In the meantime, here are a few things I’ve been up to:

I moderated a panel on games and learning for Zócalo Public Square in Los Angeles, with a dream team of experts that included James Gee, Kaveri Subrahmanyam, and Richard Lemarchand. The panelists brought a range of perspectives across practice and theory, and we went from 0 to 60 pretty quickly; no lengthy handwringing about Math Blaster here! That link will take you straight to a video of the panel.

I was interviewed by Kill Screener and journo around town Yannick LeJacq for Bit Creature, and by my old pal and PixelVixen 707-coconspirator, J. C. Hutchins for his StoryForward podcast. They’re both stellar guys, strong journos and fab writers, but they’re also very different guys, so check them both out!

I contributed an essay to the book Unbored, by Joshua Glenn and Elizabeth Foy Larsen. Unbored is a massive, fun idea book of activities for kids of pretty much any age. I’m really proud to be in here and if you know any young people, I highly recommend checking it out.

Over at Unwinnable, I’m still writing my column about playing games with my kid. I’m overdue to start this up again in the new year. I’m still struggling to think of a hip way to explain why we’ve been playing Skylanders.

I set a goal of writing a short story a week. If any of them are any good, you’ll hear about it here.

And that’s about it! Hope you’re having a good new year too.

So I was the writer on Klei Entertainment’s Mark of the Ninja, and purely for the sake of getting it on paper before old age makes me forget the whole thing, I’m going to write up some of the books and people who influenced the script.  There are no real spoilers here, although most of this will make more sense after you play the game.  (And you should!  Everyone seems to love it.)

When I joined the project, most of the plot and all of the major characters were in place.   Many of the story revisions came from some epic meetings that we had going over the outline and then the script, with me joining the Vancouver team via Skype.  This meant that a team that included art, design, the producer, and the writer (me) was involved in developing and polishing up the plot, and that process helped the storytelling – especially when it came to setting the mood, changing the tone from world to world, and telling the story through gameplay, which especially paid off in the final scenes.

And there are words, too, natch.  My role was to take the story outline and write the cutscenes, the audio logs, the interstitial dialogue, and the barks.  (I got help on the barks, because Nels felt sorry for me.)

Let’s start with the bibliography.  For the actual true history of ninja, I turned to Stephen Turnbull’s book, which stuck to the facts (and a few legends – but only the ones that have been circulating for centuries).  In World 1, the audio logs that describe the Hisomu Clan’s first great mission all use real historical details or plausible tactics, mostly informed by Turnbull.  The haiku about “nightingales” refers to the famous nightingale floors used in castles of this period:

The daimyo who gets out of bed “to find relief” is a really oblique reference to Uesugi Kenshin, who – as legend has it – was murdered by a ninja who hid in his latrine and murdered him when he sat down to use it.

Nels Anderson also turned me on to the “A Short History of Japan” podcast, and starting with Episode 15, I got a lot of background on the Sengoku Jidai period and the ninja’s role in it.  It’s a great listen and I highly recommend it, for the broad context and for thejuicy, violent stories.

There are three audio logs in every level of the game, aside from the last one – and almost all of them are written as haiku.  Klei wanted to do a series of audio logs that would tell the history of the clan, and help set up the legend of the tattoo and the choice that Ninja has to make.  While I like the idea of using audio logs to deliver background information, I’ve seen plenty of games do it badly, by letting someone you don’t care about talk at you for a minute about old news while you’re busy playing the game.  Great writing can save these – the BioShock franchise is an obvious example – but those longer logs also fit the pace of that game.

The haiku form was intended to solve that problem, because haiku are short, and they’re enigmatic.  None of the haiku immediately make sense; you get the impression of what they’re about and hopefully, you’re intrigued to piece them together and learn more.  The fact that there’s some question or some mystery to them gives you a reason to go back and figure them out.  In World 1, we have nine haiku that piece together to retell the story of a ninja mission.  World 2 explores two of the masters’ perspectives on the power of the tattoo ink, and in World 3, we get Azai’s side of the story – which is not a haiku: it’s actually a haibun, a form where a piece of prose ends with a haiku.  I learned about that form in the book How to Haiku : A Writer’s Guide to Haiku and Related Forms by Bruce Ross, and it seemed like the best way to handle Azai’s confession, which had to be clearer to inform the events in World 4.

Ora also mentions a “death poem” – this is an amazing form that I read about somewhere along the way.  You can read a few examples here.

The three audio logs in World 4 are not haiku.  I won’t reveal what they are to avoid spoilers, but suffice to say I really regret this, because I feel like I farted out at the end.  The text that I used seemed to fit better and communicate more clearly what we wanted to explain about Ninja’s situation and his relationship to the Clan, but I wish I had found a way to stick with the haiku form.

By the way: I wrote all but one of the haiku – the other one came from a contest that we ran at PAX East.  Joel McCoy wrote the third poem in 1-1, which starts “Glint of shuriken … .”  It’s incredibly bad ass and actually came out as the toughest-sounding log in the bunch.

Kudos too by the way to the actors who read the haiku, who were amazing.  Michael Dobson reads most of them, and he absolutely kills them: dig the gravity and drama he brings to the sets in World 1 and 2.  And Vincent Wong’s performance as Azai in World 3 is austere and sublime.  Be warned, those scrolls are a little harder to find.

The hero of Mark of the Ninja is simply named “Ninja.”   From the prologue games - part one and part two, in case you missed them – you can tell that he’s been with the clan for a while, and I imagined him as some kind of an orphan, possibly from a poor and isolated village.  This train of thought led me to read the book Toshié: A Story of Village Life in Twentieth-Century Japan by Simon Partner, which is a terrific social history of the dramatic changes in 20th century Japan, told through the life of one very memorable woman.

