Game Studies

Elden Ring: Subverting Heroic Nostalgia 

Abstract

This article demonstrates how creative decisions and emergent narratives within FromSoftware’s award winning 2022 title, Elden Ring, represent and encourage a broader cultural shift away from the form of heroism popularised in the western world by Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Elden Ring’s emergent narratives and gameplay encourage feelings of entitlement and nostalgia while simultaneously problematizing that entitlement. This article therefore reads the game as a demonstration of how Campbellian heroic narratives perpetuate toxic cycles of (self)destruction and shows players that they are a part of sociopolitical systems in decline, not outside observers. It begins by theorizing the place nostalgia holds in western culture, both resulting from the monomyth’s ubiquity and in response to socio-political crises. Nostalgia is an increasingly influential marketing and rhetorical strategy that speaks to a pervasive assumption that there were “better times” one can return to through individual action. The article moves on to show how Elden Ring, despite being a Japanese game, resonates with this context due to its overt critique of archetypical notions of individualism and heroism. Specifically, this article demonstrates how Elden Ring implements an open world setting in conjunction with non-optional narrative events to foreground the limitations of agency and reframe the quest for redemption as a quest to satisfy one’s own ego. The Campbellian hero in Elden Ring is depicted as a danger to the community, not its saviour.

Keywords: emergent narrative, agency, heroism, subversiveness, nostalgia, consumer culture, FromSoftware

Introduction

In 1949 Joseph Campbell published The Hero with a Thousand Faces and, in his closing remarks, included the following declaration:

In the fateful, epoch-announcing words of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: “Dead are all the gods.” [...] It is not only that there is no hiding place for the gods from the searching telescope and microscope; there is no such society anymore as the gods once supported. [...] Isolated societies, dream-bounded within a mythologically charged horizon, no longer exist except as areas to be exploited. And within the progressive societies themselves, every last vestige of the ancient human heritage of ritual, morality, and art is in full decay. (2010, p. 358)

Even in its abridged version, there is a lot to unpack in this passage. The fetishization of individualism, the shift towards “economic-political” values at the expense of “religious content” and the simultaneous move towards rationalisation have, in Campbell’s opinion, divested societies of their imaginative capabilities and starved them of cultural sustenance (2010, p. 358). Campbell’s pessimism extends further than that of Nietzsche: there can be neither liberation nor ethical improvement in a world where God is dead (indeed, “all the gods” are dead) because “ritual, morality, and art” are irrevocably bound to religion and mythology in an organic structure that is now in a state of “full decay” (2010, p. 358).

Problematic assumptions about what constitutes a “progressive” society aside, Campbell’s declaration that the world is in the midst of a spiritual and political crisis has proven remarkably prescient. The 70 years following The Hero with a Thousand Faces have been marked by unchecked technological innovation [1], political upheaval in major economic centres, wars involving nuclear superpowers, global pandemics and neo-fascist groups seeking to reverse social progress and strip away human rights. The world is increasingly marked by volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity -- conditions that have, in the words of Kok and van den Heuvel, “created a new form of morality” ([2017] 2019, p. v). The following analysis demonstrates that Elden Ring uses its narrative and game mechanics to engage with the pervasive notions of heroism that have grown out of Campbell’s cultural legacy and the political dangers with which they are increasingly associated [2]. The game’s popularity offers evidence for a spreading pessimism predicated on two increasingly pervasive beliefs: that social, political and existential issues feel increasingly threatening, and that traditional notions of nostalgia-based heroism create the problems it seeks to solve.

Beyond the close-reading of a single game, however, this article offers Elden Ring as a representative case-study of how games shape politics by both exemplifying problematic narratives and allowing players to discover them for themselves. Gadi Wolfsfeld and Gary Watt establish that political opinions and actions -- from voting behaviours to means of engaging in political debate -- are dictated less to by direct news and political education than how political events are communicated and the emotional responses these texts evoke. In 2011, Wolfsfeld’s Making Sense of Media and Politics demonstrated that political attitudes form independent of overtly politicized media and are engaged with primarily through settings where the participants respond emotionally and are not aware of any didactic function. Updating this work, Albrecht (2023) unpacks the mechanisms of constructed realities (specifically, reality television) to show how perceptions of Donald Trump’s managerial and pecuniary acumen arose not from any actual success in business, but rather the entertaining depiction of him as a successful businessman in The Apprentice. As they discuss, this was, in a way, a piece of interactive media; this show was represented a self-consciously constructed reality in which viewers consented to participate. With Trump’s supposed shrewdness and political potency thus communicated through popular culture, the “mythical” image of him as “a charmingly brash entrepreneur with an unfailing knack for business” has proven almost impossible to destroy, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary (Mayer, 2016).

