The Psychology of Elden Ring

By Anthony Bean

"Oh, arise now, ye Tarnished. Ye dead, who let live. The call of long-lost grace speaks to us all." ~ Opening Cutscene, Elden Ring

 

"The Psychology of Elden Ring" offers a deep dive into the captivating world of Elden Ring, exploring the game's rich psychological themes and implications. This insightful book is packed with fascinating analysis, research, and theories that will appeal to both gamers and psychology enthusiasts alike.

Through this book, readers will:

 

• Discover the intricate relationship between the game's story, characters, and environments and how they shape the player's emotions and thoughts.
• Explore the game's intricate narrative and its commentary on themes such as identity, morality, and human nature.
• Learn about the psychological concepts and theories that underpin the game's design and how they impact the player's experience.
• Gain insights into how the game's challenging gameplay mechanics and difficulty can affect players' emotions and motivations.
• Discover how Elden Ring's unique world design and immersive storytelling create an unforgettable and emotionally resonant gaming experience.

 

"The Psychology of Elden Ring" is a must-read for any gamer interested in understanding the psychological underpinnings of one of the most highly anticipated games of all time. This book offers a rare glimpse into the creative process behind Elden Ring and provides an engaging, thought-provoking analysis of the game's psychological impact on players.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Leyline Publishing
• Release date: Jul 8, 2023
• ISBN: 9781955406178

Book preview

INTRODUCTION: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ELDEN RING

Few games have loomed as large in popular video game culture in recent years as Elden Ring, a devastatingly difficult sword-and-sorcery RPG that became a bestseller when it launched on PC, PlayStation, and Xbox consoles back in February 2022.

It’s apt, then, that the game frequently seems to loom over you, as undead colossi, many-limbed king, or ravenous bear tears into your minute form, flashing death repeatedly across the screen.

Elden Ring is brutal, if beautiful – a place of gorgeous glades, underground stars, and painstakingly designed creatures across its sprawling open world – but that beauty only serves to make your continual demise all the more tragic, as your cursed hero falls across sunlit grass and barren ground alike.

Developer FromSoftware is infamous for its unforgiving games – Elden Ring, Bloodborne, and the Dark Souls trilogy – fans of which are intimately familiar with their game-over screens and bruising difficulty that rewards patience, practice, and belligerence as much as technical skill.

But for a game so committed to killing its protagonist, it’s surprising just how popular Elden Ring has been. This ‘tragic fantasy’ game sold an incredible 12 million copies in its first two weeks on sale, and a sizable 17.5 million by the end of 2022 – marking the first time that FromSoftware had broken unabashedly into the mainstream. So what is it about a game that’s dead set against your success that’s captured the hearts of so many?

At a time when games are a mass-market, multibillion dollar industry rather than a niche basement hobby, games are designed to respect your time, ensuring you don’t lose hours of progress when you forget to save in a hurry. They have autosave features, generous checkpoints, and carefully-controlled difficulty curves to ensure players are easily onboarded and then convinced to stick around; a game where players bounce off in the opening hours and don’t come back is not a game likely to make much money at all.

Elden Ring bucks this trend by repeatedly putting players in front of a brick wall – knocking them back just when they thought they’d gotten the hang of things. Enemies are brutally hard, right from the outset, and require careful attention and countless deaths before you can take them on with any chance of success. It’s also impossible to pause the game during combat, requiring careful concentration for sustained periods of gameplay, even if these kinds of design choices run counter to the convenience-led features that are so common in today’s games.

Elden Ring is not convenient; nor is it psychologically comfortable – it delights in showing the player the terror and ferocity of the unknown, as well as the limits of their own ability. But it is also gripping in its determination to defeat you, and opposing it back grants the player an incredible feeling of agency, and grit.

While this level of challenge can be frustrating, it offers an immense psychological reward – of reaching the peak of Everest after numerous failed attempts. Elden Ring requires the determination (and masochism) of a top athlete willing to put in hours of discomfort to see eventual success. It’s no coincidence that many of the chapters in this book grapple with the design of difficulty in the game, the role of death in growth or transformation, and how the game’s inherent tragedy and trauma is key to its narrative weight.

For a medium still infantilized in much of mainstream discourse, Elden Ring’s popularity points to a player’s desire for meaningful challenges, and the chance to expand your sense of self – in the way that heroics, impossible acts, make you larger than you were before. By the end, it is you who is looming large over Elden Ring, and not the other way around.

These things make it, and its players, a rich site of psychological study, and a shining example of the meaning-making that’s so unique to the interactive medium of games. The Psychology of Elden Ring delves into the myriad ways that Elden Ring rewards and punishes the player, and how that tension feeds into the rich mythology at the heart of this game – the player flailing in the thrill of a battle sure to best them, both hero and failure at the same time.