Now, some tunes.  Several names of musicians made it into the script.  Count Karajan is named for the legendary conductor, Herbert von Karajan.

I first heard of Karajan from a friend in college, and recently his recording of Mahler’s 9th was my way in to that composer’s amazing, amazing body of work.  In fact, I kept trying to work a quote from Das Lied von der Erde into the script, but it never fit. (If that sounds pretentious, picture a game that makes you feel like this guy.)

The legendary founder of the Hisomu Clan, Tetsuji, gets his name loosely from the the guitarist Tetuzi Akiyama.  You can hear him here with Toshimaru Nakamura, on a track from Nakamura’s album Egrets - and by the way, one of the guards who’s mentioned in passing in 1-1 is named Toshi.

One of Tetsuji’s successors, Otomo the Hungry – who is mentioned in the World 2 audio logs – is named after Otomo Yoshihide.

I’m probably most familiar with these improvisers from David Sylvian’s Manafon.  You should buy that – it’s brilliant.  I also recommend Nakamura’s Egrets, which is gorgeous and haunting, and a great entry-point to his work.

The Toronto-based “Noh-wave” band Yamantaka // Sonic Titan contributed the song that you can hear in the E3 trailer and, to stunning effect, in the finale of the game.  Jamie Cheng had mentioned he wanted to get a song for the game, preferably from a band that could sing in Japanese. When I read this feature and then heard their album, I thought they would be perfect.  They’re a fantastic band, they’re up for Canada’s Polaris award, and I hear they put on a hell of a show; check ‘em out.

They also released the song we commissioned, “Mark & Blade”, as a single, and you can grab that here.

I think that covers everything, but if I missed anything I’ll update this post.

Mark of the Ninja ships next Friday on XBLA.  I’m pretty excited about this.

I was the writer on the game, and I’ve been playing builds since last September.  I had the opportunity to help show it at GDC (in a casual, sitting-on-the-floor-in-Moscone-West capacity) and at PAX East.  So I’m very familiar with the game, and I’ve seen some early reactions to it – but of course, I don’t know what the public will think, or the reviews.  So I’m nervous!  But not too nervous, because – and factor in my bias – I think it’s a terrific game.

When we announced the game last winter, we posted a text adventure to lead into the first trailer.  Now we’ve posted the second half of that adventure, which complete’s the Ninja’s mission, introduces Master Azai, and provides a prologue to the game.  Click here to play part one and part two.  These games were a hoot to work on. They also contain some of the grossest stuff I’ve ever written.

Part two also introduces our latest trailer, which showcases more of the animation and scenes from levels that we haven’t revealed before.  You can watch it by beating the game – but if you just want to skip ahead, you can also watch it below.

After we ship, I’ll probably post once or twice about the writing process, the sources I used, and some of the references in the names and audio logs.  For now, I’m just going to hole up, keep checking my alerts and Tweetdeck for previews and early reactions, and bite my nails until the thing ships.

At the same time, flipping through my pull list for my local comic book store (Jetpack Comics in Rochester, NH – best damn comic store in New England), I noticed that I’ve dropped all of my Marvel titles.  From age 13 until just a few years ago, I forgot about comic books; but when I started getting back into them, Marvel had a lot to offer – Fraction writing Iron Man, Bendis’ Dark Avengers and Ultimate Spiderman, Whedon’s Astonishing X-Men, and even the new New Mutants series, mostly for old time’s sake.  A few different arcs sucked me in, but when they ended, I stopped buying the books.

If I had to boil my decision down to one reason – and for the sake of time, I will – I’d say that I left Marvel because their books are just too big.  All their attention has one (through economic necessity, I’m sure) to high profile sure things, while the weird little characters that always caught my attention can’t seem to get any traction – like the brief Cloak & Dagger revival, or the new Moon Knight series, whose final issue was the last Marvel book left in my sub.

Meanwhile, Marvel gluts the market with crossovers between their biggest titles.  They have ten different Avengers books, fifteen X-Men – I think I’ve got five different versions of the Captain America origin story that came out just in the last year.  I just can’t read the same stories again and again.  You say that Iron Man is an alcoholic again?  Dude, I read that story when they did it in the 80s.  Stark was living on the street like a bum!  It was intense!

But there’s no room for oddballs, and it’s the oddballs that give a little nuance to the universe.  Small characters can have beginnings, middles, and ends.  They can show up, experience a dramatic arc, and vanish – gone!  Their story’s told and they can leave.

I’m going to point my finger at a specific issue of The New Avengers, written by Brian Bendis, and a specific scene featuring one of my favorite unsung characters in the line.

The New Avengers is a spin-off title of the main Avengers, featuring a team of sort of well-known and less-known heroes.  I’m not sure what the point of it is, aside from making money, but it does have a more oddball take on Marvel’s mightiest heroes.  It also has awkward humor, like this joke that Spiderman makes about the Iron Fist’s name:

Did I mention that superhero books aren’t for kids anymore?

That’s from issue #21, but the issue that really bothered me was the next one.  Let me start by introducing the character Victoria Hand.

Hey, that’s a pretty good introduction!  To elaborate: She became well-known in the Dark Avengers series, where archvillain Norman Osborne has formed a team of other villains, and rebranded them as heroes.  Victoria was Osborn’s right-hand woman, helping him execute his schemes and keep his cuckoo team together.  She did this not because she was evil, but because she thought Osborne was really onto something – that he actually had a plan that would accomplish more good and bring more peace to the world than the well-meaning but less-effective supes that came before him.  In other words, she made a choice to do the wrong thing for the right reasons.  And this makes her an interesting character!