The present discussion, though limited in scope, expands upon the work of Wolfsfeld and Watt with a view towards further argument in later publications, demonstrating that computer games likewise offer a critically significant site wherein modern subjects engage with and explore political positions through their participation in ostensibly non-didactic fantasies of agency. Building on the critique of individualism in videogames articulated by such scholars as Mark Hines (2023) and Stephanie C. Jennings (2022), this article positions Elden Ring as a culturally resonant site of self-conscious critique that shows how political meaning is both embodied and constructed within popular video games. Campbellian heroism has long been associated with popular entertainment and AAA video game narratives specifically -- thanks, in part, to how lucrative the structure remains (cf. Jennings, 2022: pp. 320-21). This article demonstrates how Elden Ring foregrounds some of the critiques levelled at this narrative structure and thereby reflects a broader cultural shift away from faith in political leadership (cf. McManus, 2018; Mair, [2013] 2023; Brown, 2019, 2023). The research objectives of this article are therefore as follows: 1) connect depictions of Campbell’s monomyth in popular culture to anxieties regarding (perceived) social, political and existential changes; 2) frame the individualistic hero as a perpetuator of socio-political issues rather than their solution; 3) use a comparative analysis of game mechanics in Elden Ring and prior, archetypical fantasy games (namely The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim and the Dark Souls series) to posit the former as an articulation of contemporary anxieties.

Nostalgia and Consumerism

This article frames Elden Ring as a liminal political space that both constructs and deconstructs a problematic heroic narrative structure. To that end, it is necessary to unpack the most culturally enshrined iteration of that narrative structure: Campbell’s monomyth. When justifying his worldview in the epilogue of The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell speaks of the “titanic battlefields” of the Second World War (2010, p. 360). Yet the image of an unsustainable world in the grips of moral and cultural decay has appeared with remarkable frequency and resiliency since Campbell offered it. Oliver Bennet’s Cultural Pessimism (2001) traces the spread of this perceived decline across British and American societies between the 1960s and the turn of the millennium. More recent commentators have likewise articulated a similar sense of apocalypticism; while Campbell’s account appeared in his discussion of ostensibly universal narratological trends, the same presentation of a world caught in a continual state of collapse occurs in contemporary works of applied ethics (Fisher, [2009; 2012] 2023; Gertz, 2018), political philosophy (Lavelle, 2008; Mair, [2013] 2023) and, increasingly, environmental discourse (Ghosh, 2016; Wallace-Wells, 2019).

British and American audiences today are bombarded with nostalgic imagery and products designed to imply that their lives are emptier now than they were in some imagined past; through television screens alone, audiences are confronted with eternal reruns of 90s sitcoms, a slew of “legacyquels” (Singer, 2015) and adverts that encourage potential customers to “try to preserve [the past] through nostalgic consumption activities” (Bambauer-Sachse and Gierl, 2009, p. 391). Consumer culture thrives on the need to reclaim a better pre-existing state, to the extent that “[n]ostalgia has emerged as a preeminent, if not the preeminent, commercial category” (Halligan, 2011). As Ryan Gunderson notes:

a seemingly limitless number of desires have been manufactured with a solitary route to their affirmation via consumption. Because of this, consumer society’s members find themselves in a lifeworld of aimless striving, dissatisfaction, disappointment and boredom. (2016, p. 378)

Capitalism’s turn towards manufacturing these “desires,” rather than products, has opened the door to “nostalgia marketing”: a commercial ploy used to “enchant” products and brands by evoking connections between them and a real or imagined past (Hartmann and Brunk, 2019, pp. 669-70; see also Jun, Park and Kim, 2022). This is a highly lucrative commercial model because “[a]ttempts to undo or ‘cure’ nostalgia through the re-creation of the past in the present are made in vain” (Halligan, 2011). This is in part because “nostalgic discourse replicates itself until [...] its signifiers come to exist without a recollection or historical sense of what it was that is actually being signified” (Halligan, 2011). In other words, using Gunderson’s vocabulary, the contemporary western consumer is led into endless “dissatisfaction” and “disappointment” by an “aimless” striving that reaches for a past that can never be reclaimed because it never truly existed.

