by Max Coombes
Published April 2025
Download full pdf of article here.
Abstract
In this paper I discuss the relationship between downloadable content (DLC) and base games in producing lack and fantasy, using Shadow of the Erdtree (2024) as an example of a text that retroactively marks the base game (Elden Ring [2022]) as “lacking.” Extant research on DLCs varies as to whether they are exploitative or novel expressions of transmedia storytelling. Scholars, players, and developers, however, tend to agree that DLC “extends the life” (Payne, 2018, p. 71; Genovesi, 2018, p. 1; Tyni and Sotamaa, 2011, p. 311; Lizardi, 2012, p. 34) of a text through presenting itself as a new textual horizon. This article explores how this attempt to extend life figures diegetically and experientially in the relationship between the DLC and original text. I turn to psychoanalysis, in particular Benjamin Nicoll’s (2023) writing on videogames as generators of lack. Through this I read SotE through Julia Kristeva’s (2024) poetics of melancholia to account for how lack and desire manifest in the play experience. I find that SotE attempts to staunch the play of desire by presenting itself as a textual dead end or caesura. This suggests that videogames can draw attention to players’ drive to impossible fantasy, not to absolve them of desire, but to allow them to play with the anguish of being unable to overcome it.
Keywords: Elden Ring, Shadow of the Erdtree, DLC, psychoanalysis, Kristeva, desire, melancholia
Introduction
I feel apprehension before touching the desiccated hand of Miquella, the demigod who lies dead in Elden Ring (FromSoftware, 2022) and whose corpse works as a portal to Shadow of the Erdtree (FromSoftware, 2024)’s downloadable content (DLC), the Land of Shadow. It’s not so much the idea of touching the corpse — in Elden Ring we are ourselves undead — but about crossing the threshold between two worlds, and finding a world within a world. There is something strange about this, as having to decisively move into a world-within-a-world resembles the structure of fantasy. Through the use of this portal, or threshold, it is as though the base game has become what John Clute in his Encyclopedia of Fantasy (1999) calls a “frame world” (p. 365), with the DLC the fantastical “secondary world” (p. 847). There are two concurrent, and related, mechanisms at play here. Fantasy, as Rosemary Jackson (2005) reminds us in her psychoanalytic survey of the genre, is a literature of desire. It induces in the reader a longing for something they can’t immediately identify (1). Moreover, the DLC is a secondary world that retroactively marks the base game as incomplete and lacking. It restores desire, promising a world beyond the original text that may contain some fantastical missing thing. The apprehension felt at the threshold of Miquella’s hand is both diegetic and material: How does the game foster desire for what is beyond? What is missing demands recovery, and what is its relationship to play? I argue that SotE confronts the player with precisely the kind of longing that generates fantasy while subjecting them to an exhaustion that undermines, and critically comments on, DLC as the extension of a videogame.
I explore this through a textual analysis of SotE — a game that at once fosters the sense of fantastical discovery just over the horizon and confronts the player with a vast emptiness wherever they go. This ambivalence affords players the opportunity to be aware of both their desire and the game’s inability to relieve the lack driving that desire. Because the game comments on the failure of DLCs to extend the life of a videogame, or its text, I will first turn to literature on DLCs and how they are positioned in relation to their players and base games. A recurring claim is that DLCs are “life-giving,” (Payne, 2018, p. 71; Genovesi, 2018, p. 1; Tyni and Sotamaa, 2011, p. 311; Lizardi, 2012, p. 34). Payne insists that in DLCs that expand the world of the base game, this life-giving capacity is achieved through narrative detours and a renewed sense of discovery (p. 72). I then map these ideas onto their psychoanalytic and literary counterparts, as these ideas regularly appear in critical studies on fantasy literature and psychoanalysis. Discussing the industrial and commercial themes related to DLCs through the framework of fantasy allows us to better understand the pleasures of and desire for these peripheral texts, while discussing fantasy literature through the framework of psychoanalysis introduces lack as a conceptual category along with the desire motivating it. By bringing these concerns in-line with one another I am able to discuss how SotE, as a fantastical supplement to the Elden Ring base game, asks us to reflect on fantasy, DLCs, and lack through play.
