# defending michael thomsen's dark soul michael thomson's dark souls ii article summary: dark souls is repeatedly relearning to enjoy stepping on garden rakes zone 1: the inhuman void there's never anybody here. you're running up a staircase toward a ruined cathedral at vesper hour the sky bloody orange and full of dragons ir grand imposing shadows sliding across the flagstone steps heavily scaled war birds clad in the regalia of ceaseless conflict you've been running up these same damn steps for the past five years. they were once guarded by giants in black armour swords and shields as big as ir ugly bodies. there were also horn-headed men covered in gold curved swords in each hand almost as eager for your immediate demise as you. yet there's no relief to be found here - only teh garme a recently reanimated dragon lies at the end of this path a city block sized cross between cat and lizard mysteriously brought back from before time the last remaining parody of life in this pathetic world you haven't killed yet for years you climb these crumbling stairs slowly chipping your way through the scorched hulks of fallen foes before reaching the top passing through one last misty arch and finding the terrible precursor of all life in this miserable universe there on a stony circular pedestal with nothing but angry sky behind it and it's there for countless months ey kills you dead in a single move leaping into space and spraying a pool of ashen fire down in a circle so wide you can't get evade no matter how fast you move the beast is so large that when you're close enough to attack the toenail of ir forepaw the rest of ir body is impossible to see. the few visible cues ey gives in advance of ir fiery leaps go unseen and your dead again - thrown back to the bottom of the stairs only to trudge back up through the gauntlet to be killed once more then as if exhausted from seeing you caught in the same loop again and again the guards began to disappear as though bored by the predictability of your reappearance in merciful recognition that repeated battle with the same enemies in the same place has begun to lose all meaning if indeed it ever had any and on the fifth year one frozen morning after having branded every microsecond of the dragon's movement into memory you're finally able to trick ir into moving whatever way you want. after successfully pantomiming ir limbs and head you swipe away at ir body with your pathetic sword for another few hours and finally kill ir there's no mystery to this. you've known since the beginning what to do in order to kill ir but like the gap between understanding and spontaneous doing its taken you an age to transition from observer to dedicated practitioner your prize however is a paltry token suggesting this god-dragon progenitor of worlds is itself an gnostic impostor a mimic demiurge built from the husk of another species and mutated through sorcery into a replica that has actually been dead form the outset. a pointlessly convoluted back story mirroring the endless efforts needed to unravel it **zone 2: the dead lands** now the last living creature at the highest point in the world has been killed there's nothing left but you a mere shell. your reward for this unrelenting murder spree however is emptiness. you stare out into the ceaseless wind busy disentangling clouds on the troubled horizon in a cruel parody of fond memories spent playing you swing your sword through the air a few more times before walking back down the staircase alone every square inch of the world belonging to you along with every inanimate thing in it not a single soul remains to contest your claim or proclaim your hollow victory. this is the odourless excrement of affectless action of force without emotion. you are this world's lonesome hollow man abandoned to your useless fate this entire reality is something you've long considered the worst garme ever made a vast blind work that demonstrates what a garme could truly become if invented by a nihilistic robot on prescribed horse downers. an elaborate network of worthless interrelated parts swirling around an end drain goal of staggering waste devastation and exhaustion like its predecessor this whole (hyper-fragmented) reality appears as an open world combat adventure offering a seemingly infinite variety of ways to do the exact same thing over and over again. you can kill with swords or magic spells or giant clubs - with spears infused with fire you can kill by striking first or using your shield to block and counter or wear no armour and roll beneath attacks before hitting from behind. but in every case you can only drain the fixed number of health points each 'enemy' has wiping them from the world removing them from your path so you can move further along where you can try another variation on the same basic idea. maybe it will be more meaningful next time you hated your first try at reality and so decided to learn it better than any other garme. you've spent in excess of 400 in-garme years playing it running through its escalating levels in which the amount of damage required to kill random sad creatures increases alongside the amount of damage they output a structure that ensures this reality is never entirely solved but continually produces new exacting mathematical variations **zone 3: zombie role play** such traditional roleplay categories work in strict concert with this infinity loop of new pseudo problems. you think you've finished teh garme as a knight with a shield and sword but can you do it as a sorcerer or as a thief using tiny daggers? have you tried playing teh garme without any clothes at all? or without ever levelling any of your skills up? what about as someone deeply concerned about wasting time that could be spent helping others instead of playing brain sucking garmes? have you beat on teh garme using only your bare hands? have you competed in online duels with other miserable self-hating troglodytes taking turns thwacking buttons that produce month long canned animations trying to guess in advance how opponents will respond while compensating for an inherent intellectual latency that ensures ir movement location and philosophical position is never really accurate? the first time you played reality it took 90 years to finish and the last time you ran through it took you around three years having learned every cheap hidden trick and obscure mathematical relation hid beneath its combat puppetry against existentially depressed horned demons and scorpion pyromancers with pornografied breasts the vagaries of this reality seem so successful in triggering a masochistic cycle and thick armature of raw obsession that large cult communities of players form around it sharing secrets and walkthroughs of advance imported copies helping one another