One can identify a similar process in western politics. The commercial drive to hold the attention of audiences in the digital age has encouraged an emphasis on “clickbait” sensationalism (Frampton, 2015) and the “increasing polarization of society” bolstered through the echo-chambers and misinformation that characterize social media (Katz and Mays, 2019, p. 1). One result is a resurgence of nostalgia-fuelled right-wing populism around the world [3]. This movement was best epitomised in 2016 by Trump’s nationalist, populist campaign to become president of the United States by urging disillusioned voters to “make America great again,” but the political strategy was likewise employed during the Brexit referendum.

Such social and political issues are hardly new. “Fake news,” for instance, is discernible in much earlier media practices (cf. Higdon, 2020). However, today these issues and their socio-political impacts are compounded by historically specific factors, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. According to researchers for The Conversation, the pandemic inspired “a nostalgia frenzy” among western audiences that was characterized, in part, by nostalgia playlists outperforming new releases and re-runs of classic sporting events (Brunk, Hartmann, Dam and Kjeldgaard, 2020, see also Campoamor, 2020). The years following the pandemic have since seen the rise of “lockdown nostalgia” -- a yearning to return to what were perceived as “simpler times” (cf. Rogers, n.d.) -- and thus the endless striving continues. This wilful return to the past likewise defines the hero’s journey in The Hero with a Thousand Faces and indicates why Campbell’s narratological structure remains popular among audiences today.

The Monomyth

Whether or not one accepts a causal connection between the resurgence of nostalgia and the pervasive popularity of Campbell’s work, the hero’s journey or monomyth is incorporated into writing courses of all disciplines, has inspired countless culturally enshrined works and is “[n]ow recognized as one of the most influential books in the English language” (Jennings, 2022, p. 321; see also Ip, 2010) [4]. Consequently, Campbell’s structure and the nostalgia it is predicated upon, where “life was perfect until recently [and] where [...] new evils, usually with an external or foreign origin, [...] threaten the social order” (Koh, 2009, p. 741), have been weaved into the cultural consciousness.

Campbell’s work is not without criticism, and the colonialism, ethnocentrism and fundamental misunderstandings which characterize his work are well documented (cf. Christenson and Bond, 2021; Hanney and Norrington, 2024). During her particularly critical account of Campbell’s ideological imperialism, Jennings concludes that “[t]he monomyth is […] a recipe derived from a pulverized mash of stories, taken without reparation and especially well suited to the palates of white American men” (2022, p. 327). The fact Campbell’s narrative structure has cemented itself as and remains a cultural touchstone despite such criticisms attests to the deep-seated appeal it holds with purveyors of mass entertainment, thus continuing to frame how larger political issues are engaged with on an emotional level.

Toby Litt argues in How to Tell a Story to Save the World (2021) that “individual illusions of Heroic righteousness are catastrophic,” offering public responses to COVID-19 and climate change as examples. They note two broad consequences of internalizing the assumptions of Campbell’s monomyth, the first being that “by making everyone a Hero, you make everyone feel justified in consuming whatever they need in order to achieve their aims” (Litt, 2021). Stockpiling, conservatism and outright greed are justified by the logic of heroism, wherein all objects, individuals and communities are reframed as resources to help the exceptional hero on their quest. Related to this, the second consequence that Litt points out is that “by elevating the Hero, you denigrate the community,” resulting in the latter appearing “weak, indecisive and incapable of acting in their own defence” (2021). These two consequences -- individualistic entitlement and the denigration of communities -- are pervasive political issues, and not just with regards to the climate emergency that is Litt’s pre-eminent concern. They go on to note that these principal ideological markers of the hero’s journey “cause panic buying [...] profiteering [...] overconsumption and fatalism, hedonism and depression” (Litt, 2021). Such a rendition of Campbell’s work therefore underpins every one of the social, political and cultural issues that plague the western world today and is self-reflexively critiqued by Elden Ring’s narrative and in-game mechanics.