I really like Victoria Hand.  (And yeah, it helps that she has a passing resemblance to an old friend of mine.)  So I was glad that Marvel kept her around.  In the books, Osborne’s super-evil plan falls through and almost everybody goes to jail – but Captain America asks Hand to work with him, as a kind of double- or-triple-agent or something?  The thing is, a lot of other superheroes don’t get the memo.  And so when the New Avengers decide that Victoria Hand might still be evil, they decide to pay her a visit and interrogate her.

Except they don’t just interrogate her.  They torture her.

Remember, Victoria Hand has no superpowers. She’s a highly-trained, super-skilled bureaucrat, essentially.  But when a handful of the world’s greatest superheroes come to pay her a visit, they decide to beat her, threaten to kill her, and even make her imagine that she’s been tossed out a window to fall to her death.

Is that what heroes do?  Is that what anyone does?

Truth be told, I don’t think there’s anything more to this than The New Avengers being a crummy comic that’s in really bad taste.  But it’s a good metaphor for what I think of Marvel nowadays: all of the interesting characters are getting beaten up by the famous ones.  That ain’t an ecosystem that I need to spend $4 an issue to read.

Last weekend, my family and I took our first family vacation in … ever? … and spent a weekend together in Disney World, down in Orlando, Florida.  It was a huge, exhausting, and wonderful experience – and while I tried to enjoy it as a dad and a tourist, if you’re in the pop culture biz, you can’t help but take some mental notes along the way.  Disney is very, very good at what they do, and there’s a lot to learn from the way they handle their parks.

If you’ve never been to Disney World: you get not one but four major amusement parks, surrounded by resorts, a water park, and a bunch of other facilities where people sleep, eat, swim, and then get on buses to get to the parks to get on the rides to have fun.  There are big roller coasters, small playgrounds, animals, costumes, and tons upon tons of gift shops.  There’s actually some of just about everything.  It’s impossible to sum up in one post.

So I thought I’d share a few “takeaways” that the professional, “I want to make entertainment; what can I learn?” part of my brain picked up while the hot, frustrated, “why can’t I teach my kid not to lean against the urinals in the airport?” dad side of me was busy having a vacation.

Every place has a story. The gaming community is really into “narrative,” and Disney World is full of it.  You don’t just take a safari through a replica of the African grasslands; you also take a detour to chase down poachers and rescue a baby elephant.  The dinosaur ride doesn’t just spin you past a bunch of dinosaurs; there’s a scientist who’s sending you into the past to retrieve a live specimen, and really, what could go wrong?  Even the swimming pool at our resort had a story: it was on Ol’ Man Island, and a plaque (I wish I had photographed this) told the story of the Ol’ Man, and how he lived here in solitude until some local kids made this their swimming hole.  Those kids brought joy to the last days of his life, and now … wait, they just made this all up, right?  Right?  Whatever, let’s go swimming.

“What could go wrong?” is a great storyline.  Over in the world of games, we’re obsessed with the hero’s journey.  There is one hero, they go on a quest, etc.  In Disney’s rides, no one person gets picked as the “hero.”  Instead, the narrative usually veers into some kind of a calamity that everyone can decide how to deal with.

Or rather, nobody really has to do anything, you just sit there and enjoy yourself until the ride stops and the narrator tells you that everything’s fine.  But you feel like you were involved the whole time – and you can imagine that you played the hero.

Simple, obvious names work. I often overthink names – character names, titles, places, headlines.  I think they need to be tricky, or “clever,” or obscure, or overthought.  Disney doesn’t do that.  All of their names are simple, and they’re great.  Magic Kingdom.  Animal Kingdom. That Ol’ Man Island place, at the Port Orleans resort.  All nice and simple, and you understand what they are instantly.

If you’re in entertainment … . You can criticize Disney for plenty of things: for what they’ve done to copyright law, for what they did to Winnie the Pooh, et cetera.  They’re a big corporation, and they’re bound to do something that pisses people off.

That said, Disney also understands that they’re in the entertainment business, and the products and services they make are purely for fun and joy – not the public welfare, not utility, not health, but simply to entertain.  And every one of the many dollars people spend here is spent by someone who wants to have fun, to be entertained, and to spend a few days inside their dreams.  And Disney is very good at delivering dreams.

When you think about the extraordinary effort they put into everything – the attractions, the costumed cast members, the parade at Magic Kingdom – it’s daunting.  Yes, the show is old-fashioned, and a little corny.  But they give it everything they’ve got.  They’re not a lowest-bidder consultancy trying to migrate an enterprise to a new e-mail solution; they’re trying to entertain, and bring our imaginations to life, and entertain us.  And it made me realize, if you’re not giving 1,000% to entertain your audience … why do you think they’ll stick around?

New gig, new venue – I just started a monthly column at the excellent Unwinnable, and the subject is my kid, and the way he plays videogames. I’ve been thinking about doing a “gaming dad” column ever since my son and I played our first game together (it was Machinarium), and in my Edge Online column from a couple years back, I tackled a few examples of the jealousy, violence, and learning that we experienced together in front of the screen. With this new column, I want to gain insight into the mind of a small child. Other parents are the natural audience, but it will also be relatable to everyone – to all of us, young and old, who still have an intemperate seven-year-old inside of us.

Check it out! And let me know what you think. If I get too cute, feel free to slap me – but I don’t think it’ll be too sentimental; if anything, the first few are going to be pretty ugly. If you’ve ever played Invizimals, you’ll know why.

