The following is an excerpt from You Died: The Dark Souls Companion, a book about Dark Souls and the delightfully mad people who play it by Keza MacDonald and Jason Killingsworth. You can buy it here in paperback (worldwide shipping), or on Amazon or iBooks as an eBook.
Good Grief: Trolls, Invaders & The Shadow Self by Jason Killingsworth
There’s an overweight red phantom jogging up the steps of Sen’s Fortress. He’s decked out in the bulky armour set of Black Iron Tarkus. The helmet and chestpiece alone are sturdy enough to deflect an inbound asteroid, but Fat Tarkus also has a Black Iron Greatshield gripped in both hands, lending him the appearance of a human snowplow as he runs toward his destination. Fat Tarkus has not, however, invaded the world of Falcon679 to run. Or even to fight. He has come here to stand. His red aura, the signifier of all invading members of the Darkwraith covenant, glows continuously like a traffic light refusing to change.
Fat Tarkus has come to troll, but in a literal sense, playing the part of a fairy-tale bridge troll who will deny others passage. He settles into a doorway at the top of Sen’s Fortress through which this world’s host must eventually pass in order to reach the area’s boss and progress to Anor Londo. But nobody’s squeezing past Fat Tarkus, his raised greatshield pliant as the bank-vault doors you see in heist movies. And just like the criminal masterminds in those movies, The Dark Souls Sadists’s first attempt at cracking the barrier involves munitions. He conjures a pyromancy flame, runs up to Tarkus and hurls it at him from point-blank range. The force of the explosion knocks Tarkus back slightly but does virtually no damage, being almost entirely absorbed by the shield. The only impact – a tiny chunk of lost stamina – regens in seconds.
Fat Tarkus has come to troll, but in a literal sense, playing the part of a fairy-tale bridge troll who will deny others passage.
Falcon679 changes tactics and hurls a throwing knife, which ricochets off the shield with a shrill ping. Then he tries arrows, unleashing a steady barrage, but they too prove useless. The spectre of a player from yet another world materialises briefly and dashes right through Tarkus, as if to mock the host’s predicament. Having come to terms with the impotence of his bow and arrows, Falcon679 stands motionless, perhaps weighing his options. Then he kneels abruptly and uses the Black Separation Crystal, an item that, according to its menu description, “sends phantoms back to their homes, or sends you back to yours”. Nothing. (Unfortunately for this inexperienced player, the crystal only banishes co-op summons from your world, not invaders.)
The nature of the stand-off has turned Falcon679’s game of Dark Souls from an action-RPG into a Monkey Island-style adventure game. He finds himself in one of that genre’s trademark cul-de-sacs, no idea how to progress, scrutinising every item in his inventory, wondering if there’s a way in which one of them might be applied like lubricating oil to the present stalemate.
Out of ideas, he starts gesturing at Tarkus using the game’s emote system. He waves like a chummy next-door neighbour. Then he beckons. He raises and lowers his shield with comical rapidity as if a bit of counter-tomfoolery might weaken the troll’s resolve. Fat Tarkus is unimpressed. Fat Tarkus has all day. Falcon679 switches to two-handing his weapon and attacks. Nope. He regresses to failed tactics, letting fly another couple of throwing knives. Nope. He tries repeatedly to kick Tarkus backward out of the passage. Good luck with that.
The nature of the stand-off has turned Falcon679’s game of Dark Souls from an action-RPG into a Monkey Island-style adventure game.
Approximately 15 minutes into the encounter, Falcon679 starts jogging laps around the perimeter of the chamber, as if he’s stuck in a prison yard and might as well exercise to pass the hours. At other times he stands idle, facing Fat Tarkus.
Skip forward to the twenty-minute mark and Falcon679 has caught a fresh wind. He tries to hack and slash and huff and puff and blow Tarkus down. Dark Souls has taught this player, like it has the rest of us, that throwing yourself at any of the game’s brick walls enough times will eventually allow you to punch through triumphantly like the Kool-Aid Man in those old television commercials. But absolutely nothing is working. He’s just stuck. He has no more ideas.
