Dark Souls 3 – The “Artist” Complication

Introduction

Going into Dark Souls 3, I knew full well what to expect from the many experiences of my friends who have had played previous Souls games, and what their current experience and thoughts were about the newest Souls game in the franchise. I was never crazy about this franchise, until I was pestered enough from both my friends’ recommendations and conversations about the game. Up until now, I knew new players had many things to fear when first playing the game, but I did not know the huge frustration that it truly was until now. The beginning states of me transitioning into the Souls series was a series of unfortunate deaths (maybe around a hundred or so). Although this frustration did not stop me as I learned basic game mechanics such as the importance of dodging and parrying. Overall, the weeks long of play that I spent on this game has been a glorious love-hate relationship, but just as the sun is praised, I also praise this experience I had myself, as it was something new, and very addicting as I finally got into it (although I still died a lot). So now, I share you my thoughts on when it comes to who is the “artist” of this game.

First: What is Dark Souls?

The Dark Souls franchise are a series of action role-playing and dungeon crawling games developed by FromSoftware and published by Bandai Namco. The publishing company Bandai Namco is best known for many of its famous other published franchises such as many of the Tales of Series, Tekken 6, some of Soulcalibur, and many other franchises. The Dark Souls series was first introduced in its first game Demon Souls, and slowly transitioned into the name of Dark Souls, leading up to its third sequel today. Today, the Souls franchise takes much widespread critical acclaim, with Dark Souls 3 today becoming Bandai Namco’s fastest selling video game ever at three million copies sold worldwide just one month after its release.

 

The “Artist” of Dark Souls 3

When it comes to accounting the “artist,” or the creator of this video game, accounting for who the creator is complicated due to the many creators that it has overall. For video games, there are many departments that have separate creators for separate aspects of a game. These many separate aspects of a game that have many different creators can be the designers, artists, programmers, scriptwriters, or music/sound developers. Per Becker, “the interaction of all the involved parties produces a shared sense of the worth of what they collectively produce. Their mutual appreciation of the conventions they share, and the support they mutually afford one another, convince them that what they are doing is worth doing. If they act under the definition of ‘art,’ their interaction convinces them that what they produce are valid works of art” (Becker 39). If we are to take account Becker’s quotation here of what art is, and just who are the creators, we can vaguely get that everyone involved in the production of something are the “artists” collectively. This means that the whole development team that collaborated and contributed something into the video game are the creators.

In conclusion from Becker’s statement, a videogame development team is the one who is responsible for being acknowledged as the “artist,” as they collectively had produced the game overall.

References: 

Becker, H. S. (2012). Art Worlds. Berkeley, Calif: University of California Press.