This is a common gripe among gamers. But the mainstream press has also produced some of the best stories on games that you’ll ever read. When you get a serious magazine writer to take the subject seriously, you get stories like John Seabrook’s profile of Will Wright, or Elizabeth Kolbert on Ultima Online, or Tom Bissell profiling Jennifer Hale. Jonah Weiner started with just about the most inaccessible game in the world and told a compelling and sympathetic story about the guys who created it. Ian Bogost ran a terrific critique of Journey in The Atlantic. Radiolab had that incredible episode on games (nondigital but still, check it out!). And so on.

But when the folks who love games knock the mainstream media, it’s usually because of articles like Sam Anderson’s cover story in the New York Times Magazine, which talks about the latest wave of casual and mobile games in a way that’s shallow and disrespectful. Anderson makes up a new label for the genre – “stupid games” – and he slaps it on a wide swath of titles, from Angry Birds to Farmville to Tetris to chess. He makes fun of his interviewees, including the NYU Game Center’s Frank Lantz, whose job he belittles early on: “Game-studies scholars (there are such things) … “. And after spending time with game designer Zach Gage, he still lumps Gage’s work into the “stupid games” category. He also compares Gage to a character in an Ayn Rand novel for (maybe?) sounding grandiose about interface design.

Set all that aside, and it’s not a bad article. Anderson leans on personal experience instead of talking to more game designers – if Angry Birds is such a big game in the story, why not give Rovio a call? – but I understand why he keeps the focus on himself: he’s making an article that’s relatable to his audience, who find themselves spending an unexpected amount of time playing little games on their phone, and who want someone to tell them to stop. I like to think of casual $1 iOS games as the gateway to bigger and better games; someone who never thought of themselves as a gamer might start playing Angry Birds on the subway, and then they’ll move on to something better. I’m guessing Anderson feels the opposite: these things are a bad habit, and it sounds like we should break it.

When mainstream pubs criticize games, they usually argue that they’re a waste of time. Because outside of maybe killing someone, what’s worse than wasting your time on unproductive activity? I’ve never liked that argument, because when you start making fun of how people spend their leisure time, you’re on a slippery slope. How many hours in a year does a serious baseball fan spend watching games? You don’t even get to pick up a bat and play!

Still, Anderson has every right to criticize games. My big gripe about the article is that he insulted the people who shared their time with him, more or less to their faces, and that he found it easy to do because after all, this is just a story about stupid videogames. It came off as mean-spirited, discrediting, and maybe self-conscious – and it blinded me to went well in the piece. For what it’s worth, Tom Bissell, who has also played the role of “mainstream journo who explains this stuff to non-gamers,” has a much better approach: he may make fun of how much time he spends with videogames, but he’s always making fun of himself more than anyone else. He’ll laugh at himself for spending hundreds of hours on Oblivion, but I’ve never seen him make fun of Bethesda for making the game.

Anderson’s story is also the opposite of what the mainstream press can do very well: talk to the people who make games, and find out what makes them tick. In all of the stories I linked to above – from Seabrook, Bissell, etc. – a serious journalist spends time with a game creator to learn why and how they do their work. We learn about their creative process, the way they live, the tools they use, the context in which their work belongs. They tell us stories about people first, and games along the way. And they’re inquisitive, sympathetic, and in the most basic way, respectful. And this is where the press could improve and advance the games biz, instead of having a laugh and moving on.

I’ve got more update for this week. While I was at GDC, the rad new zine Conjectural Figments published its second issue, which includes my story “The Link In The Chain.” You can read, print, or download the issue here.

When I was a kid, I used to wonder if I was the only real person on earth – that maybe all the other people around me were really robots, quietly spying on me. I think a lot of people get that feeling: it’s a sign of how difficult it is to empathize with other people, and to imagine the full, real lives they lead even when they’re not hanging around with you. Vonnegut fans will also recognize that scenario from the Kilgore Trout novel that sets off the events in Breakfast of Champions.

Thinking about the concept, I had the idea to write a story about that kind of a world – except I wanted to tell it from the perspective of one of the robots who has to deal with this one, solitary individual. I finished the story and started shopping it around last summer.

In the end I made up a few human beings, but the focus stayed on Katherine, who feels underappreciated and isolated in her role – feelings that strike most people who are old enough to be responsible for something.

This is the second story I’ve published. rereading it, I don’t think it’s as effective as the first one, We Are Ted Tuscadero for President. They both came from a pretty personal space, but I had a better handle on Ted’s character (and in fact, I sort of slipped him into this story, maybe as a crutch). But I’m still pretty fond of it.

I’ve got a third story that I’m still shopping around. And after a year and a half, that’s not a lot of volume. Charlie Jane Anders recently wrote at io9 about how she got her start by writing a story every single week. I think she’s onto something: I would get much better at writing this kind of stuff if I do it constantly. Maybe I’ll go that route. But the main reason I wrote this particular story was that I liked the idea, I liked the character, and it tapped into a lot of stuff that I was going through last year. Writing it made me feel good, basically. I don’t really have a better explanation than that.

A couple weeks ago, Klei Entertainment announced its latest title, Mark of the Ninja. And I’m pleased to announce that I wrote the script. You can see a sample of gameplay above – and check out the promo site, which includes a text adventure that Jamie Cheng, Nels Anderson, and I worked on.

Mark of the Ninja is a 2-D stealth game. It’s built on the Shank engine, but where the Shank franchise features running and gunning, Ninja casts the player as a “glass cannon” – highly maneuverable and powerful in a one-on-one fight, but vulnerable against guns or mobs. While the action’s a hoot, you have to think and sneak your way through to win the game.

