It was on the seventh day I realised I was no longer alone in the world.
First came the words, scrawled in glowing script on every surface, haphazard in their arrangement, helpful and deceitful in equal measure. Next came the shades, passing ghosts blown onwards by unseen winds, never lingering long enough for recognition nor familiarity. Last came death clad in armour of deepest crimson, to strike me down from behind as I fled, my solitude banished by this succession of foul visitations.
It was simply coincidence which led me to be playing Dark Souls on an Xbox Live free weekend. Traditionally I’ve taken great pains to avoid console multiplayer, having no desire to pay for the privilege of being verbally assaulted by a succession of angry teenagers, and while I’d heard intriguing things about Dark Souls’ online mechanics, I saw no harm in descending into the depths of Lordran firmly ensconced in Offline Mode. The title screen berated me each time I switched the system on, white words on a black background dripping with disappointment at my choice to play alone.
I treasure the solitude I find in gaming. Daily life is crammed full of people: the thousand fragmented interactions of working in a busy office, empathising with clients and co-workers; the back-and-forth chatter of passing acquaintances across Twitter and Facebook; reminiscing with good friends in a beer garden with a cold pint, surrounded by the hubbub of other people’s lives - new babies and birthdays, Big Brother and Britain’s Got Talent - then trudging home past drunken strangers in the rain. I’m no introvert - if I want human companionship in my games I have plenty to choose from, from MMOs to MOBAs, Wii Sports to Mario Kart - but sometimes we all need an escape from the constant interplay of reality.
Dark Souls met that need for me, its twisted inhabitants content to let me go on my way with a minimum of conversation. I learned my way around its labyrinthine systems alone, discovered each one of its fiendish traps - and how to circumvent it - for myself; burnt to a crisp, sliced in half, crushed, cursed, infected, each time reborn with fresh insight. I revelled in my solitude, skipped down dark paths and through subterranean galleries. My sanctuary may have been cruel and unrelenting but it was mine, and mine alone, until the free weekend brought me inadvertently online.
Despite my apprehension, I couldn’t help but admire how Dark Souls seamlessly integrates multiplayer into the experience. Instead of lobbies and endless matchmaking, it’s as if the fabric of reality has been stretched thin, and myriad parallel Lordrans – each with their own undead messiah - begin to overlap. Warnings and secrets cross the void with relative ease to appear as glowing glyphs, while passing players fade in and out, ghostly figures brought into sharper focus in the moment of their deaths. If you choose to gamble your precious humanity to suspend your undeath, you can summon fellow players to fight by your side, yet in doing so you open the door to malevolent incursions, dark invaders seeking to rip that same humanity from your rapidly cooling corpse.
Three days later, my refusal to pay the toll of Xbox Live returned me to isolation.
My brief encounter with the outside world had been an entertaining distraction, but I was delighted to have Lordran all to myself again. No more spirits. No more interpreting cryptic messages left by my fellow players. No more fear of a dark phantom invading my world with murder on its mind just as someone knocks at the door and the phone rings and the smoke alarm screeches its incessant blare.
Yet an unmistakable theme ran through E3 this year which made me worry for the future of my solitary game experience. “Always online” was a mantra, a touchstone, a talking point repeated with increasing fervour in a manner recalling the fevered protestations of Maxis PR at the height of the SimCity debacle. This is the era of new consoles packed full of social network features that let you share, discuss, watch and broadcast your gaming habits, of Skype calls popping up in split-screen while you’re gurning at Kinect in a fit of murderous bloodlust in your underpants.
Even Microsoft’s climbdown on their strict online requirements doesn’t change the intent of the games being shown: “shared world” is the new “open world”, from Watch Dogs to The Division to Bungie’s Destiny. It’s not enough to have a fully-realised world to explore, to smash your toys together and see what explodes first. Now you have to play with others, to always expect a real person sneaking up to stab you in the back. There’s always the opportunity for another kid to jump into your sandbox and kick down your castle.
The ideas of always-online shared worlds and the seamless integration of singleplayer and multiplayer are tremendously exciting - to see Dark Souls’ ingenious multiplayer repurposed into a war between hackers on the streets of a near-future Chicago is a neat premise - but as SimCity aptly displayed, there are costs to enforced sociability. Convenience. A pause button. Individualism. A dulling of the sensation of singular heroism, which gaming delivers so well. More than anything else, the knowledge that you can never be alone, that your enjoyment is ever-dependent on some stranger’s choice not to screw up your game.
In breaking down the doors of my sanctuary, you created an invigorating breeze to stir up the dust and blow the cobwebs from the corners. But now the door cannot be closed, and I know it’s only a matter of time before the thieves, the trolls, the tourists arrive, and I’m forced to retreat ever deeper into the darkness to find my precious speck of solitude.