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What’s better: In-game memorials to players, or Dark Souls bonewheels?Vote now!
Vote now!
Image credit:CCP
Image credit:CCP
Last time, you overwhelmingly decided thatgoing on the roof is better than one in the chamber, you little rapscallions. You’re going to get in so much trouble when someone finds out! This week, I have death on my mind ahead of the much-belated scattering of my dad’s ashes, so let’s talk about death. ‘The long sleep,’ some say. ‘Making the little flowers grow,‘Lee Hazelwood will tell you. ‘Big D,’ I think is what several anonymous e-mails I’ve received were referring to. Let’s compare several very different afterdeaths. What’s better: in-game memorials to players, orDark Soulsbonewheels?
In-game memorials to players
Death will claim us all. As our lives become partially digital, it’s only natural and right that these important healing ceremonies and tributes become partially digital for people who lived in those spaces and are missed in those spaces. While players have held vigils, wakes, and other ceremonies for lost friends in countless games, here let’s focus on permanent additions.
It’s no surprise that many memorials are in MMOs, games which run for years and foster community and friendship. World Of Warcraft hasoodles of memorialsfor fallen developers, friends, and players. They come in forms including headstones, quests, NPCs named after people, NPCs based upon people’s WoW characters, and a genie named Robin after celebrity player (and professional genie) Robin Williams. In space bastard simulator Eve Online, an area used unofficially to memorialise characters with drifting cannisters came to be used to remember actual people too, and the developers eventuallybuilt an official monument in the spot. I’m sure folks who know other MMOs can tell us about memorials in their virtuaworlds.
Many other types of games contain memorials and tributes to fans and community members, mind. Even if folks might not have met them in the game, the games have brought people together or were an important part of their lives. Borderlands games have memorialised fans with NPCs and weapons.Dying Lighthasmuralsfor a player. It feels almost comical to point to this handful of examples as if they are standouts or isolated cases but we would be here all day. Please do share any that mean something to you, reader dear.
And I couldn’t begin to tell you how many mods contain memorials, or simplyare one.
Dark Souls bonewheels
Here’s a fun question which I imagine Smash Hits magazine once asked Blue or Blazin’ Squad as an ice-breaking character test: after you die, would you rather become a ghost or a skeleton? This is a trick question. You can be both a ghost and a skeleton, and you will. While your ghost observes and mopes and knocks precious objects off shelves like a cat denied Dreamies, your skeleton will be having the absolute time of its death. It’ll be cackling with its skeleton pals, swapping skulls for funsies, playing bone flutes, and quaffing booze (it knows the drink will cascade down its ribs like a macabre frat party vodka luge, and finds that hilarious). And if it’s really lucky, it’ll get to roll around on a wheel.
The bonewheel skeletons in Dark Souls games are among my very favourite video game enemies. Lashed to a wheel (perhaps a breaking wheel, the method of their execution?), they can roll about at great speed. If they hit you head on, they can staggerlock and very quickly murder you. This leads to the following development of thought:
But which is better?
When I die, please remember me as a bonewheel skeleton. No particular one. Whichever skiddy idiot most recently makes you laugh in any Dark Souls game, that one’s me. Beyond that, please don’t remember me at all. Bonewheels win. But what do you think, reader dear?
