Giantness and Excess in Dark Souls

Abstract

Using the Dark Souls series as an example, I examine how a frame of 'monster of excess' can be used to read giantness in digital games. The monster of excess finds a paradigmatic example in the giant, an age-old mythic figure still prevalent within digital games. Many elements are directly borrowed or translated from other artistic forms such as film and literature. But, in this paper, I focus on how excess is encoded ludically, and how that links with the more representational and aesthetic depictions of excess within the games. I find that elements such as the camera and the game's interface, along with the player-character are all affected by giantness, with giants seeming to exist in excess of the games' established frames.

Full text

Giantness and Excess in Dark Souls
Dom Ford
IT University of Copenhagen
Copenhagen, Denmark
dofo@itu.dk
ABSTRACT
Using the Dark Souls series as an example, I examine how a frame
of ‘monster of excess’ can be used to read giantness in digital games.
The monster of excess nds a paradigmatic example in the giant,
an age-old mythic gure still prevalent within digital games. Many
elements are directly borrowed or translated from other artistic
forms such as lm and literature. But, in this paper, I focus on how
excess is encoded ludically, and how that links with the more rep-
resentational and aesthetic depictions of excess within the games.
I nd that elements such as the camera and the game’s interface,
along with the player-character are all aected by giantness, with
giants seeming to exist in excess of the games’ established frames.
CCS CONCEPTS
•Applied computing →Media arts.
KEYWORDS
Dark Souls, giants, monsters, excess, abject, sublime
ACM Reference Format:
Dom Ford. 2020. Giantness and Excess in Dark Souls. In International Con-
ference on the Foundations of Digital Games (FDG ’20), September 15–18, 2020,
Bugibba, Malta. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 4 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/
3402942.3402966
1 INTRODUCTION
Many monsters can be considered ‘monsters of excess’, but giants
can almost always be seen through this lens and tend to be paradig-
matic examples. This manifests at the physical and visual level:
giants tend to be humans (usually men), but bigger. Their propor-
tions and general size are all in excess of typical human limits. But
excess is also seen in their traits, behaviours and actions. Using the
monster Grendel from Beowulf [Donoghue 2002] as an example,
Dana Oswald remarks that “[h]e is both a monster and a man — a
creature charactarized by an excess of masculinity in terms of size
and strength, but also by clear human needs and desires” [Oswald
2010, p. 76]. She continues:
Grendel is not just here [at Heorot] to kill but to con-
sume; this is a hall for feasting, and he does just that.
But Grendel’s eating is more than ravenous, and even
more than bestial. He devours every part of this body,
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as the poet tells us, even the hands and feet – such
excess reveals indiscriminate consumption. This is
not the work of any familiar predator. [Oswald 2010,
p. 76]
By noting that Grendel’s feasting is “not the work of any familiar
predator” [Oswald 2010, p. 76], Oswald hits upon what troubles
us most about these giants of excess masculinity: man is capable
of far more terrifying acts of evil than any natural enemy, any fa-
miliar predator whose urges and behaviours can be explained by
necessity and nature. The only thing keeping people from such
barbarism would seem to be the cultural and societal boundaries
demarcating the acceptable from the unacceptable, but in these gi-
ants those boundaries are shown to be weak and arbitrary. Grendel
in this scene embodies typical—even celebrated—masculine traits:
immense physical strength, large size and a big appetite. But by tak-
ing them to horric excess, Grendel demonstrates the paradox that
these traits are simultaneously desirable and aspirational but also
abject and monstrous. Grendel’s physical appearance is not given
much description in the text, which focuses more on his desires,
evil spirit and the fact that he is descended from Cain [Donoghue
2002, l. 99-114], and so whether or not Grendel can be considered a
giant is debatable (although his head is later described as requiring
four men to carry with diculty [Donoghue 2002, l. 1638-1639]).
Oswald’s reading of Grendel also feeds into her later analysis of
giants more broadly:
The giant is that which man both abjects and desires:
his physical excess is both gross and aspirational. He
is the self that man longs to be, the ultimate patriarch
and the perfect vision of masculinity and unity that
he wants to achieve. The giant’s body is the more
complete self to which the human man never can
measure up. [Oswald 2010, p. 160]
This extends too to yet more typically masculine traits, such as
sexual desire. The Giant of Mont Saint Michel in the Alliterative
Morte Arthure [Benson and Foster 1994] has such excess of male
sexual desire and power that, Oswald notes, “his penis not only
penetrates, but tears her in half” [Oswald 2010, p. 167]. This excess
of the desirable traits of sexual desire and power means that the
giant is unable to produce an heir at a time when the continuation
of the family line was seen as greatly important. A culturally agreed
balancing and limiting of valued traits becomes necessary by the
existence of giants such as these.
In this paper, I look at how giants in the Dark Souls series [From-
Software 2011, 2014, 2016] are constituted by the game’s system.
How do the game’s systems, procedures, mechanics and interfaces
render excesses and create and demarcate the giant?