The Player as Problematic Hero

Like some prior FromSoftware titles and numerous other AAA video game contemporaries, Elden Ring introduces a freely explorable setting that ostensibly allows the player to investigate the game’s diegetic world at their own pace, discover the narrative on their own terms and approach challenges from different perspectives. Yet, in contrast to other “open world” games, Elden Ring’s gamespace simultaneously highlights the limitations placed on the character by self-consciously trapping the player into cycles of conquest and destruction.

In Elden Ring, players control “A Tarnished of No Renown,” who is sent to the “Lands Between” by a vaguely defined divine force (FromSoftware, 2022). The player’s mission: defeat a litany of fallen demigods, repair the eponymous Elden Ring and thereby restore metaphysical and political order to an epic fantasy world. This mission is steeped in nostalgia; the Tarnished’s goal is to restore a prior, better (untarnished) version of themselves and the Lands Between. Yet the path taken by the player-character in their quest to make these lands great again exposes the political pitfalls underpinning the heroic ideals of entitlement, individualism and nostalgia. Far from restoring the grace of some imagined past, the player’s heroism leaves the world the same hostile wasteland where “[i]solated societies […] no longer exist except as areas to be exploited” (Campbell, 2010, p. 358).

To understand how The Lands Between are worse off for the player’s monomythic heroism, it is important to understand how games engage with agency and entitlement. Prior scholarship regarding FromSoftware’s oeuvre has often revolved around the difficulty of these games (cf. Vella, 2015; Theodorou, 2020) or highlights the way they reveal narrative in ways specific to the medium (cf. Ball, 2017; Kłosiński 2022; Caracciolo, 2024). The following analysis, by contrast, builds on Himes’ (2023) critique of the political dimensions that underpin Elden Ring’s central heroic journey, the problematic nature of which the game foregrounds. In order to situate this analysis as representative of a broader cultural turn away from Campbellian ideals, though, it is first necessary to identify how video games construct and reproduce political ideals -- specifically those of individual agency and entitlement.

Thi Nguyen explains that video games, as an art form, function to provide unique experiences of agency that cannot be found in our regular lives:

In ordinary life, we have to desperately fit ourselves to the practical demands of the world. In games, we can engineer the world of the game, and the agency we will occupy, to fit us and our desires. Struggles in games can be carefully shaped in order to be interesting, fun, or even beautiful for the struggler. (2020, p. 4)

It is for this reason that audiences engage with games: to feel uniquely empowered to act upon tasks they have just the right ability, just the right tools, and all the time in the world to complete -- not to mention the opportunity to try over and over again until they achieve a satisfying outcome. Jannet Murray echoes this sentiment when they state that:

Within the world of the computer, […] it can feel as if the entire dance hall is at our command. When things are going right on the computer, we can be both the dancer and the caller of the dance. This is the feeling of agency. (1997, pp. 144-45)

Such an understanding already frames videogames (and, indeed, all fantasies of agency) as the exercising of power and entitlement. However, this is only a portion of what agency represents, and, by grasping its various facets, it is possible to understand how a game like Elden Ring can problematise positive understandings of agency as a concept.

Agency does not refer specifically to personal empowerment, but rather a much more general and dispersed potential for change. As Muriel and Crawford (2020) explain, agency does not belong to individuals, but rather to anything that affects a change:

[A]gency is what produces differences and transformations. Agency exists because, in some way, it transforms reality. Agency, therefore, does not have to do with the intention, desire, or the will of an actor, but rather with the transformations that occur; which are effectively observable and traceable. (2020, p. 5)

The fantasy of agency that underpins the open world video game, specifically, is that of living in a world that exists independent of the player-character, despite it being simultaneously built and designed around them. For example, in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (henceforth, Skyrim) (Bethesda, 2011), the level of challenge and reward is directly tied to the level of the player. Skyrim’s gameworld alters itself to accommodate the player-character and scales its difficulty in response to their progress. In effect, every choice is the right one and the player is proportionately rewarded for the time and effort put into the game.

