Through looking at these games as a feedback loop between text, environment and ludic system, I connect the main conceptual motifs that structure the games as a whole with Osawa Masachi's concept of the post-fictional era and Hiroki Azuma's definition of the otaku. Of course, The Downward Spiral wasnt just opening my early-teen eyes to the wonders of blasphemy and extended remixes, but also to the joy of the concept album- in coordination with Melon Collie. This expression of contemporary social anxiety is connected to the discourse of postmodernity in Japan. It does this through a fractured approach to story-telling, that is interspersed with Buddhist metaphysics and wrapped up in macabre, gothic aesthetic depicting the last gasping breath of a once great kingdom. Heres Trent Reznors best-known (and most highly regarded) work, The Downward Spiral, bulked up to include Dolby 5. I argue that the Dark Souls series expresses in allegorical form an anxiety about living in a time where the meaning of our everyday actions and even society itself has become significantly destabilized. I argue that the game should be thought of as an emblem of the current cultural zeitgeist, in a similar way one might identify something like Jack Kerouac's The Dharma Bums as an emblem of the counter cultural 60s. On the album's first single, 'March of the Pigs,' for example, Reznor screams about swine lined up for slaughter amid guitars screeching in pain. This paper is about locating the meaning of a series of games known as the Dark Souls series in relation to contemporary social conditions in Japan. On the second full-length NIN album, The Downward Spiral, Reznor builds his constructions of noise and gloom around warm, fuzzy melodies.
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