Five Minutes Of... Demon's Souls

[Five minutes of... is a series of video game investigations by Margaret Robertson, former Edge magazine editor-in-chief and current development director of social game studio Hide&Seek. Here, she explores what five minutes of play reveals about a particular video game, this time focusing on what the punishing Demon's Souls teaches us about failure.]

Alright then, Demon's Souls. Let's do this.

Sometimes it's hard to pick a game to talk about five minutes of. Sometimes it's easy. Demon's Souls is a game I've only ever played five minutes of, no matter how long I play it for. This is because I play the same five minutes every time I play. I don't mean the same five minutes in a Halo 30-seconds-of-fun kind of way. I mean the same five minutes.

Many of you will have had the same experience with Demon's Souls, or are having the same experience now with the sequel Dark Souls. If you haven't played it, it's that middling-brown hack-n-slashy RPG from From Software -- who you dimly remember were the guys who made Otogi -- and which you are sick of reading web comics about.

I hated those five minutes of Demon's Souls. Hated them the first time, hated them the tenth time. I persevered because I was surrounded by all the hype and reverential masochism: "it's hard, but the good kind of hard". I went back, again and again, with renewed hope each time, but found nothing but frustration and confusion.

As game worlds go these days, it's pretty grim. Gloomy, and murky, and woundingly derivative. There is little time to get your bearings, or to establish any sense of connection with this unlikeable world and this unwieldy avatar. There are corridors and shambling enemies and, after a bit of ungratifying flailing around, you meet your first serious opponent, who kills you. Then you do exactly the same thing again. And then you do it again.

I did not find it to be the good kind of hard. I railed about not understanding what kind of fun I was supposed to be having. Is this an equipment game? A min-maxing, load-out-juggling, inventory-tweaking thing? I like those. But this isn't one of those. So is it a brawler? Is this a nice, meaty, ponderous-but-precise third-person combat game where I need hone combos and rhythms and frame-perfect timing? I don't like those, really, but it turns out that doesn't matter, because this isn't one of those either.

So is it tactical, explorey fun? Is this about being smart about how I navigate maps, how I use space, how I manage resource? Cos those, I really really like. Which would mean I would really really like this, but I don't, and that turns out to be because it isn't one of those either.

And so I abandoned it, not sure if I was smarter than those who'd been transfixed by it, or just weaker. But now Dark Souls is out, and the hype has started anew. Friends I love and strangers I admire tell me of its glories. But it was hard to get excited about the new game when I had my abandonment of the original on my conscience. Before I could go on I would have to go back, and to my enormous surprise, I found that I wanted to.

This is because, in the interval between my first taste of Demon's Souls and my recent reprise, I've had a lot more practice at failure.

Actually, as ever year goes by, I have a lot more practice at failure.

Gamers on the whole are good at failure. We do it a lot, for fun -- or we certainly used to, before recharging health and infinite checkpoints. There are strong arguments to be made that this experience is one of the great virtues of games, one of the great reasons they aren't wasted time and empty power fantasies.

But even with that background, I'm finding that failure is something that I'm growing into. The older I get, the more I savor it.

It's something I seek out, now, something I find increasingly reassuring. This is a fairly new development. Your initial assumption is that you ought to follow whatever talents you seem to have. When I was young, it seemed sensible to pick, as hobbies, things I was good at. Ludicrous! Can you imagine a stupider idea?

Doing anything well -- really well -- is hard. Properly, grindingly hard. If you're trying to have fun doing something you expect to be naturally good at, you're just volunteering for a continuing spiral of shame and disappointment.

Now, for a hobby, I pick things I know I'm bad at. Things that I enjoy being bad at. I have recently decided to draw more things. I used to be horrible at drawing, but now I'm brilliant. My drawings haven't got any better, but I've made my peace with my total lack of native talent.

I'm terrible at drawing, but brilliant at being a terrible drawer. Almost everything I've drawn since this realization is a triumph. I did a cat the other day that would have made da Vinci weep. I choose to spend time doing things I know I'm bad at, where I don't hate myself for not being better. Failure has no sting when you expect it from the outset. It's just a little victory that you chalk up in the only column that matters.

It's taken me a few years, too, to figure out how to approach being a game designer in the same way. It's some time -- and a good few games ago now -- that I made the pretty loathsome transition from journalist to designer. It was a transition that I was pretty uncomfortable about. Very easy to be seen as some obnoxious know-it-all who thinks they can do it just because they've watched it being done.

So I fought hard, to begin with, to prove that I wasn't all mouth and no trousers. I am good at this; I do know what I'm doing. And I wrestled and stressed and did some okay-ish design work which some other people helped turn into some really very decent games that I hated for not being better. I got very little pleasure out of this process.

If only I'd recognized earlier that I was a failure! Now that I have, I'm making things I like far more. I mainly aspire, now, to ever-diminishing mediocrity. And you know what? I am nailing that. S-ranks, all the way.

And the games I play, as much as the games I make, have helped me cultivate that attitude. Going back to Demon's Souls made me realize I've spent all year playing failure games. Minecraft. Shiren the Wanderer. Desktop Dungeons. Dungeon Raid. Most recently The Binding of Isaac. These are games where failure is inevitable. Where progress is impossible without it. Where there is no success beyond the things you learn and the stuff you gather. Where the only victory is learning how to coexist productively with failure.

Because this is the virtue of failure. I often read about it -- and have often written about it -- purely antithetically. In the current age of gamification, this is particularly acute. We've developed an understanding of failure as defined only as the opposite of success; as the dark without which we couldn't have the light that we crave.

But I'm increasingly skeptical of that understanding, of the idea that failure only meaningfully exists as the salt that adds some zing to our successes.

What Demon's Souls understands about failure is that it is something which can be cherished, tamed, valued. Demon's Souls feels about persistence and humility the way most games feel about bravado and flair. Demon's Souls doesn't soften the blow of failure -- it's harder to imagine anything less sugar-coated than that bloodied You Died which is now burnt into my TV.

Instead, it measures you not in how well you succeed while you play, but in how well you cope with the silence when you stop.

The biggest gameplay challenge you face is in finding the fortitude to hit the button to try again, in not doing what I did first time round and give up rather than acknowledge the truth that I'm not very good at being bad at things. That moment is much harder than any boss fight.

I'm much better, now, at being bad at things. I would go so far as to say I'm exhibiting ever-diminishing mediocrity at being bad at things. Why, this week along, I've been bad at Demon's Souls and bad at drawing and bad at game design and bad at finishing books. Next week I am looking forward to being bad at giving talks and signing deals and making radical life decisions.

Now I just get up every morning and wander out into the world, knowing that wherever I go and whatever I do, I've got three things I can count on: the things that I know, the stuff in my pockets, and my faithful, forgiving companion: failure.

Worth saying, though, as an addendum: having had my epiphany with Demon's Souls, I thought I'd catch everyone else up and grab a copy of Dark Souls. Played it for five minutes and then junked it. That game is way too fucking hard.