Suddenly Falcon679 gets a private message, which reads, in a string of all-caps as chunky as the knight blocking his path: “YOU HAVE PASSED FAT TARKUS’ TEST OF PATIENCE. PLEASE STAND BACK TO RECEIVE YOUR REWARD.”
Back in game, Fat Tarkus proceeds to drop five units of humanity from his inventory in the doorway for Falcon679 to collect and finally, mercifully retreats from the doorway to let him pass. Moments later the player controlling Fat Tarkus gets a notification on his own console: “Falcon679 sent you a message”. He opens this message from the person he’s been stonewalling for the past 20 minutes. It reads simply, “hahaha beer spilt”. As Tarkus triggers the Black Separation Crystal to return to his world, Falcon679 steps through the previously blocked doorway into the daylight outside and emotes a bow of the head as if to say, ‘well trolled, sir’.
The actual human responsible for Fat Tarkus, Jeremy Greer, may troll occasionally but he doesn’t live under a bridge (unless somebody manages to construct a giant bridge over Lafayette, Louisiana, after this book goes to press). He’s a respectable southern gent, 35 years old, happily married, dog owner, a contributing member of society. He sells electronic reading systems to cities, municipalities and public works. “I was a computer guy for years and years, and then somehow got into sales because I have a personality,” says Greer. “That’s kind of what happens to guys like me.” During our hour-long conversation he laughs easily and often. And, trust me, when the subject comes to PvP trolling tactics in Dark Souls, there is a lot to laugh about.
I’ve tracked down Greer, who also co-hosts the wonderful Dark Insight podcast, to discuss numerous facets of Dark Souls PvP. I’m especially keen to understand the mindset of players who’ve latched onto the game’s invasion mechanic. Members of the Darkwraith covenant have the ability to brute-force their way into the games of other players and hunt them for sport. If an invader manages to kill you, they can derail your progress and force you to respawn at your most recent bonfire checkpoint. Or they can just stand in a doorway for 30 minutes holding a shield. Once inside another player’s world, invaders can pass the time however they like.
The ability for one party to force an unwilling participant into a duel made me squeamish.
I must confess up front, I’ve always had an irrational phobia around invasion. I’ve been invaded countless times over the hundreds of hours I’ve spent with Darks Souls, but I’ve never reciprocated. The ability for one party to force an unwilling participant into a duel made me squeamish. Any time I unhollowed at a bonfire, rendering myself vulnerable to invasion, I instantly felt like I was walking to my car through an empty parking garage at night, gripping my Balder Shield like keychain pepper spray.
Unversed in the nuances of PvP tactics, I rarely offered invaders any meaningful challenge. Encounters were less of a duel and more of a let’s-get-this-over-with turkey-carving. Eventually I began jumping off the nearest ledge if an invader ever showed up, the PvP equivalent of shouting ‘You can’t fire me...I quit!’. No matter how many times I died to the Capra Demon or Ornstein & Smough, I never felt inferior or judged by them, but it was impossible to get one-shotted by an invading player without a tinge of shame and inadequacy.
Greer found his early encounters with invading Darkwraiths as terrifying as I had, but instead of fleeing the experience, he simply decided to heed the Internet meme that urges one to...git gud.
“I'd never played a lot of multiplayer games on the Internet before [Dark Souls],” he says. “I'd played racing games and stuff like that but nothing with an active competitive element to it. I remember my first time getting to Anor Londo and going out to where the bridge would be, but I hadn’t raised it yet. Someone left a message there that said, 'Beware of Darkwraith'. I remember not understanding at all what a Darkwraith was, just holding my shield up and spinning the camera in a silly circle expecting something to attack me. The first couple of times I was invaded, it was a terrifying experience, and I thought, ‘I bet it's a lot more fun if you're on the other side of that’. And it was absolutely true. It was a lot more fun!”
After such a negative experience on the receiving end of invasion, did he have any qualms about turning around and becoming the aggressor?
“Well, I didn’t view it as negative,” says Greer. “It was terrifying and it was scary, and the actual fight didn’t last very long, but it was kind of thrilling at the same time. I was like, oh wow, this game has a whole side I haven’t seen before.