FDG ’20, September 15–18, 2020, Bugibba, Malta Dom Ford
2 GIANTS IN GAMES
A vital dierence in giants in digital games compared with litera-
ture, for example, is how the giant is manifested in the text. Jaroslav
Švelch makes the comparison between monsters in literature and
digital games using a dichotomy between “the sublime thesis and
encyclopedic containment” [Švelch 2018, p. 10]. A term borrowed
from Stephen T. Asma [Asma 2012], who applies Immanuel Kant’s
conception of the sublime to monsters, Švelch sums up the sub-
lime thesis as a "prominent strand of monster scholarship [which]
emphasizes the fact that monsters confound our perceptive and
cognitive abilities, and ll us with awe and terror" [Švelch 2018,
p. 1]. “But video games present us with a dierent kind of mon-
ster”, he claims, “a monster that is designed to be confronted and
(usually) defeated by the player. Unlike the ideal ‘sublime’ monster,
it is encoded in computational systems and well dened in the
game’s rules” [Švelch 2018, p. 1]. This is the notion of encyclopedic
containment, which “is connected to a general urge to control and
contain the unknown, and the contingencies of the chaotic world”
[Švelch 2018, p. 3].
For Švelch, the computational nature of games is the primary
reason for this. In an earlier work, he draws on Wolfgang Iser’s
notion of indeterminacy: the written word conjures an image only
in the reader’s imagination. Such indeterminacy which allows for
the fundamentally unknowable is not possible in a rule-based game.
For a monster to exist in a game, it must have predetermined (or
procedurally determined) appearance, mass, behaviours, abilities,
stats and so on, all of which are codied and computed, and which
can therefore be learned and comprehended by the player.
So while giants in games do draw from a large range of literary,
aesthetic, visual and cinematographic vocabularies in their con-
struction, those aspects cannot tell the whole story. They cannot
fully account for how the giant is dened, manifested and demar-
cated in games. To illustrate this issue, I explore the bosses of the
Dark Souls series.
Much has been written on FromSoftware’s iconic Souls series.
Perhaps most pertinent to this paper is Daniel Vella’s conception
of the ludic sublime, exemplied for him in Dark Souls [Vella 2015].
Vella’s notion of the sublime might oer a counterpoint to Švelch’s
reading of videogame monsters, that they (thus far, at least) fail to
capture the sublime due to their computational nature.
For Vella, the ludic sublime manifests in Dark Souls through the
interplay between mystery and mastery. He highlights a central
tension in digital games:
The player is driven onwards by the expectation of the
perfectly-ordered, rule-bound cosmos that procedural-
ism locates in games, but, faced with the impossibility
of obtaining direct knowledge of the underlying game
system, she is constantly drawn to confront the neces-
sarily tentative nature, not only of her interpretation
of her experience of the game into the ordered form
of a cosmos, but of her direct phenomenal experience
of the game object itself. [Vella 2015]
The ‘black box’ nature of game systems — a disconnect between
our inputs and how the system interprets and reacts to them —
generates an unknowability. “Even after extended play has resulted
in mastery of the game, there remains at least an opening for the
possibility of surprise and further revelation”, Vella states [Vella
2015], underscoring how although games invite us to, in Švelch’s
terms, “devise and perform a winning strategy” in response to its
challenges and monsters [Švelch 2013, p. 197], the player never
gains a complete understanding of the system — at least in more
complex games such as Dark Souls.
This mechanism, Vella argues, forms the basis for how Dark
Souls fosters a ludic sublime. The game works to
arrest the player’s judgment and prevent her from
arriving at a stable cosmic understanding, preserving
a sense of mystery and gesturing towards a whole
that escapes the player’s conceptualizing grasp. In
various ways, Dark Souls works to actively remind
the player of the limits and the inadequacy of her per-
ceptual opening onto the milieu of the gameworld, the
computational systems underlying it, and the space
of possibilities they structure. [Vella 2015]
The mystery of the game’s cosmos combined with the player’s inad-
equacy lies at the heart of Dark Souls’ sublimity. Švelch argues that
Vella’s conception of the ludic sublime might manifest temporarily
— when the system is not very well-known — but mastery of the
game combined with extensive information on fan wikis and simi-
lar resources ultimately dispel this, even if every minutiae of the
system is not understood [Švelch 2018, p.10]. So where do giants
specically t into this dynamic?
3DARK SOULS
3.1 Lore and Gameworld
The player’s entrance into Anor Londo, which marks roughly the
middle of Dark Souls, is an aesthetically sublime one. The player-
character carried by gargoyle-esque Batwing Demons following the
arduous trials of Sen’s Fortress culminating in a ght with the giant
Iron Golem, the camera zooms out to reveal the vista. Grey clouds
loom overhead, cast back by intense sunlight battling in from the
distance. The city itself is shrouded in darkness, remarking both
upon its mysteries and upon its insignicance in the awesome pres-
ence of nature. Only the cathedral forces itself into view, piercing
the sky. This sublime introduction to Anor Londo bets the fact
that this is the city of the gods, Gwyn’s seat of power when the Age
of Fire, now spluttering and fading, was at its zenith. And the archi-
tecture of the city does not let the player forget that fact. Passing
through rooms many times larger than necessary, anked by stat-
ues of heroic gures, and climbing staircases with separate tracks
for player-character–sized entities and larger denizens (gure 1), it
is clear that this is a city of and for giants.
But the world the player enters is a ruin, an echo of former glory.
The game’s cryptic lore oers some hints as to why these giants
fell from glory, each to do with excess in some respect. Manus, for
instance, is a human turned grotesque and giant due to an excess
of humanity. Gwyn, rst of the gods and bringer of the Age of Fire,
is brought down by the constant struggle for light and re over
darkness. The nal boss of Dark Souls, Gwyn, is a ragged husk,
brought down in his desperation to never let the re fade. Instead
of the usual bombastic score of boss ghts, the nal ght with
Gwyn is set to a melancholic, understated piano track [Sakuraba
2011]. Instead of the Lord of Fire, he is now named the Lord of

