has been improving since the beginning to make computer operating systems easier to understand and much more fluid to control and navigate and this in turn has fed into game design building on the same ideas of making games much more intuitive and immersive. for me what makes a good video game experience is something to immerse myself in, a reason to care about the characters and the world, good writing (not necessarily a direct narrative but this is also good) a satisfying game weight, a good set of mechanics that function well, a solid and creative art direction and most of all treating me like an adult and letting me discover things for myself with little to no exposition. games can still be fun without much of this but without many reasons to get invested like that it will just become another throw away game for pure entertainment purposes that ill forget about in a few months to a year. much like dark souls, a game that grabs me and immerses me into a game universe is one that will stick with me forever. this follows along the same HCI route of involving a lot of brain processes that come to us naturally to make a game feel real and to make us care about a fictional universe as deeply as we would something from our real lives.
Bibliography
– Fromsoftware (2017). Dark souls prepare to die edition box art. [image] Available at: http://www.rpgfan.com/soundtracks/darksouls-prepare/index.html [Accessed 7 Dec. 2017].
-Darksouls.wiki.fextralife.com. (2017). Dark Souls Wiki | Dark Souls Wiki. [online] Available at: http://darksouls.wiki.fextralife.com/Dark+Souls+Wiki [Accessed 7 Dec. 2017].
-Youtube (2015). Let’s Play Dark Souls 1: From the Dark (a full descriptive play-through). Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUqg8XtAHnc&list=PLQDWoXFQ-YLpeEFkzeDZF1MmNQS7BDoI4 [Accessed 7 Dec. 2017].
-Hitboxteam.com. (2017). Hitbox Team – Designing game narrative. [online] Available at: http://hitboxteam.com/designing-game-narrative [Accessed 7 Dec. 2017].
-The Interaction Design Foundation. (2017). What is Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)?. [online] Available at: https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/topics/human-computer-interaction [Accessed 7 Dec. 2017].
-fromsoftware (2017). video upload of ‘the making of dark souls’ originally included in the collectors edition. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wo4DyCEao8A [Accessed 7 Dec. 2017].