Elden Ring, by contrast, does not scale its difficulty to the player-character’s ability and gives practically no indication as to what challenges the player has uncovered or how to pursue them. Subverting expectations set up by traditionally monomythic gameworlds (like that of Skyrim), the difficulty of Elden Ring’s various areas is set from the outset, guidance through them is minimal and new players need not stray far in the wrong direction to find themselves outmatched. This apparent hostility towards new players is announced at the outset of the game, where the very first enemy that the player faces (a monstrous screaming amalgamation of limbs and weapons) is intended to defeat the player [5]. The second enemy the player faces, an imposing mounted knight, is likewise more challenging than a new player can reasonably handle. Encountering these initial challenges effectively announces to the player that they are not intended to feel powerful in this gameworld, and that the rules of this gamespace dictate a limited sense of powerlessness.

Beyond these first enemies, new players are given access to four main areas: Stormveil Castle, the Weeping Peninsula, Caelid and Liurnia of the Lakes. The former two areas are scaled to a low-level character, the latter two are not, but the game does nothing to stop players from entering Caelid or Liurnia before they are ready. In fact, a trap in an early area will teleport the player directly to a location deep within Caelid, full of enemies that the player is not equipped to handle and loot they are not yet able to wield. Far from re-designing the world around the heroism of the protagonist, Elden Ring offers a world that resists any attempt to dominate it and punishes ignorance.

The game’s willingness to let new players unknowingly dive into the deep end communicates two things. First, at the beginning of their journey, the player’s character is made to feel small and insignificant, and this builds within them a sense of inadequacy akin to the nostalgic subject of late-stage capitalism. Failing in the face of even the initial challenges, new players are suddenly made aware that they lack something which will make them adequate within Elden Ring’s gamespace -- the game has manufactured a desire. Second, the player begins the game knowing that they still have lands to conquer; the game taunts the player into dissatisfaction and ambition just as neoliberal capitalist societies do through the veneration of figures like Elon Musk and Jeffrey Bezos (cf. Jennings, 2018). This latter comparison is particularly appropriate for, as Denham and Spokes (2021) explain, open world games typically cater to the fantasy of complete freedom and consequently pander to (and reinforce) a sense of entitlement. As the protagonist, so the logic goes, the player is allowed to take whatever they want because the player’s right to play in the space, to exert power and influence over it, takes priority over anything else (Denhman and Spokes, 2021). Elden Ring’s open world thus offers the prospect of freedom that the player is challenged to turn into a reality, regardless of who or what stands in their way.

This sense of the hero’s entitlement is further foregrounded through Elden Ring’s primary gameplay loop, which encourages the player to explore the Lands Between through domination, conquest and exploitation. In their nostalgic quest to return the world to its prior, better state, heroes are justified in taking and using anything and everything they may require. In open world games such as Skyrim player-characters are encouraged to collect all items they can get their hands on, the implication being that everything within the gamespace has been put there for them and must therefore be or become valuable. Enemies and most collectable items perpetually respawn, motivating players to “grind” for currency-like experience points and loot. These rewards prompt the player to view everything and everyone in an open world as a potential resource and any barrier between them and their rewards (rarity, hostility, laws in populated areas, etc.) as another challenge with its own set of rewards. As outlined with regards to Litt’s essay, Campbell’s monomyth is predicated upon just such a justification of rampant consumption; resources and communities only exist for the hero to further their quest to reclaim an imagined prior state of being (see also Bond and Christensen, 2021).