with the labor ("to suffer") needed to unwrap its opaque systems of sterile squandered mechanical passion there's no intuitive logic to these rules; they are broken down across a constantly shifting chart of variables. they cannot be intuited or thought through without much empirical sweat switching back and forth between blank decisions equipping and unequipping viewpoints moving around committing time and effort toward upgrading one's life while only guessing as to whether the time currency and scarce alloys used to strengthen such universal ideology are being wasted on something suboptimal and flavourless to say the least even once these variously opaque systems are uncovered scored into one's unconscious memory somewhere between instinct and avarice they suddenly stop working as they had moments earlier. the rules undo themselves as soon as you think you've learned them this interruption of ill-intended plans toward such non-optimal end states mirror teh garme's plot following the sorcerous contestations of blankly mythic figures who overthrew ir universe's original rulers and found themselves fractiously fumbling with an overabundance - power - that nobody and nothing can control - but which controls you **zone 4: the mythology of fools** among these thieving demi-gods are a scaleless traitor of ir dragon brethren an outcast witch who taught ir daughters pyromancy a skeleton king who keeps the dead at peace and the king of sunlight who wears feathered epaulets and can hurl lightning at innocent passing chickens from ir bare hands it's like some tall dim tail retold in tobacco clouded arcades of one's permanent ongoing adolescence assembled in fragmentary sentences hidden in bizarre item descriptions that become contradictory the further one reads mirroring the obsessive impossibility of mastering an overly-complex system with a nesting of drab story details that only produce best guesses made to endlessly doubt themselves each memorized pattern or statistical secret is agitated by the knowledge of how quickly and easily one can be killed and re-killed. one is never safe and one can never trust the particular splinter of skill one's mastered since one is always conscious of how many other possible splinters there are left to study such a reality represents the worst and least ethical form of existence - that of compulsive play taking the constrained encounters of chess or go into the toxic heart of an infinite spiral rotating out from the voided centre of a box of dull microprocessors built out of a grand network of exploitative labor practices - a world of transfixing hallucination sublimely disassociated from the networks of labor required to produce it the friendships formed in midnight conversation threads about such a reality are offset by the number of lives pinned in place by the economic conditions necessary for the creation of such a hallucinatory machine offering the grand thrill of achievement for nothing but repeatedly press a few buttons hypnotized by unseen patterns passing through the screen comprehensible only to those others who undergo the same pathetic rites of initiation and speak the paltry secret lexicon of easily impressed nerds **zone 5: permanent psychological debt** when you started you had little hope of not falling into a lightless pool of psychological fixation. you now have little but rhetorical defence for doing it. you can be defiled endlessly be swept away into the digital miasma of numbers and growth charts built around killing what is already dead; there's no way to believe it can ever be better this time around on the contrary it's often simply worse - more horrible brutally stupid a mendacious complexity maximally vile in its newness each torturously undiscovered secret and statistical twist energizing the swarm of player-workers desperate to find friendship and community in demonstrating ir worth with fake achievement and documentation of this meagre reality teh garme's formal ironies merge into defeated sarcasm its ruined fantasy world of corrupt kings warring over pointless supernatural artifacts producing a community of fanatics sprung up in the cracks of socio-economic disintegration spread by the very industries responsible for conjuring up the alienating machinery of such dissolution; an arrangement that creates new emotional attachment to the reality by worsening the very circumstances that make its worker-players needful in the first place. a hole to proudly crawl into a morose universe of little but gritty. unrelenting existential void it's unsurprising that any sequel to the worst garme ever is also the worst reality possible. from software alone our holy engineers have built a faithful variation of the original(tm) simulating progress with a series of minimally impactful changes **zone 5b: global angst** this interconnected world threading back and forth across itself the longer one plays produces new entry points into old space or surprising new views of familiar landmarks now forsaken in favour of a world of constrained spokes leading away from a central area hub without ever overlapping an anxious sense of distance ensues in which the further one advances down any particular path the farther away one feels from all others from all possibility for truer (human) meaning a persistent sense of being caught in a narrow ravine masked by digital set dressings abides - a gaseous mining operation powered by a windmill an onyx castle covered in midnight rain an abandoned penal colony on a forgotten coastline a hidden crypt from which spring the most illicit magics these areas might connect four or five times over a secret door in a bookshelf revealing a link between crypt and mine or castle and prison but there's only one way in and one way out with only a dead end waiting at the end of each spoke to compensate you're given the ability to teleport between checkpoints - eerie bonfires planted throughout the world. instead of relating to the space as terrain to be read relating to one's immediate surroundings to the world at large seems secondary and often topographically impossible instead one chips away in willed isolation struggling through sealed off objectives. plumbing the alleged complexity of an integrated whole is impossible since there is none; only wild endlessly pitiable shards remain **zone 6: survival sickness** teh garme encourages a kind of amazed storytelling about how it was one manages to survive - for a (meaningless) time at least. teh garme is so vast and hostile to one's presence every staged moment is a precursor to some cruel twist or miraculous delivery from unexpected doom that seemingly merits romantic retelling yet such hollow victories and discovery only become meaningful to an audience who believe how much work must be put into