“So you invade somebody and you die almost immediately because you can't heal and you have no idea what you're doing, but then you go online and you see videos of these people doing awesome things and you're like, ok, I could probably get better at this. And then you start getting a little bit more practice and all of a sudden you spend eight hours on a Saturday morning doing nothing but Dark Souls PvP.”
Greer found himself craving the unpredictability of human-controlled opponents. He’d already completed the game and proven that he had what it took to outwit the lines of code governing enemy attack patterns. He’d gotten an adrenaline rush out of developing the mechanical skills necessary to face-roll through PvE, but human players were, as you’d expect, less exploitable, more dynamic in their item builds and combat choices. He’d uncovered a level of depth and complexity that only really shone in PvP encounters. Fighting PvE enemies was like prescribing antibiotics to fight a virus. The viral threat in PvP, however, evolved in the same manner that real-world ones do. There’s an arms race that prevents you from ever declaring victory in any definitive sense.
Fighting another person is simply a couples dance that ends with a bloody nose instead of a kiss.
The enjoyment for Greer wasn’t confined to the journey of mechanical mastery. PvP became a sort of Fashion Week front row as well (if you want to be dizzied by the array of wardrobe options available in the Souls series, just spend a few minutes on Fashion-Souls.com). He noticed a steady parade of weapons he’d never encountered before, used in novel ways. He’d have a small epiphany seeing a weapon wielded unexpectedly in his opponent’s off-hand, opening up a whole new range of attack possibilities. He viewed each new sparring partner as a potential mentor, there to teach him something that would raise his level of proficiency, or expand his Dark Souls combat vocabulary. He was internalising a form of sign language that involved the whole body, a language of which PvE had only taught him the rudiments.
Greer made friends, too. This fact shouldn’t be surprising given the natural intimacy of fighting. Fighting another person is simply a couples dance that ends with a bloody nose instead of a kiss. It’s not arbitrary that the beats of a staged fight are referred to as ‘fight choreography’, or that people refer to fights as “taking two to tango”. Once you learn the move-set of a boss and the tells for all their attacks, fighting that boss feels poetic in a way, a seamless dovetailing that takes you from one corner of the floor to the other. He steps right, you dive left; he dashes forward, you parry; he crouches to unleash an AoE, you lunge clear. But PvP adds to the broth an element of improvisation and stylistic co-expression. Step, ball, change.
“When you're invading the same spot for a couple of hours straight, you'll eventually run into people that are hanging out there to be invaded,” he tells me. “So I've made friends online. We'll see each other and we'll wave in the game and we know how the other person fights. Just like in a normal fighting game, you start being able to exploit their tactics. Like, this dude always does a light attack after he rolls back twice, or this person always always tries to run over here and I can go over there and try to exploit it.”
Being a PvP dick is fine but I also like helping people kill bosses because that's a lot of fun as well.
The beautiful thing about such intimacy is that it needn’t only apply to getting in the head of a duelling partner or proving one’s ability to impede another’s progress via invasion. You can feel connected and important to other Dark Souls players via altruistic co-op gestures. The way in which both extremes tickle the brainstem seems like a kind of yin and yang, the tar-black heart of invasion a perfectly balanced complement to the white knighthood of the game’s co-op. Heat and cold. Light and dark.
“I would invade in New Londo,” says Greer with an almost sheepish tone in his voice. “I would invade somebody, I would knock them off the ledge into the water, they would die. And then I'd get a message. I'd open it up expecting the person to be like, bleep, bleep, bleep, a whole lot of slurs. But what it would actually be is like, 'Hey man, can you help me against The Four Kings?' And I'd be like, yeah, I can do that. So I'd drop the summon sign down and help the person I just killed do the level.
“Being a PvP dick is fine but I also like helping people kill bosses because that's a lot of fun as well. I had just as much fun with the PvP magic build murdering Ornstein & Smough for people as I did murdering people on the way to Ornstein & Smough.”
Greer pauses for a moment before revising his previous statement.
“Not just as much fun, but I had fun.”
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