The dark endpoint of this entitled logic can be found in Elden Ring’s gameplay, which can be easily read as a critique of said logic. Players new to the game will find it difficult to complete without spending at least some time grinding -- i.e., killing a single enemy repeatedly to level up their character or until it drops specific loot. Elden Ring’s steep difficulty curve demands players improve their character’s statistics to compensate for their as-yet-undeveloped skills and the most efficient “XP farm” has become a wonderful example of emergent narrative: something perhaps not intended by the developers that nevertheless supports and deepens the game’s political critique [6]. One type of enemy, “the Albinaurics,” are, in the lore of the game, artificial, racialized life-forms whose supposedly “impure” blood has led to their continual persecution -- the player sees scores of tortured Albinaurics in the Volcano Manor region and only encounters the “Village of the Albinaurics” after it has been massacred by religious fanatics (FromSoftware, 2022). Most Albinaurics are therefore homeless and wander the Lands Between looking for safe refuge. One such refuge is the Mhogwyn Palace, a high-level area of the game that, much like Caelid, can be accessed early in a new player’s journey. Many Albinaurics rest forlornly at the beginning of this area and will not bother the player unless attacked. As a result, it is all too easy to “farm” them, i.e., kill them repeatedly, so that the “heroic” player can convert these already-downtrodden creatures into a bottomless well of currency. In this instance and across the rest of the game, Elden Ring’s central mechanic works in conjunction with in-game lore to frame would-be heroism as justification for cruel and destructive behaviour -- in this case, by rewarding genocide.

Denigrating the Community

Elden Ring’s critique of individualistic consumption is carried through to its multiplayer, where in-game lore supplements the game’s mechanics to emphasise the self-serving nature of Campbell’s hero. In FromSoftware’s Dark Souls games, each type of multiplayer interaction is tied to an in-game faction. If a player wants to help other players, they can join the “Warriors of Sunlight.” If they want to protect newer players from experienced invaders, they can join the “Blue Sentinels” and help defend the vulnerable when necessary (FromSoftware, 2011). In Elden Ring, direct parallels to these factions are not present and the three types of player interaction (summoning, invasion and invader-hunting) are all directed towards serving the hero’s ambition [7]. There is no society among true Tarnished in the game, rather all Tarnished compete to become the Elden Lord [8]. The Tarnished (i.e., the players) are not allies, but rivals. Consequently, while the Tarnished do get the option to join two factions focused on invasion, there is no faction focused on cooperation.

Even when players are working towards a common goal in Elden Ring, this form of multiplayer is more akin to mercenary action. Players “summon” one another to help overcome a particular fight, and the summoned players help in order reap more rewards (FromSoftware, 2022). When players choose to help someone to defeat a different invading player, they do so as a “hunter,” not a sentinel (FromSoftware, 2022). In effect, the pretence of saving invaded players is simply an excuse to hunt others for sport. And in all these multiplayer interactions there remains a strict hierarchy that keeps the focus on individualistic advancement. The “host” player has twice the healing potential as whoever they have summoned, and the online session ends when this host dies (FromSoftware, 2022). Conversely, if the summoned player dies in the middle of a fight the fight will continue with the host alone. The host may also dismiss summoned players on purpose to deprived them of their reward. Such control serves to emphasise the fact that, for each player, everyone and everything is expendable and consumable, including other players. As such, Elden Ring’s Campbellian hero wilfully abandons communal goals within the game’s multiplayer.

No matter which ending the player chooses, the only attribute they will have demonstrated is the ability to kill all who oppose them. This is made explicit during the penultimate challenge of the game. Players must defeat a previous Elden Lord, Godfrey, who helped establish “the Golden Order,” the fundamentalist doctrine that the player is tasked with rebuilding (FromSoftware, 2022). When Godfrey kills the player, he declares that “A crown is warranted with strength,” and when the player defeats him, he says “Brave Tarnished, thy strength befits a crown” (FromSoftware, 2022, emphasis added). Thus, by the end of the game, the player-character is shown to be a conqueror reshaping the Lands Between as they see fit, just as Godfrey did in his time.

While Godfrey and the player-character represent the heroic ideal to which a Tarnished should aspire, Elden Ring is equally critical of those members of the populace who are fuelled by “the assumption of [one’s] own Heroism” (Litt 2021). The most overt depiction of this appears in the form of “the Recusants” (FromSoftware, 2022). This faction is comprised of Tarnished whose resentment and feelings of abandonment and inferiority in a crumbling world are manipulated by a privileged and powerful demigod, Rykard. In terms of political intervention, the Recusants resent what they perceive as the unprofitable leadership of their former deity and have turned against it and all those that remain faithful. Rykard appeals to this disillusionment by encouraging his followers to “Join the Serpent King as family” so that, together, they might “devour the very gods” (FromSoftware, 2022). But for all this revolutionary fervour, the player’s actual meeting with Rykard reveals him to be a monstrous, hostile serpent who has turned into the same kind of self-serving (non)leader that the Recusants were originally rebelling against. In their quest to find order by selecting an ostensibly better figurehead, the Recusants simply created another dangerous liability (fittingly represented by a self-consuming serpent) and helped prop up the same corrupt system.