Henry St Leger is a games critic and journalist based in

London, UK. They reviewed Elden Ring at launch for

The Times and died many, many times.

Foul tarnished, in search of the Elden Ring. Emboldened by the flame of ambition. Someone must extinguish thy flame.

— Margit the Fell Omen

Emotions like anxiety and apprehension naturally exist as survival mechanisms of the human psyche that alert us to perceived threats and dangers and then respond accordingly in order to sustain our vitality. This begets the question: why are some of us drawn to lurid concepts of monstrosity—both in reality and in simulated experiences like gameplay and other forms of dark fiction? There is an allure to this genre of content among those of us who have experienced our own traumas and encounters with malevolence, as it is also part of human nature (and anatomy) to attempt to contextualize what we do not understand. Unfortunately, the subjectivity of the human experience makes it difficult to create clear distinctions between what is a unique, yet sacred, aspect of existence, and what is reprehensible.

At times, the figures in these disturbing scenes and themes do not easily assimilate into what many in Western society would consider to be wrong or evil. Various realms of culture and society dictate what constitutes moral or immoral thoughts and behaviors, yet the inevitable occurrences of phenomena outside of such clear parameters generate concerns and doubt, that perhaps we are innately flawed and, therefore, unacceptable. Our curiosity about the morbid, macabre, and morally challenging becomes more pronounced with the increase of internal and external messages that reject any positive regard within those social ecosystems. This creates rifts of cognitive dissonance and a need to reexamine how we subjectively appraise complex concepts and actions and subconsciously assign value to ourselves and others.

FromSoftware has created several immersive role-playing games that contain a multitude of visual and conceptual monstrosities that challenge players’ conceptions of morality, intention, and relation to others in social groups. The conglomerate’s award-winning title, Elden Ring, is no exception and leaves much room for interpretation and reconsideration of who the monsters really are in the Lands Between.

The Golden Order has no mercy for those that trespass beyond life’s bounds.

– Holy Water Pot (in-game item description)

Vulnerability exists at the margins, and dangerousness lies in transitional stages. As a species, we do not generally like what cannot be categorized neatly into a familiar container. Additionally, this is how biases and other mechanisms of discrimination are formed. Minorities can be considered a threat.

Significant branching of life within Elden Ring occurs after the age of ancient dragons in Farum Azula, resulting in the emergence of the Crucible and primordial Greattree era. During this time, there was no established order. Life flourished wildly in its most chaotic, heterogeneous forms, such as chimeric creatures depicted with extraneous horns, tails, scales, and/or feathers. Even humans could be born with such appendages as a sign of being touched by the Crucible’s divine favor of bestial vitality. This vitality boasted formidable levels of aggression and strength that were highly valued as a means to survive in an unforgiving world.

The reigning god, Queen Marika, made determinations about what was stunting the growth and viability of her dominion and pruned them away. The triumph in the war against the Fire Giants secured prohibition of fire among those that served the Erdtree. As fire was removed from the burning orange manifestations of the Crucible, the red hue of ruinous flames left as well, leaving behind a pigment of gold. Thus, the Golden Order was established, and life began to settle into a common existence. Unrefined, chaotic vestiges have no place in the realm of order and will be pushed out. Outliers will not be tolerated.

The term misbegotten means ill-conceived or conceived incorrectly. In the item description for the Winged Misbegotten Ashes, we are told that these creatures are held to be a punishment for making contact with the Crucible, and from birth, they are treated as slaves, or worse. Their only crime was being born outside of Grace. On the other hand, not all of the Misbegotten are depicted as primitive, hostile brutes. There are groups of Misbegotten praying outside of the entrance to the Grand Lift of Rold, as well as in Miquella’s Haligtree. The act of praying implies that there is a level of conscious, intellectual thinking, and perhaps moral judgment, that these beings possess. Moreover, the NPC Smithing Master Hewg has the ability to speak (unlike any other forms of Misbegotten in the game) and refined abilities of blacksmithing. Ironically, Smithing Master Hewg is entrusted with such an important task and placed in the Roundtable Hold to help create a weapon that can slay a god, despite being an enslaved Misbegotten.

The Omen are very similar to the Misbegotten in that they are also vilified by those of the Golden Order, although they have much more of a humanlike appearance; their distinguishing feature is protruding horns. In fact, the Omen are born from humans, but because of their contact with the Crucible during the age of the Erdtree, they are discarded by their parents and society. The Golden Order conceptualizes Omen births as cursed vestiges of the Crucible coming to usurp the new civilization they’ve meticulously cultivated.