I’ve been working on the project since last fall. Though I wrote the script, the story came from the Klei team, and it’s been in place almost from the beginning of the project. I never had to come in and stitch together a lot of random action scenes; the story has always driven the game. Klei is a small team, and I’ve been getting early builds and talking to the team over web conferences since I started. It’s a great situation and I feel really lucky to be involved.

Jamie, Nels and I demoed the game at the Game Developers Conference last week. Demos at GDC run the gamut from the very formal – a hands-off demo or a sample of footage on videotape, scheduled in the W Hotel with publicists watching everything the game’s designers say – to the very casual: sitting cross-legged on the floor of Moscone West with a laptop and a game designer and giving the game a try. We went with the latter. We set up on the third floor (near the press room) and invited people to take it for a spin. We were pretty open that it was a work in progress – the audio was temporary, the tutorial needs a little tweaking, and there’s a whole screed about the metal band Death in the subtitles of the first cutscene – but everyone got to play it hands-on. I can’t speak for the players, but they looked engaged, slapped the buttons a lot, and a few of them talked back to the screen. I took those as good signs.

I’ll have more to say about what I’ve seen and what I’ve learned over this process in the months to come. Klei will be showing the game at a booth at PAX East, and it’s slated to ship this summer. If you get a look at it, let me know what you think!

The first and sometimes the only thing people say about Dark Souls is that it’s hard—really hard, migraine hard, ready-to-shoot-yourself challenging. The players say it (“I can’t take this!”). The people who are scared to play it, say it: “Wait, that’s the one that’s really hard, right?”

I’m as guilty as anyone of defining this game by its difficulty level, when there are actually a hundred other things I’d rather celebrate. But I want to tackle the “difficulty” thing head-on, because the difficulty is key to the experience of this game—but not in the macho, “tough it out” sense you might expect. In Dark Souls, the difficulty isn’t a club the designers bash you with, but the palette with which they paint the experience.

Let’s take an example: the section named Sen’s Fortress. (Spoiler warning: we’re going to be talking about Sen’s Fortress.) Jayson Gegner praised it on Twitter as “Dark Souls’ gameplay design & level design in microcosm,” and he’s right: almost every design decision that makes Dark Souls great can be seen in this sequence.

And you won’t even see it coming. You may look straight at Sen’s Fortress a hundred times before you learn what it’s for or even what it’s called. Dark Souls has an “open world,” although you’d be better to call it a semi-open world. It is not like Bethesda’s contemperanous Skyrim, where you can start walking in any direction and find something to do; instead, you have a handful of choices at any one time, and you have to figure out which one is best.

Your first big choice in the game is to go up, or down. Nobody points you to the trailheads: you just realize after poking around that these are your options. Which is better? Nobody tells you. There is a guy sitting nearby who tells you that your job is to ring two bells, but he doesn’t say much more. From here, you’re on your own.

Now, it won’t take long to figure out that going up is easier than down. Following the path of less resistance will bring faster progress, while going down will take you to encounters that range from painful to impossible. (You could also go across, through the graveyard, which would be a really bad idea.) Technically, you could be stubborn and ring the down bell before the easier up bell. But I’m sure that almost everybody hits them in the order the designers expect.

Why would the designers give us these options when all but one of them leads to disaster? Because if we make the decision, we own the consequences. When we talk about “open world” games, we think of words like “discovery” and “freedom,” and sometimes we conflate the terms: if we can discover the world on our own, then we must be free. But there’s no freedom in Dark Souls. The designers let us experience the place on our own, while hooking us on an invisible leash to keep us more or less on task. Yet we still feel like we’ve conquered this space, because we put it together ourselves—unlocking our own shortcuts, discovering how the levels connect, and making our mental maps of the entire world. (Here’s one simple way From Software could have ruined the whole game: by giving us an on-screen mini-map.)

So, you start with a simple goal: ring the two bells. Get that done, and you’ll open the gate to Sen’s Fortress. By now, you’ve definitely seen the place: it’s a big, imposing building at the end of a walkway leading from Undead Parish. The front gate’s open. Let’s check it out!

///

The first section of Sen’s Fortress is the most challenging. It acts as a kind of overture, introducing all of the elements that will give you grief: pressure plates in the floor that trigger traps in the wall; tough, fast lizard men; snipers that shoot lightning bolts at you from the darkness; and platforming sections, that force you to thread your way across narrow catwalks between giant swinging axeblades. Fall off the catwalk and you end up in a mucky pit where your movement is restricted and demons lurk in the darkness, waiting to clock you. Get stuck there once and you’ll be even more nervous the next time you run that gauntlet, which just makes executing your moves even harder.

If you’re a so-so player like me, you may run through this opening section a dozen times before you’re comfortable with it, and you’ll still screw up every third or fourth time thereafter. So let’s stop here and ask: why is this damn game so hard? Are the designers mean people? Are they superhumanly good at videogames? Did they, at the inception of the franchise, do some market research and conclude, “Well, you know, there are already plenty of easy RPGs on the market?”

I can’t speak for the designers—truth be told, I’d be scared to be alone in a room with them. But the challenge accomplishes a few things. First and most obviously, it forces you to pay attention. Play any other recent action RPG—Fable III, say—and the dungeons fly by in a whirl of similar rooms, easy encounters, and piles of devalued loot. It’s rare to go through any piece of real estate more than once, and in Fable III, I remember running through several beautiful dungeons and fortresses and paying almost no attention along the way. By contrast, Dark Souls shoves your nose against every inch of the game.