Giantness and Excess in Dark Souls FDG ’20, September 15–18, 2020, Bugibba, Malta
Figure 1: The main stairs to the Anor Londo cathedral.
Cinder. Eschewing an epic culmination of the player’s arduous
journey, Dark Souls instead paints this gure of legend as a pathetic,
scrabbling husk who ghts not for any purpose anymore, but rather
for lack of knowing what else to do.
Through these depictions, Dark Souls instils in the player a sense
of futility. The grandest cities can be reduced to shadowy ruin, the
most powerful entities reduced to pathetic husks devoid of purpose.
The giant becomes a gure that represents the towering grandeur
and inuence of a past that has fallen so far. The giants in the story
are emblematic of that fall from grace, and their presence in the
game in their ragged state forces the player to see the living, human
cost of their excesses.
The position of the giants of Dark Souls within the lore, however,
is not my central point, but rather serves as the context for the
impact giants have on gameplay. In this analysis of giants in the
gameworld, they take on functions similar to the tradition monster
of excess: desirable traits are embodied and taken to a grotesque
extreme, displaying the need to limit that trait. In what follows, I
look more closely at how giants are positioned within the games’
systems and gameplay mechanics.
3.2 System and Gameplay
The game’s rst boss in the tutorial area, the Undead Asylum,
unexpectedly falls from the ceiling and takes up most of the room
(gure 2). For new players unfamiliar with this part of the game, the
most direct and obvious route to this point leads the player there
equipped only with a Straight Sword Hilt, an exceptionally weak
weapon. Due to this and the and the small size of the room compared
with the towering demon and therefor a lack of manoeuvrability
options, it is an encounter designed for failure in the rst instance.
This moment teaches the new player of Dark Souls that bosses
are intentionally dicult and will likely take multiple attempts to
defeat. Death is inevitable, and the player must accept this early on.
It teaches the player that through perseverance, alternative tactics
can often be found. By dodging one or two of the boss’ attacks and
running into a small corridor down the side, the player will then
nd a proper sword and shield. Following the path further, they will
nd a balcony overlooking the hall from which they can perform a
plunging attack, dealing massive damage to the boss.
Figure 2: The Asylum Demon boss near the beginning of
Dark Souls.
This encounter early on is formative for the player of Dark Souls,
establishing from the outset the game’s main loop: the player en-
counters an enemy, is quickly and easily killed by it — engendering
feelings of inadequacy and hopelessness — but then, with some ex-
perimentation and persistence, eventually builds their knowledge
of the boss and hones their skill suciently to defeat them. An
inadequacy is instilled in the player, but to overcome that the game
ensures that the player is able to nd potential solutions within the
mystery of the surrounding area. The game’s rst boss encounter
embodies Vella’s spiralling mastery—mystery dyad.
This inadequacy is reinforced in three key ways by the series’
giant bosses. First, the giants simply dwarf the player-character.
Second, they severely restrict the player’s movement by simply
taking up more of the arena. The room in which the Asylum Demon
is fought, for example, is relatively small and peppered with pillars,
so avoiding the giant’s large swings is simply more dicult due to
its size relative to the environment. Thirdly the series’ giants also
work against the player’s interface.
As a game that uses a third-person camera perspective, combat
with more or less equally-sized opponents is well aorded. The
player can see their avatar, the opponent and their surroundings
with ease. Environmental hazards can be anticipated and planned
around concurrently with observing the enemy’s patterns of move-
ment. The games’ giant bosses work against this, however. Their
sheer size is not accounted for by the camera and interface. The
camera could, for instance, zoom out or turn parts of the enemy
translucent, but it does not. And so in many boss ghts the player
is never able to position the camera such that they can attack the
boss and observe and anticipate its attacks and movements and
watch out for environmental hazards.
With The Last Giant boss in Dark Souls II [FromSoftware 2014]
(gure 3), we see an example of a further fundamental interface
dierence between giant and non-giant opponents, which began in
the second game of the series. The giant’s limbs are each assigned
a separate lock-on point. Rather than locking onto the centre of the
boss’ torso no matter its size, against bosses like The Last Giant the
player may instead lock onto specic limbs.
In this way, the perhaps frustrating behaviour of the camera
against giant opponents makes the player aware of it. This breaks
down a barrier between the game and the player that is usually

