Second-Order Effects of Dark Souls
You Died.
Dark Souls, released by FromSoftware in 2011, has a peculiar way of introducing itself. Where most role-playing games gently ease you in to their gameplay and narrative, Dark Souls throws you in a riptide to see if you make it to shore. There are no quests to guide you, and prospective allies may turn against you. There is no grand narrative of salvation, rather an impossible choice of continuing the world’s cycle of ash, or ending it and simultaneously its inhabitants. It is as frustrating as it is unforgiving, every failure amplified by a pure black screen with seven letters.
Fanning the Embers
In Dark Souls, the traditional conflict/resolution paradigm is mostly limited to combat. The provided solution is to pay close attention to how an enemy moves, internalize their approach, and chip away at their health bar. FromSoftware can manipulate this cycle through subtle or delayed animations, construction of boss rooms that restrict mobility, and limited viable equipment, but the fundamental gameplay loop remains intact. Encounter an enemy, die an undisclosed amount of times, and eventually, hopefully, you’ll understand the interaction well enough to beat it.
Why, then, are there so many testimonials about this game changing lives?
Through all the fantastical elements of Dark Souls, there is realism to its progression. You can acquire all the tools available to you in the game with improved stats, gear, and spells, yet failure is all but inevitable without learning how to approach the problem. Each boss encounter feels insurmountable at first. Progress is incremental; one more move learned, one more hit landed. Taking each boss down feels earned, a reward for your efforts. FromSoftware appeals to what is called the internal locus of control by making you achieve each victory for yourself, an idea explored further in Daryl Talks Games’ How Souls Games Save You.
By constructing a game without difficulty settings, pity systems, or significant upgrades, FromSoftware forces its players to face Dark Souls’ challenges as is. It is, though, ultimately a game. Feedback is immediate. The game ends. In real life, your locus of control is not always internal — sometimes things just happen, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Even when a problem is in your control, it doesn’t always feel rewarding to solve it. Reality is far more complicated than any game could hope to encapsulate. Conflicts cannot be put on hold until you have enough free time to deal with them, and you rarely get a chance to try again. Media will always be simpler than the real world it resides within. That being said, we can still learn from it.
Learning About Learning
For myself, the lasting takeaway from my time with Dark Souls is that information must be sought. The fabricated world and your role within it is not clearly defined. In Final Fantasy X (2001), there are long cutscenes and instances of dialogue to tell its story. In BioShock (2007), there are audio logs you pick up and listen to while exploring. Dark Souls’ approach is far less invasive. It’s entirely likely you play the game to completion without being able to explain what just happened or why. Pieces of its world of Lordran can be learned through item descriptions, one-off interactions with characters who seem to randomly come and go, and the handful of cutscenes that do play out, but how these pieces fit together isn’t clear. YouTuber VaatiVidya has made a career of attempting to complete the puzzle for each FromSoftware game, however his explanations of Dark Souls remain as theory.
This unique approach to narrative led me to consider the learning process in the real world. Yes, there are schools, institutions dedicated to learning. Books, journals, people willing to share their findings and experience, media, Internet. There is more information than ever before, and more ways to access it, which also leaves plenty of room for incorrect and outdated information. If your lore theory about Dark Souls is incorrect, the only repercussion is being wrong about a fantasy world in a video game. If you’re a medical professional or a civil engineer basing your conclusions on dated studies, then suddenly the stakes are a lot higher. The history taught in American public schools is selective at best, and isn’t showing any signs of leaning toward objectivity.
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What I’ve learned is two-fold. First, information must be actively sought and vetted. Even at the best schools, you only learn as much as you put in to each class. If you don’t commit yourself to an active and ongoing process of education, the knowledge you’ve obtained will slip in time. Second, it’s okay to not know things. No human is an encyclopedia, and no encyclopedia is complete. From an academic perspective alone, the longer you stay in school, the more narrow your field of study becomes. Experts in their field are often the first to admit how little they know. Some questions stay unanswered.
Academic Lens
The model of understanding how media shapes our perception of reality is called cultivation theory. Initially proposed by George Gerbner in the 1970s as a way of assessing television’s effects on its viewers, it’s been expanded over the decades to be appropriate for media with three traits: pervasion, accessibility, and coherence (Mosharafa, 2015). If the media is popular and can be engaged with for long periods of time, has limited barriers of entry, and tells a message Mosharafa describes as “homogeneous throughout its various programs and times,” cultivation theory can be applied to consider its heavy viewers’ (defined as engaging with said media more than four hours a day) perceived reality. An important caveat is that not every heavy viewer, not even most, will experience a perceived reality that differs from observable reality based on media they consume. For those whose perspectives do noticeably shift, changes are categorized into first- and second-order effects, or, respectively, quantitative and qualitative. In a 2012 study done on cultivation effects of video games, it was found that after playing three weeks of Grand Theft Auto IV, first-order effects such as the chance of being a victim of crime increased, yet second-order effects such as fear of crime did not change, finding “very limited support for cultivation effects” (Chong et al., 2012).
The interesting note here is that in the above discussion of Dark Souls, the referenced video and myself almost exclusively discuss second-order effects, contradicting the 2012 study’s findings. To raise one’s self-efficacy through internal loci of control and take a cautionary approach to learning are inherently qualitative, yet undoubtedly influenced by heavy engagement with the game. The amount of research done in this field is limited at best. As FromSoftware games and their counterparts maintain cultural relevance, I can only hope there’s enough interest in the profound sociological impact some video games can have on some people some of the time.
References
Daryl Talks Games. (2022, March 12). How Souls Games Save You. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=keIWG6hSD7Q&t=1001s
Edison, J. (2025, September 24). Christian activist David Barton will advise Texas State Board of Education during Social Studies Overhaul. The Texas Tribune. https://www.texastribune.org/2025/09/24/texas-sboe-social-studies-standards-david-barton/
Gabriel Chong, Y. M., Scott Teng, K. Z., Amy Siew, S. C., & Skoric, M. M. (2012). Cultivation Effects of Video Games: A Longer-Term Experimental Test of First- and Second-Order Effects. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 31(9), 952–971. https://doi.org/10.1521/jscp.2012.31.9.952
Gotthic. (2024). Anor Londo [Photograph]. Steam/FromSoftware. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3356085766\
Mosharafa, E. (2015). All you Need to Know About: The Cultivation Theory. Global Journal of Human-Social Science, 15(8), 33–47. https://doi.org/https://socialscienceresearch.org/index.php/GJHSS/article/view/1505
VaatiVidya. (2020, July 10). Dark Souls Lore ► Explained! YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=McXJj7sjcZ0
(2011) You Died Screen [Photograph]. FromSoftware.
