Riding a Complex Rollercoaster: Challenge and Emotional Experience in Elden Ring

Abstract

Games are about challenge, and challenges in FromSoftware ARPGs are considered difficult but emotionally rewarding to manage or overcome. Elden Ring represents the culmination of nearly four decades FromSoftware has spent fine-tuning the emotional experience their ARPGs provide. Current research on challenge suggests that challenge difficulty affects flow or enjoyment but reveals little about the intricate connection between challenge difficulty and emotional experience. Furthermore, the nature of challenges in FromSoftware ARPGs has not received as much attention as the difficulty involved in overcoming or managing them. How the interaction between physical, cognitive, and emotional challenge affects moment-to-moment emotional experience deserves more academic attention. In a holistic and phenomenological close reading of key passages in a recording of Elden Ring that includes gameplay footage and comments from the player-as-critic, this thesis explores how challenge types and challenge difficulty contribute to subjective emotional experience. The findings indicate that considerable challenge difficulty evokes or intensifies sentiments, but that the interaction between physical/cognitive and emotional challenge is as important to emotional experience as challenge difficulty. Elden Ring combines difficult physical/cognitive challenges with unsettling/overwhelming audiovisuals, narrative ambiguities, and strong characters to challenge the player emotionally. Diverse sources of emotional challenge contribute to the co-occurrence or succession of a wide range of sentiments, resulting in moments of considerable emotional intensity and complexity that evoke appreciation and feed into a meaningful narrative of play. This thesis expands our knowledge of challenge as an important feature of games and reveals the potential impact of FromSoftware ARPGs on their players. Since Elden Ring is as emotionally challenging as it is emotionally rewarding, the ARPG contributes to our wellbeing and productivity by encouraging its players to embrace rather than avoid emotional challenge.