Reddit mentions of You Died: The Dark Souls Companion

>Isn't the point of a video game to feel like a video game?
>There has to be a better term for what you're trying to say.

This has been discussed to death so I just shortened it. No, video games do not have to feel like games. They don't even necessarily have to be fun all the time.

But my point was that there is something like a collective structure of the medium.

Compare for example narrative. Basically the whole western, eurocentristic world builds fictional narrative on the old testament and the Odyssee/Illiad. Every hollywood movie today uses a simplified version of that structure. You learn it from childhood on, it is normal to you and you expect it. When people from western society watch a movie from a different cultural background it feels wrong and outlandish.

A similar thing exists in games. The designers copy and reuse mechanics from each other, so player can reuse their prior gained knowledge and build on it.

Dark Souls 1 did not do that for the very most part. It threw out preexisting rules and structures, told you to forget everything and learn something completely new, which hat its own system of "fairness" or "rules". This is why so many early reviews considered it difficult or badly designed. There are many reports from people who come from a non gaming background or went in completely blind (without notion that it is supposed to be difficult) and had generally very different experiences.

Dark Souls 2 doesn't do that. It tells you in the intro that you will die a lot, it has a death counter, linear levels, tough long boss battles, etc.
DS1 wants to be an experience, DS 2 wants to be a difficult video game. And both do that pretty well.

I know this is not necessarily a satisfying explanation either, especially if you never really experienced that feeling yourself, but there are hundreds of videos youtube and people literally have written books on that subject.

DS1 was lightning in a bottle.

If you haven’t already, read this. If you’re in the UK, Direct message me and I’d gladly pass on my copy.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/You-Died-Dark-Souls-Companion-ebook/dp/B01ED96ZVG/ref=nodl_

Also, the Bonfireside Chat podcast is invaluable.

I recommend reading "You Died".