Why videogames’ optional reading is more than just filler

By Niall O’Donoghue

Gwyn, Lord Of Cinder, falls beneath your sword. It’s the culmination of a long, hard journey, after many hours fighting your way through this ceaselessly hostile world. Now, as the music fades away, all that’s left to do is choose. Will you preserve the Age Of Fire, or beckon in an era of darkness? It’s a significant question, with resounding consequences, yet many who reach the ending of Dark Souls might ask themselves another one entirely: What on Earth just happened?

To answer that question fully, you’ll need to piece together the descriptions of hundreds of items found throughout Lordran, and cryptic conversations with NPCs. It’s a tall order, enough that even VaatiVidya, the YouTuber whose name has become practically synonymous with ‘lore’ over the past decade, has to admit: “Even I tend to ignore the lore and simply focus on enjoying the combat in my first playthrough.”

No wonder, then, that so many of us might choose not to engage at all. Think of all the times you’ve skimmed through one of Deus Ex’s email chains to find the password buried within, or ignored a codex entry in Doom Eternal in favour of rushing to eviscerate the next demon. But, of course, for a certain type of player – Vaati among them – that’s not the end of the story. Not by a long way.

“ACCOMPLISHMENTS ARE FOREVER OUT OF REACH TO THOSE WHO CONSTANTLY FEAR FAILURE. A TRUE WARRIOR HONES HIS BODY AND MIND, AND PEERS FAR BEYOND IMMEDIATE HARDSHIP”

Extract from Parrying Dagger item description, Dark Souls 2

The description for Oldenford’s Staff references Melfia, a location never seen in the Souls games.

The YouTuber still remembers the first time he felled Gwyn, and the powerful melancholy he felt afterwards. That experience lit a fire in him, it seems, and by the time of Elden Ring’s release, he and his collaborators were creating a flowchart of item descriptions and dialogue, exhaustively catalogued in an attempt to better understand the whole. It’s a dark fantasy world in more than one sense, with many of the essential details obscured in shadow.

“FromSoftware is willing to obscure so much of their stories to enable community theory-crafting,” Vaati reflects. “Just like they have confidence in hiding areas to explore in their games, they also have confidence that their stories are intriguing enough to warrant players diving into the lore.” The key word there, perhaps, is ‘community’. Huge audiences have built up around Vaati’s videos, and in forums on Reddit, dedicated to unpicking these mysteries in a variety of games that stretch far beyond any one series or developer. But there are anchor points – worlds that such lorehounds particularly love to lose themselves in – and one is the Destiny universe, which has grown enormously since the original game’s launch in 2014, now encompassing two full releases, 11 expansions, and myriad smaller updates. Not for nothing does Bungie employ an in-house historian to keep track of it all.