A Paper by Max Naimark

Dark Souls teaches the art of scaling, the acceleration of self-knowledge accomplished through the game. The constants that players meet are a result of game design, however those constants attempt to move outside their own boundaries in the player’s reassembling. The player’s hypotheses are themselves candidates for constancy. They try to relate to the skill that generates other hypotheses and in this way, if only temporarily, to become an embodied interworld absolute between the real and the virtual.

This paper will discuss how Dark Souls reveals the main conflict between Hegel and Deleuze regarding the question of death, and how the game enables us to formulate a concept of scaling constants.

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