Because you repeat each section of the game so many times, and commit it so firmly to memory, you build up certain tricks and patterns. You achieve mastery, which is satisfying, and yet you always feel like something could go wrong, which is exciting. It’s not like memorizing a tricky cadenza on piano; in Dark Souls, your timing (well, my timing) is never perfect. Take Undead Burg, in the sequence right after the first bonfire. You run across a catwalk into a room. The first skeleton will rush at you, but let’s say you’re a split-second too slow as you dash across the catwalk; he may have his shield up in time to block your swing. While you stop to deal with him, another skeleton has time to throw a firebomb at you. And because you were probably cocky going in, you were probably a little careless, and now you’re mobbed. You could get killed on your twentieth time through this room, or even your fiftieth.

This is why the same handful of skellys by a catwalk can keep you entertained for hours, and it probably has the level designers on Fable III—and the producers who set their budgets—crying in their pints. And while I hate to boil this down to quality versus quantity, it is odd and maybe terrifying to think that so many AAA games—with teams in the hundreds and budgets in the tens of millions—are built to deliver content that the player experiences only once, if at all. That’s some “fall of the Roman Empire” stuff right there.

But more than anything, the game’s difficulty level leads to a dynamic and exciting experience. While the game is consistently difficult, it’s difficult in very different ways, and this gives each level its own challenge, its own tempo, and its own intensity.

In Sen’s Fortress, once you run the gauntlet of the first two catwalks, things start to calm down. You can take your time exploring the next rooms, and at this point, the game will even start dropping sight gags. Right after the opening section, you’ll come to a room where a lizard man is leaning against the wall, taking a snooze. After struggling with three of these guys on the way in, you’ve found one who’s stone cold asleep!

Dark Souls doesn’t get enough credit for its sense of humor, which largely falls under what Anna Anthropy calls “masocore.” For example, in Sen’s Fortress, you’ll run into an eye-popping number of treasure chests. This place is a land of plenty compared to the rest of the game, where loot of any kind is scarce. By the fourth or fifth chest, you’ll be so greedy that you’ll run right up and open it—and then suddenly, two arms spring out of the sides and pull your head inside, where a giant pair of jaws chews you up. The designers knew you were going to walk up to that chest without a care in the world, so they decided to have some fun and throw in a Mimic.

Then there are the traps. Sen’s Fortress has three types, stating with a pressure plate/lethal dart thing that that you step on just a few feet inside the entrance. (After a few tries you’ll probably notice that you can lure the lizard men out right in time to catch them in this trap, and if you do it just right, you’ll take one of them out and make the fight much easier. I pull that off about three-fourths of the time.) The flying darts appear a few more times in the Fortress, and they get easier every time: after all, you’ve got the whole map memorized, so barring a distraction or mistake, it’s pretty unlikely that you’ll fall for the same trap twice. In that way, the floor plate traps feel like a missed opportunity. It’s clever the first time, but in Dark Souls, repeatability is more important than first impressions.

The boulders are better. The first time I saw one, I was watching a lizard gurad as he turned to face me, and just as he started walking, BAM!—a giant boulder smacked him down and rolled him away. Peering carefully out the door, I found a grooved track where the boulders were rolling by, every eight or so seconds like clockwork, giving me a narrow window to run up the track and look for an exit. (Naturally, I found one.)

As you go deeper, you’ll discover there are four tracks for the boulders to roll down, and you can even find—and rotate—the mechanism that lines them up with each chute. When I discovered that I could reroute the boulders myself, I wondered if this was a puzzle—say, I would have to send the boulders down the chutes in a certain order to unlock the next path. But that wasn’t the case. While the boulders will knock through a couple of walls to open secret rooms, figuring that out is strictly optional. I’m sure it was tempting for the designers, who are smart and devious people, to gate our progress until we work through this puzzle. But they didn’t, and for a good reason: that’s not the type of game Dark Souls is.

To stick a new kind of puzzle in the middle of this game would be disruptive. Even the players who like that kind of puzzle would have to change their frame of reference and dust off a set of skills that nothing else in the game has used. See for example the inventory puzzle in the middle of Portal 2: the player has to grab a turret and drop it into a scanner in a weapons factory, in order to trick the assembly line. This puzzle is so incongruous that the voiceover almost immediately gives away the answer, to keep the player from stalling out. Portal 2 may be a puzzle game—but it’s not that kind of puzzle game.

In any case, the boulders aren’t your chief headache: the axes are. Keep climbing through the fortress and you’ll face two more catwalks defended by swinging axes. The fourth and last set swings over the narrowest catwalk, in the highest point in the fortress, with the worst angle to check out how much space you have between the blades. Strangely, I’ve never failed to get through, but I’ve always been terrified, because the thought of getting knocked off and falling down and losing all of my hard-earned progress is excruciating. It would be about as bad as dropping your ice cream cone on a summer day.

The traps in Sen’s Fortress—the darts, the boulders, the axes—reinforce something you knew from the beginning of the game: the very ground you walk on is treacherous. This is something you don’t see in, say, BioWare RPGs, where the space you walk through is mainly there to pace out the encounters. In Dark Souls, you have to pay attention to the floor. You can fall off the edges of cliffs, or shimmy along a narrow ledge to a treasure. Without going as far as Prince of Persia, Sen’s Fortress makes you aware of the physical space you’re in by making it treacherous—and it’s treacherous in a different way than the cliffs up to Undead Burg, or the shaky platforms of Blighttown, or the invisible pathways of the Crystal Cave, or the tree roots of the Great Hollow (where falling can be the easiest way down). In Anor Londo, you can stroll across grand, flat, wide-open bridges, but it also forces you to shimmy up flying buttresses and sneak around narrow ledges—which tells you that this place is magnificent, and that you don’t belong here. In the same way, the traps and catwalks of Sen’s Fortress give the environment its own character, and brings a new texture to your experience.