In the Recusants political and theological struggle, it is possible to discern a timely critique of the alt-right groups currently developing across social media and in the global political arena. The support of Rykard, a monster who promises the overturning of a political system only to reaffirm its most damaging elements, is comparable to the US presidency and re-election of Donald Trump. When justifying the Recusants’ purpose, their de facto speaker, Lady Tanith, explains:

The Erdtree blessed the Tarnished with grace. But it was all too meagre, in the face of the enormity of their task. The Tarnished were forced to scavenge, squabbling for crumbs. […] To scurry about, fighting over what miserly scraps they allow us. If the Erdtree, and indeed the very gods, would debase us so, then we are willing to raise the banner of resistance […]. (FromSoftware, 2022)

Tanith nostalgically cites dignity and an implied former glory on behalf of all Tarnished while effectively blaming their suffering on the withholding of resources: the “meagre[ness]” of the Erdtree’s grace. The only justifiable, courageous response, she argues, is to oppose the system “even if it means heresy,” implying that any opposition to the dominant order is heroic in and of itself (FromSoftware, 2022).

Such vague notions of persecution and the invocation of indignity echoes Trump’s first presidential victory speech, in which he announced that “The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer” and that his supporters “must reclaim our country’s destiny and dream big and bold and daring” (2016). It was this openly fascist rhetoric that tapped into the “deep anti-establishment anger among American voters” (Holpuch and McCarthy, 2016) and lead the US into a cycle of self-cannibalism and misguided rebellion against perceived shadowy manipulators by propping up morally bankrupt leaders who increasingly support violence towards the minoritized. Just like the Recusants, the player-character and all others likewise seduced by the monomyth try to stop the world burning only to add fuel to the fire.

Similar to how rescuing another player from an invasion serves as a pretence for hunting the outnumbered and resource-poor invaders, the player’s supposed quest to “redeem” the in-game world proves nothing more than a flimsy justification to dominate it, namely by placing themselves atop the world that once dared to defy them. And if one cannot dominate the world, the Recusants show, one is just as likely to prop up someone privileged enough to do so, resulting in individuals becoming both perpetuators and victims of a “new” system that prolongs the same cycles of violence and oppression. This vain striving, the cyclical nature of the Tarnished’s journey, is made clear by events that bookend their quest.

Margit, the first main boss the player is likely to face, announces that the “Foul Tarnished” are “Emboldened by the flame of ambition” (FromSoftware, 2022). Instead of describing a noble hero pursuing redemption, this declaration reframes the player-character as a usurper with pointedly individualistic goals. Notably, Margit humbly positions himself, instead, as the hero, opposing the player-character’s villainy: “Someone must extinguish thy flame” (FromSoftware, 2022, emphasis added). This rhetorical trick twists the moral logic of the monomyth’s narrative, questioning the actions of the player-character thus far and foreshadowing the game’s overarching critique. Coming from the monstrously strong and aggressive Margit, this reference to the all-consuming flame of ambition is easily dismissed as bravado. But while Margit’s metaphor appears a simple taunt at the beginning of the game, by the conclusion it has gained emotional and symbolic weight.

As players move through the game, they approach “the Erdtree,” a colossal glowing tree that sits at the centre of the Lands Between and offers a symbolic reminder of a lost state of supposedly “natural” stability (FromSoftware, 2022). In terms of in-game lore, the Erdtree is a monument to the Golden Order and a symbol of abundance and eternal life (for the privileged classes, at least). The tree is an omnipresent reminder of their quest to “fix” the world that literally looms over the player-character for the duration of the game. The tree marks the location of “the Elden Throne” that all Tarnished are tasked with claiming (FromSoftware 2022) and within the tree itself lies the shattered Elden Ring they are to repair. However, when they reach the tree, it repels them: there is a barrier of impenetrable thorns that stands between the Tarnished and their goal. To complete their task, the player-character must first burn the Erdtree and prove that all values they hold dear are disposable. The player is thereby shown that a Campbellian hero will cast aside everything in pursuit of their ambitions [9].