FDG ’20, September 15–18, 2020, Bugibba, Malta Dom Ford
Figure 3: Fighting the Dark Souls II boss The Last Giant.
mediated by the player-character. Typically, the player-character
can be thought of as the means by which the player can interact with
the gameworld and have presence within it. The camera primarily
allows us to observe the eects of our interactions and to gather
visual information used to inform our further interactions. The
disjoint between avatar and player in this sense becomes even
more clear in a game such as Dark Souls which uses a third-person
perspective. The camera does not represent or stand in for the
player-character’s eyes, rather it is a disembodied view on the world.
Michael Nitsche makes a similar distinction here in his analysis
of the virtual camera. He observes that the videogame camera
represents “a hybrid between architectural navigable space and
cinematically represented space” [Nitsche 2008, p.85]. The camera
in a digital game acts both as a tool for the player to navigate space
and for meaning to be conveyed by reappropriating cinematic and
photographic techniques. The camera is at once tied to the avatar,
the player and the gameworld.
Such a distinction, Daniel Black remarks, means that “the player
can be looking at the game body as a separate, externalized entity
while still feeling that her capacity to act on and in the game is
expressed by that separate, externalized entity” [Black 2017, p. 191].
This creates a barrier of sorts between the gameworld and the player.
Although the giants of Dark Souls do not interact with the camera
directly nor acknowledge its presence, they do bring to the fore the
limitations of the camera. Their excessive size forces the player to
consider the camera and how it is used, drawing their attention out
of the gameworld and onto the framing device for that gameworld.
In a sense, then, this extends the threat of the excessive giants
beyond the avatar to the player as well. The player’s informatic
control, their “ideal viewpoint” [Black 2017, p. 191], by way of the
third-person camera is challenged when, for instance, a part of a
giant’s leg covers the entire screen. This can be described as a sort
of metaludic ontolepsis, to appropriate a term from Raine Koskimaa
[Koskimaa 2000, chap. 4]: a leaking of ludic aspects through the
boundaries separating gameworld from player. The player is made
to feel small, both by comparison of their avatar to the giant and
small themselves in their view of the gameworld.
This eect which can perhaps be described as ‘breaking out of
the camera’ can be read as a form of excess. The camera does not
accommodate the giants’ large size, and so the giant is seen to exist
in excess of the game’s frame — the frame through which the player
sees the game environment. This further underscores the giant as
the monster of alterity. As Jerey Jerome Cohen puts it, the giant
is the “Intimate Stranger” [Cohen 1999, p. xi]: too monstrous to be
human, but too human to be so easily cast out.
The excess encoded in the game’s interface here reects the
diegetic lore of many of the giants of Dark Souls too. Manus, for
instance, was born of an excess of humanity, his “humanity went
wild”, the in-game description of the Soul of Manus reads [From-
Software 2012]. But unlike other representations of excess within
the game (Seath the Scaleless’ obsessive thirst for knowledge which
drove him to lose his sanity, for example), the excess of size that
the giants exhibit has this eect of drawing the player’s attention
to some of the conditions of their gameplay, such as the camera
and its limitations.
4 CONCLUSION
Giantness in the Dark Souls games is close to the series’ core, acting
as a key embodiment of the broader theme of excess that permeates
its gameworld. Crucially, it’s an embodiment which feels all the
more visceral as it pushes at the boundary of the game’s frame
in the form of the camera. This example shows how excess can
manifest ludically. By pushing at the game’s frame, the relationship
between game, avatar and player is disrupted, or at least brought
to the fore.
Indeed, the game’s frame itself is brought to the player’s attention
by that which exceeds it. The result is that the games’ themes
of inadequacy, futility, hopelessness and the sublime are brought
forward by the representational and aesthetic elements, but nd
a particularly powerful ludic embodiment in the games’ giants,
underscoring also their centrality to the gameworld.
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