So, I wrote a big chunk of words on the general purpose thread not knowing this was a thing, so there’s a link for anyone who cares about it.
Something I left out that post is an idea that I didn’t want to get into there because it required some explanation and would have made what I actually wanted to say more bloated and less clear, but it’s something that has been at the core of a good deal of my videogame reasoning as of late.
When Arkane released Deathloop last year they made a couple of videos with the people of Noclip talking about the general design of the game. In one of them they touched upon a pedagogy and cognitive psychology concept that they took into account during development, that to me has been quite opening when applied to videogames. That concept is the one of cognitive load. (Here’s the timestamped video with the relevant segment).
To summarize, the cognitive load of a certain activity, be it a videogame or an university class is the amount of things the person taking part of that activity has to take into account while participating on it. This can be from rules, proper procedures or even social expectations to the anxiety the individual feels due to the pressure or its personal circumstances. The interesting thing about the cognitive load is that it doesn’t only pertain to the explicit stuff alreeady known by the individual, but crucially, it also includes every unknown aspect of the activity and the stress derived from that uncertainty. As Bakaba explains, in the context of a videogame, not knowing how a particular set of mechanics work, like for example, not knowing what is the punishment or generally what happens when the player dies, is something increasing the cognitive load of the player, and weighing them down. According to Bakaba, in a videogame ideally you would want to make the cognitive load as low as possible, by removing all unnecessary stressors and communicating properly what the game is about and what the possible outcomes are in order to make the experience as enjoyable as possible.
Taking all this back to how Elden Ring behaves, during my time I couldn’t stop thinking about this idea and how it was conditioning my enjoyment and relationship with the game. When I started getting openly bitter towards it, I realized it was in part because of how insane the cognitive load of this game in particular is. The amount of explicit and implicit rules, from the systems and how the game actually plays, to how properly conduct yourself during the exploration in order to minimize the chances of ruining sidequests and npc encounters.
Relating all this to what I wrote about the amount of effort and compromise Elden Rings demands, this is a game that gatekeeps one of its most crucial pieces of information concerning what happened to the world behind a sidequest that requires finding an insanely hidden path located via absurd platforming and proper speedrunner pathfinding skills.
This, in the context of an open world game as complex and layered as this one is, and I’m sorry for the language, already fucking delusional. But accepting that this is also the legacy of the series and the type of incredibly big secret that justifies the obtuseness of it, and at the same time, exactly the kind of thing the average Souls enthusiast hopes to encounter in any of the games at least once, it can not only be forgiven but even maybe complimented as the right choice.
Here’s the thing though: how does this choice (that takes place on the first couple dozen of hours of a 150+ hour videogame) inform the player and what kind of relationship it encourages with the game? Is it a healthy and understandable relationship, or, on the other hand, an incredibly obsessive and compulsive one? How does this kind of thing affect how the player will play the rest of the game, will it make them play more casually and relaxed, or will it enforce abhorrent things like FOMO on relevant parts of the game and the narrative? I think it’s already obvious where I’m trying to get at.
Elden Ring cultivates a way of playing that can be described as totalitarian and uncompromising. It doesn’t even blink when it comes to punishing the most uninquisitive and casual players, leaving them out inmensely important parts of its world and narrative. And while this is true to the other games in the franchise, again, the scope, size and structure of this game drastically changes both how the game works, and how it should ideally work at all levels. It would already be bad enough if the game somehow delivered on its promise, but now think about the ways it doesn’t, how it betrays this “culture” and ways to relate to its content it teaches with its “clasically Souls” mentality. It’s a surprisingly high level of bullshit we have inadvertently normalized and accepted due to how the other games in the franchise work, without consideration to how the new structure of this game modifies and changes that way of playing and relating to it.
We are in front of a game that doesn’t hesitate to ask the player to do the most absurd and nonsensical things repeatedly over the course of 150+ hours, always in good faith and with a smile on the face, while at the same time, not even blinking when it comes to incredibly bland and uncharacteristically poor design choices. The laziness and uninspiredness it showcases in its lowest moments is at odds with how it treats the player and the commitment it asks from them, as I tried to convey in that other piece of writing, but maybe it’s also a sign of an even deeper betrayal, which is why I wanted to bring this idea of the cognitive load to the conversation, as a clearly defined concept that can represent how unfairly Elden Ring burdens its most generous and committed players.
