#fromsoftware games

As I was watching SmoughTown's most recent Elden Ring lore video, I started thinking about the lore hunting of Souls games as a social phenomenon, and I genuinely hope this community is studied by psychologists and social scientists someday, because it's worthy of research.

Normally the rise of FromSoftware's games from relative obscurity to worldwide fame is what people might be interested in, but the dedicated lore community online and especially on YouTube is especially fascinating to me. Dozens of YouTube channels are specifically dedicated to collecting, compiling and deciphering every scrap of lore and storytelling available in these games with a deliberately obfuscated storyline, and hundreds of thousands of people watch and consume this content, not simply satisfied with playing the game, but joining in on the search, the debate and discovery.

I'm reminded of Jacob Geller's absolutely stellar video "Shadow of the Colossus and the Search for the Last Great Secret", and I feel like the modern Souls lore community is a convergently evolved social phenomenon to the "Secret Seekers" on those old forums trying to tease out the last secrets of Fumito Ueda's masterpiece (Hidetaka Miyazaki was directly influenced by Ueda's work, so this makes sense).

People will evaluate Souls lore with greater skepticism than I see most people use for their political or personal beliefs, and the lore debates I've seen in person often feel like academic discourse more than your average nerds discussing their favorite game, so I suppose all I have left to say is "why is no one studying this???"

O' Erdtree you shall burn 🔥

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