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When you get to the roof, you’re supposed to feel nervous as hell. In fact, when you first set foot up there, you’ll see a metal giant. If you’re like me, you will stand dead still to see if he’s going to attack you—yes, he’s maybe a hundred feet away, but who knows? But he ignores you, and once you’re at ease, you can creep around the rooftop, fighting knights (who are tough but familiar), sneaking around corners, and the whole time feeling torn between two impulses: the urge to explore what’s up here, and the fear that you’ll get killed and have to start over.

The designers know that right now, you’ll be looking for a bonfire. In Dead Souls, the bonfires are your checkpoint system. When you rest at a bonfire, it becomes your homebase; if you get killed, you wake up back at your last bonfire and head out to try again. Right now, your last bonfire is all the way back outside the Fortress, which means you desparately want to know: Where’s the next one?

Bonfires usually appear out in the open, with the consistency of highway rest stops. But once in a while, the designers decide to hide a bonfire, or block it off with a gate. In Sen’s Fortress, you have to look for a gap in the wall on the rooftop that lets you drop down a few feet and land in a balcony, where you’ll find the level’s only bonfire. You might miss it at first because, for one thing, the gap is hard to see from where you’re standing, and for another, the first time you reach that part of the roof, a grenade drops right in your face and sets you on fire, making you scramble as you try to figure out where it came from and how to escape.

That’s a good joke! The first giant you see on the roof will startle you, but he won’t hurt you. But there’s a second one who makes his presence known by throwing those grenades that burn off most of your health. Once you get a handle on where he’s aiming, he becomes predictable and easy to evade—but he’s still a nuisance. You can make your way up to his tower and try to kill him, but if you haven’t found the bonfire yet, this is a dicey proposition: it usually takes two or three runs to beat a mini-boss, and if you whiff it on this one, you’ll have to take on the whole fortress before you can try again.

But like I said, find the bonfire, and the entire dynamic changes. Now you have a waypoint at the edge of the roof. You’re gotten past the hardest parts of the region. You don’t have to mess around with swinging axes or dark tunnels or lizard men. You finally have time to explore.

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Dark Souls has been praised for its backstory—or as Tom Bissell put it, for not telling you what the backstory is. To a limited extent, Dark Souls practices environmental storytelling. The game takes place in a ruined civilization—you can see that just by looking at the buildings. The few characters you can talk to are faded ghosts from a better time; that’s why they seem helpless and in fact, rarely even move around. The few bits of backstory you pick up come from quick dialogues and from the loading screens, where objects flash by with a few breadcrumbs of exposition attached. Big Hat Logan? Anor Londo? You only have a dim idea of what these mean.

Dark Souls is one of the most engrossing games I’ve ever played. No matter what I’m doing, I feel “in the moment.” I imagine this is how a feral cat feels, prowling the same neighborhood night after night, looking for fights—and like the feral cat, I don’t really spend a lot of time thinking about how it all came to be. Where most RPGs try to pile on history to give their stories weight, Dark Souls—for all the evidence of its history—keeps you focused on the here and now, rarely giving you a reason to reflect.

Dark Souls may be a hard game to play, but it’s an easy one to spectate. Big guys are tougher to fight than little ones. Heavy weapons take longer to swing than light ones. Fast, clumsy, strong, agile—we can see what these creatures are and what they can do, and the numbers floating over their heads just affirm our instincts. And the monsters aren’t just big, they’re weird. A wolf that fights by gripping a sword in its mouth? A giant bulbous demon that vomits lava? A topless woman attached to a spider? You don’t need much lore to prop up stuff like that.

Meanwhile, the guideposts through your journey have basic, humble descriptions. You have to ring the bell. You have to light the bonfires, and then kindle them. Everything is called what it is, and even the levels have short, simple names. Slapping ornate names onto everything—say, the Bell of Qualla’goggooo, the Bonfire of Shamalama—would, in trying to layer on meaning, merely slop on too much and disturb the beauty of what’s in front of you.

From Software is more concerned about “theming” than “storytelling,” and they are very, very good at it. Take the bonfire. In gameplay terms, this is your checkpoint, the place where you save your progress and recover your health—one of the oldest mechanics in gaming. Dark Souls represents the safety and comfort in this idea by using one of our oldest symbols of warmth and protection. You know without being told that if you sit by the bonfire, you’re safe.

Now look at the gesture a character makes when they make an offering to the bonfire. The pose is humble and pious: the character is on bended knee, hand on heart, as it reaches into the fire and makes an offering, or a pledge. The gesture isn’t cast as a “power-up” but as a kind of restoration. Your character is damaged and “hollow,” but by performing this rite, it recovers some of its humanity—reinforcing that this is a place to rest, to heal, to get back what you’ve lost. This is really, really well done.

Dark Souls‘ approach wouldn’t work for every game. “Something bad happened here” is not exactly the greatest story ever told, and what you learn about the specific characters and specific events is not as striking as the raw imagery of the fire, the undead, the sun. The NPC quest chains are brittle, and key encounters with the handful of NPCs are easy to miss. When you find someone to talk with, the overt exposition ranges from mediocre to bad. Half the exchanges end with a “ha ha ha ha” or “heh heh heh heh,” and sometimes, the dialogue doesn’t even understand the gameplay. When a character first warned me that Sen’s Fortress is a treacherous place where many have gone but none have returned, I wanted to ask: “Didn’t you tell them about the bonfire?”