Conclusion

Building upon the work of such theorists as Wolfsfeld and Watt, this article reads computer games as fantasies of agency whereby players engage with and explore alternative ways or being. Such a reading situates computer games -- and open world computer games, in particular -- as uniquely capable of critiquing notions of heroism and entitlement through the self-consciously problematic forms of freedom they provide. Elden Ring is exemplary in this regard. It uses the medium to develop upon established open world formulae to demonstrate that Campbell’s cyclical monomyth creates the state of “full decay” he laments (2010, p. 358). Elden Ring’s player is challenged to undertake a perilous journey to return a crumbling world to a prior state of stability. However, by the end of their quest, the hero’s journey has come full circle; the Elden Ring is restored, but there remains no healed community.

The final shot of the game shows, not “the renewing of the community, the nation, the planet, or the ten thousand worlds,” but the player-character sitting alone atop the throne they seized by force (Campbell, 2010, p. 34, 179) [10]. Elden Ring specifically critiques real-world groups who are inspired by monomythic archetypes -- those who fantasize about “smoothing or ignoring the complicated patterns of bodies, knowledge, and power in democracies” (Hines, 2023, p. 6) and thereby positions itself in a liminal political space by both exemplifying a damaging narrative tradition and challenging it. Elden Ring offers not just an escape from the problems of daily life, but a means to better understand the causes of societal problems and how they may unknowingly perpetuate them.

Endnotes

[1] cf. Milmo, 2023.

[2] FromSoftware is a Japanese company, and it is worth bearing mind that all interpretations of Elden Ring in English are necessarily translated and localized. There is a wealth of critical potential in the movement of narrative tropes between Japan and Anglo-American contexts and vice-versa, (cf. Hutchinson, 2019; Hutchinson and Pelletier-Gagnon, 2022). However, a comprehensive outline of the complexities of this interchange is beyond the scope of this article.

[3] cf. Silver, 2022 or Serhan, 2020.

[4] It is worth noting that the cultural enshrinement of Campbell’s monomyth and the “ego-machismo” popularised by its “Hollywoodisation” since the 1970s was not the intention of the original research (Litt, 2021). Campbell’s book itself lays more emphasis on spiritual enlightenment and psychological development than physical (male) dominance, and is, as Toby Litt points out, overwhelmingly “descriptive, not prescriptive” (2021).

[5] Even if the player manages to overcome this creature, it is impossible to progress further into the game unless they die.

[6] For a more in-depth discussion of this concept, see Murnane, 2018.

[7] The first expansion to Elden Ring, released 7th December 2022, included a fourth multi-player option: arena combat. These contests take place outside the narrative world of the game so have not been considered in any great length here, though it is worth noting that the competitive nature of this combat only serves to strengthen the sense of the hero’s pursuit of individualistic goals.

[8] While there are Tarnished living together and helping one another in a location called “the Roundtable Hold” (FromSoftware, 2022), interacting with these characters reveals that they have all but abandoned the quest they share with the player-character. Moreover, the leader of this society ultimately betrays the protagonist and becomes one of the final mandatory boss fights necessary to complete the game.

[9] In order to access a flame capable of burning the Erdtree, the player must make a sacrifice. Either they sacrifice a companion with whom they have been travelling since the beginning of the game, or they sacrifice their morals. In the latter option, the player-character embraces “the Flame of Chaos” and becomes an avatar for a god of destruction (FromSoftware, 2022). If they take this option, far from saving their companion, the player opens a path to burning the whole world. This path ends all life in the world, and thereby depicts one of the most well-known aphorisms concerning consumer society: “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” (Fisher, 2023, p. 1).

[10] There are two exceptions to this, those being the so-called “Age of Stars” and “Lord of the Frenzied Flame” endings. In the former, the player-character replaces the metaphysical order that governs the Lands Between with a new, indifferent one. This act brings about what is described as an “age of loneliness” (FromSoftware, 2022), but there is little indication how the rule of this new, impassive entity will differ from the old, pernicious one. The latter ending has already been mentioned above. A full reading of these specific endings is beyond the scope of the present discussion.

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