People I Met Playing Demon’s Souls

Originally posted 2009-12-30.

Online video games have a deserved reputation for being populated by illiterate, immature, ignorant, inflammatory imbeciles. Penny Arcade, as is their forte, rather coarsely pointed this out some years ago.

I spent 63 hours over the course of a month in Demon’s Souls, the bogglingly deep and captivating Japan-made Western RPG. It was my first video game with an online component (beyond Street Fighter and BlazBlue matchmaking), and I feared for the worst. But every person I met was gracious and neighborly. These are people who bow to you when you join their game. I guess that with a game this unapologetically difficult, the real enemy is the game world itself, and players are inclined to a sort of camaraderie. It also seems that you need to have a well-developed sense of patience and calm in order to get very far in Demon’s Souls.

There is plenty of material out there on the web about the game itself and why it is a treasure, but here is a sampling of the sort of people you might end up playing with.