Still, there is a story here, and I counted two pieces of lore in Sen’s Fortress. First is the name: Who is Sen? I have no idea. So far, I haven’t found another reference to him anywhere. (Though Reddit has some theories.) More compelling is an archer who we find on the rooftop, guarding a tower. When you approach him, he doesn’t stand out from the other knights and guards you run into up here. But if you close in and engage him, you’ll notice he has a few more tricks up his sleeves than the average bad guy: he can jump and roll, he’s tougher to kill, and his armor’s really shiny. The real tell comes when you kill him and loot the body. He’s carrying a weapon named Ricard’s Rapier, and this is how you learn his name.

Even on the Internet, I can’t find much lore about Ricard. But I’m fascinated enough by where he ended up, out here by himself, guarding some tower, with nobody but a few ghouls and lizards to keep him company. It expands the story just that little bit more: “Something bad happened here—and here’s a guy who suffered.”

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The boss fight that ends the region is, counterintuitively, the easiest thing you’ll encounter. The Iron Golem that guards the exit may look tough, and he has a few tricks: if you get too close to his hand, he might pick you up and throw you right over the side of the building. But as with most of the bosses in the game, there’s a simple way to beat him: hide behind his legs and whack at his ankles until he’s dead. Once you’ve tackled the rest of this place, the boss is just an encore.

When you beat him, you’re done. Sen’s Fortress has changed from an out-of-the-way building, to the next step in your quest, to a nigh-insurmountable challenge, to an old friend. You’ll probably still remember every nook and cranny of the map, but now you’ll have a shortcut—a prison cage that acts as an elevator—that lets you skip all the challenges in between. There may still be a few corners and secrets you haven’t checked out: the chutes at the end of a few hallways that drop you down to the bottom, or the pit where that creepy headless Titanite demon hops around. You can tackle that at your leisure.

But I’ll wrap up this runthrough with the image that to me, makes sense of the entire fortress and maybe, the entire game. I still remember the first time I walked out on the rooftop and saw that metal giant, just like the one who opened the gate in the first place.

When I caught sight of him I backed up and raised my shield: was he going to attack me? Then I noticed what he was doing: he was hard at work throwing boulders down a hole. I had seen the device that caught the boulders, the tracks they rolled down, the holes where they broke through the walls, the lizards they crushed. I knew that the tracks ran through the entire Fortress, and now I could see the giant creature that kept the boulders rolling, moving like clockwork: lift, turn, drop, lift, turn, drop. He’s the coldly beating heart of this puzzle box, the engine that drives the entire machine, the creature that just keeps dropping rocks on your head to see if you’ll quit. He’s the most obvious metaphor for a game designer you’ll ever find. Is he making your life miserable—or richer, and more exciting? That’s for you to decade.

/ / /

So you may still be wondering, “That’s great, but why is the game so difficult?” That’s a good question. It’s a question I’ve asked dozens of times, whenever the difficulty spikes—or should I say, lurches ahead of me. Because for all I can say about the wonders of this game, the difficulty is still what makes the biggest impression. And honestly, it doesn’t always work. The last stretch of the game is a slog. It grinds you through one miserable boss fight after another—some of them coming within minutes of each other—and by the time you’re done you may just feel a kind of achey relief.

We tend to fixate on challenge because it’s that’s how we cope with it: we try to measure it and gauge it, we wonder if we can handle it, and then we slowly prepare to confront it. We lower our expectations and, at the same time, raise our skills through practice, until finally the mountain that looked so high from the base seems kind of small and cozy once we’re at the top. Things are only difficult until we understand them. To people who have beaten Dark Souls, the game doesn’t really seem that hard—hence the expression, “the real Dark Souls starts here,” meaning, in the much harder New Game Plus.

In music, film, and literature, difficult works provoke the same kind of response. We talk about them in terms of whether we can deal with them: War and Peace is “too long,” Lars Von Trier’s films are “too disturbing.” Audiences may balk at a work because it’s unfamiliar, complicated, opaque, taboo, exhausting, unpleasant to the senses, and so on—but in every case, the audience often hangs back and wonders: Are we the problem? Or is the work failing us? Is it challenging because the challenge is key to the form, the message, and the experience—or is it challenging because the artist is a jerk? If the artist has a message to send us—well, to paraphrase Samuel Goldwyn, why couldn’t they just send us a telegram?

Games shed new light on this old debate, because here, challenge is understood from the get-go as being integral to the experience. All games test their players, and the players accept that they are taking a test and they will be graded. We’re also more comfortable with the idea that the difficulty is the point of the game. We accept that sometimes, you have to earn your place in the audience. Consider this letter from Randall Shown that ran in The New York Times, replying to an article about choreographer Merce Cunningham:

Without the bias of an education in dance, I came to Merce on my own. Sitting in the rafters at City Center every March, I’d watch the legions leave halfway through, unable to grasp the language of his gestures or the sounds that accompanied them. Years later when coincidence led me to share my life for some years with a dancer in the company, Merce admitted his pleasure at testing the limits of his audience, suggesting in not so many words that the ones who made it through somehow earned the pleasures he suffered, and earned, in his own art.

The primary language of Dark Souls is difficulty. The game paces and varies that difficulty with the same craft that goes into its character builds, sound effects, and environmental design, and with the same purpose: to explore distinct, exquisitely-realized variations on one unified experience. What starts as a dare is revealed to be the reward.

… And okay, sure, it also gives you something to brag about to your friends. And did I mention: I beat Sen’s Fortress! I did it! See you in Anor Londo, if you even get there suckas!!!!!!!!

[CHANGES SINCE THE ORIGINAL POST: I corrected two mistakes, first that the dude by Firelink Shrine doesn't tell you where the bells are (he does), and second, that the giant who drops the boulders is the same one who opens the fortress (he isn't). Added a link to a theory from Reddit about where the name "Sen" came from. Also tweaked some wording.]