Initially, there are efforts by the perfumers within the capital (akin to physicians or healers) to superficially cut the horns from infants born with the Omen curse, but despite their best intentions, the majority of these infants are not able to survive the immense pain and suffering inflicted during these surgeries. Contrastingly, Omen born to royal or divine lineages are not subjected to having their horns removed and are instead shunned to the sewers underneath the capital. The Regal Omen Bairn item shows us that Omen that are still left with their horns are especially dangerous in that they are able to conjure up cursed spirits. They live a tormented existence where they are haunted by these spirits and can unleash their immeasurable suffering through great amounts of physical and mystical power.

Eventually, it is decided that these efforts are not enough to remove the threat. The perfumers that once aimed to lessen the pain of the Omen are urged by the Capital to carry out more unforgiving means as Omenkillers and eliminate them altogether. The ashes of the infamous Omenkiller Rollo explains that the former healer imbibed a physick to rid himself of emotion, thus enabling him to enact his nightmarish labor. He has to abandon his doctrine and innate empathy as a healer to serve the ideals of the governing order. Nevertheless, the knowledge and techniques that the once-healers developed while attending to the Omen in a position of trust becomes their most effective tool in influencing the mind and emotions of those they slaughter.

Morgott and Mohg were the first children born to Queen Marika and Godfrey, but they were born with the accursed blood of the Omen curse. These twins were likely early manifestations, if not the first, of the affliction within divine lineages and given life at a time where there was overlap between the Crucible and the Golden Order. They may not have been immediately shunned to the sewers at birth, but rather raised in secret within Leyndell in their early years, as evidenced by how well-spoken and intelligent they are. Not knowing what to do with graceless children of royal blood, the Golden Order turned the sewers into a makeshift prison to hide the Omen’s existence from the public view and preserve their own authority.

Morgott’s character incarnates the discrimination that the Golden Order harbored toward the Omen. He rejects his identity and existence as an Omen and serves the Erdtree as its most loyal protector, although he never receives love in return. His title of Veiled Monarch is given through the player’s dialogue with Gideon Ofnir, which informs us that Morgott is hidden from the public eye in order to not be exposed as an Omen. His alternate form, Margit the Fell Omen, is a personification of what Morgott rejects yet an outlet where he can use the physical strength that the Omen curse gives him to protect the Order and the Erdtree. While fighting Morgott at the throne of the Erdtree, he becomes halted and exhales a powdery, diseased breath. He says, The thrones... stained by my curse... Such shame I cannot bear. Thy part in this shall not be forgiven. This second phase of the battle displays his release of abilities more aligned with the Omen, the Formless Mother, and the Lord of Blood. Morgott feels himself falling to a superior opponent and gives into the true nature of his Omen blood.

Alternatively, the other Omen twin, Mohg, chose to embrace his curse. He detested the way he was treated as being born an Omen and rejected the order of the Erdtree. Therefore, Mohg would not have an outlet of faith or foundation for how to live his life like his brother Morgott. That was until met with the mother of truth, or better known as the Formless Mother. The Bloodboon incantation item description mentions that his accursed blood erupted with fire, which conveys that the Formless Mother was able to commune with Mohg and give him power through his Omen blood when activated by wounds. While these may have been internal, psychic wounds (i.e., anger, resentment, hurt, betrayal), it is also noteworthy that Mohg’s left eye becomes impaled by the overgrowth of his Omen horns and could also represent the physiological wound that the Formless Mother needed. The fire erupting within Mohg gives him a newfound purpose, spurring him toward establishing his own sect outside of the Golden Order.

Albinaurics are lifeforms made by human hands. Thus, many believe them to live impure lives, untouched by the Erdtree’s grace.

— Albinauric Bloodclot (in-game item description)

The Albinauric Staff describes these creatures having an innate arcaneness, suggesting that they were given life through magical means. Considering that Albinauric blood is a silver fluid that resembles elemental mercury, the magical means could indeed be alchemical processes. The homunculus is a desired product within alchemy to contain manufactured life energy. Unfortunately, these vessels of artificial life were flawed creations, and their creators continued to experiment to yield more efficient results. This resulted in the different variations in Albinaurics that we see in the game, as they come from two generations of creation.

The first-generation Albinaurics appear to be much more humanoid; however, their major flaw is that they are unable to use their legs. On the other hand, the second-generation are the nomadic variations that we see in additional locations across the Lands Between. The item description for the Albinauric spirit ashes characterizes these creatures as having dumpy heads that resemble those of frogs. While their legs are functional, we do not see any evidence of these variations having the intellect and ability to communicate like their predecessors. The second-generation Albinaurics are more simplistic in nature, which may be why they are so easy to trust the Lord of Blood to join his covenant. It is also noteworthy that Mohg’s Albinauric followers begin to sprout small horns, and their skin turns from silver to red. These transformations suggest some adaptability of features similar to their Silver Tear predecessors that make a mockery of life, reborn again and again into imitation, as quoted by the Silver Tear Husk item description.

What is greatly tragic about the Albinaurics is that they are victims of persecution and torture, as seen