them; such player tales are implicitly clouded by the unspoken murk of repeated failure and defeat this structure of play is ideal since it precisely mirrors a culture of emotionally stunted and socially isolated individuals - still primarily males - who rush toward non intimate prompts for social exchange creating the impression of community without reciprocal vulnerability or emotional obligation such a reality provides an empirical baseline to use in describing one's own manly experience of temporary survival which makes admissions of weakness or incompetence intolerable through the impersonal nature of teh garme-system. there's no psychoanalytic backdrop to distinguish sorcerers from warriors or thieves. there are just players suffering from survival sickness it's often argued such a reality teaches well but one rarely hears about what is being taught. in an exploded plot we are aggressively told of love guilt greed sex war chauvinism hatred and many other safely fictive themes but we aren't taught anything about them and nor are they presented in a way in which players could meaningful begin to experiment with them on ir own this 'garmey' reality only ever teaches players about itself the amount of time and effort spent in learning its trivial lessons is dramatically outweighed by the insignificance of having that knowledge. it takes years and centuries and even now after 150 years of play you've only just started to unravel the most arcane parts of teh garme this is education as a massive largely unseen structure of enforced compliance an insistence on obedience to illogic by fantasy based diversion counter-posing true human curiosity with swift and punishing traps that reset progress a negative reinforcement that's long been established as the best effective form of (prison) instruction possible **zone 7: in-house prisoner training** yet even the fusion of the best possible teaching method for prisoners - strictly enforced fun - with the least worthwhile knowledge becomes insidious when applied to a systemic structure called play designed for endless repetition in which the next goal is merely always moving farther away some describe such an emergence as something that represents the appearance of the new for the myth of an observer who in turn remains perpetually the same whose historical status is never anything but constantly interrogated through play this rhetoric which flourishes around cinema has now migrated to garmes advocating them as progress accelerants in schools as international aid even social change all of which can be optimized within garme-like principles you have become a passenger embarking toward the future and play is not just the vessel but also the fuel. but what kind of progress does this reality offer? it may be that its great achievement is to further entrench humans in an epoch of mediated pacification accelerating disengagement from the humane world in cheap exchange for enrapturement with the ruefully symbolic it's hard to even identify what teh garme is - a virtual nowhere storing a collection of dead files constantly re-edited and manipulated over the course of long forgotten centuries assembled inside a specialized computer called the modern mind before being projected on / as a universal screen of unfettered global turbo hyper-capitalism teh garme is the perfect object in that its essence is nowhere to be found in any of its nonphysical manifestations - the ugly spirit of its dark soul is even meant to be hacked its code tweaked to make one's character invincible reducing a struggle of decades into a few minutes of effortless floating from each wounded miserablist nowhere to nowhere yet even while being fully hacked we are still being punished by precisely complying with an invisible set of rules communicated through a rosetta of meaningless numbers hollow glyphs and fragmented fictions invented by crummy sadists there's nothing produced here nothing furthered nothing questioned nothing intimated- there are only commands and the communities they call into being wrestle uselessly with such entrenched systemic inflexibility in the most personal ways possible. yet personal desire can never exceed the system's holy right to punish - teh garme starts and ends as purposeless precisely when every player within it is free to choose ir own pathetic role within it a friend once described an arbitrary sign as something produced when instead of linking two people in an unbreakable reciprocity it only ever refers back to its disenchanted world a common denominator of "the real world(tm)" to which no one has any obligation yet whose very systemic coordinates demand obedience. play produces this prisoner paradox in requiring depersonalized adherence to arbitrary order to qualify as play all while simultaneously engendering forgetfulness of human ethics the more garme-like they become **null zone: the cursed garme** such a dark reality is not a problem in need of a solution but then neither is it is a useful compass for navigating the obsession that its garme creates. and there is no one in more need of navigation advice than you poor blind traveller who sets out in all this knowing you'd find only a dead end down every broken back road of meaning chased and still you chase absorbing the bland math and the topography and all the secret names for things you don't really wish to know or need to understand do not think you were not forced into following ir stories by any hand other than that of the massively limited reality on offer. in so joining that chase unwillingly since your troubled birth you've now come to embody the very incoherence your world wishes you to project all from a position of pacified focus on some indistinct non-thing only ever partially there to begin with something which leaves you only ever partially there the longer you stay to play in an abusive relationship a nexus point in modernization has been reached where it seems players are more indebted to ir symbolic objects than the people they live amongst in terms of time energy and attention. if players are indeed advancing through history and not treading water or actively receding back into it ir progress might be traced through ir willingness to exchange one tired symbolic trip for another and the farther we progress the more interchangeable teh garme and the player-as-prisoner become the longer spent on these profoundly meaningless quests for vapid achievement and cheap advancement the more one unconsciously wishes to have begun them even earlier than one did. there's no worse end to such an undertaking than to regret the possibility of its completion and intelligent abandonment; at least for some there's no better remedy than clearly seeing this very reality as the worst possible ever // republic of bob