Fantasy, Commerce, and the Missing Thing
In Elden Ring the player is tasked with defeating adversaries and restoring the balance of the fallen world, the Lands Between, to become the Elden Lord. According to the game’s story, the Elden Lord works as consort to Queen Marika the Eternal, reigning god of the Lands Between; Marika resides in the Erdtree, a gigantic golden tree that represents the Golden Order, a belief system established by Marika to interpret the wishes of the Greater Will, a mysterious entity that sits outside of time and space. Throughout the game, the player will see golden markers, known as the Guidance of Grace, telling them where to go in order to progress through the game. Diegetically, these markers are understood to be blessings of the Erdtree, as followers of the Golden Order are invested in the player becoming Elden Lord and restoring Marika’s reign, and the player’s decision to either become Elden Lord or follow a different path marks the end of the game. The events of the Land of Shadow, however, as Elden Ring’s DLC, are concurrent with those of the base game. Once connected to the Lands Between, the Land of Shadow has since been veiled, or hidden, by Marika. Meanwhile, Marika’s son, Miquella, once an adherent of the Golden Order but now disillusioned with its teachings, has travelled to the Land of Shadow to find the Gate of Divinity and become a god. In short, while Elden Ring establishes a world of violent entropy, SotE stands for revelation, that of a world cut off from the one the player has already experienced.
In this SotE embodies and confronts the player with their own desire for additional content. Existing game studies scholarship addressing the purpose and function of DLC helps to explain this desire. DLC broadly takes the form of content costing less than the base game and “designed to enhance a game text to which a user already has access” (Lizardi, 2012, p. 35). If the idea of enhancing a game text appears vague, that’s because it is. Matthew Thomas Payne (2018), for instance, argues that between serially released games, loot boxes, maps, user-generated content, and patches, the idea no longer holds consistent meaning (p. 71). SotE fits the characterisation of what Matteo Genovesi (2018) calls “extensive” DLC, as it offers an original map, the Land of Shadow, populated with new characters, gear, mechanics, and narrative insights into Elden Ring‘s lore. Commentary on the industrial patterns driving DLCs tends toward the utopian or apocalyptic, with little in between (Napoli, 2016, p. 341). Either they emerge naturally, as a byproduct of digital distribution and convergence culture (Payne, p. 71), or haphazardly amidst industrial shifts (Nieborg, 2014, p. 55). Alternatively, DLC may result from cynical capitalizations on the promises of “transmedia storytelling,” offering “a perpetual cycle of commodification” (Lizardi, 2012, p. 35) as well as what Proffitt et al. (2007) describe as a “commodified intertextual flow” dictated by “narratively necessary purchases” (p. 239).
Irrespective of the understanding of DLCs as either the byproduct of industrial cynicism or textual imagination, DLCs are thought to extend the life of a videogame text (Payne, 2018, p. 71; Genovesi, 2018, p. 1; Tyni and Sotamaa, 2011, p. 311; Lizardi, 2012, p. 34) through combating the sense of that text’s depletion (Genovesi, 2018 , p. 3). That is, a text considered depleted may be given new life. Payne argues that, in order to accomplish this, story-based DLCs typically “sacrific(e) narrative tightness, promot(ing) a greater sense of serendipity and discovery—the joy of stumbling upon an emergent happening that can be engaged or ignored” (p. 72). He also encourages us to read the abundance of DLCs, not as something that happens to players as a consequence of industrial cynicism (p. 71), but as a reflection of their desires. That is, players are willing to pass over narrative organisation for detours promising discovery, a virtual world’s coherence for fragments, and a sense of textual closure for an indefinite work-in-progress. Whether the product of industrial cynicism, player demands, or novel storytelling opportunities, the DLC reveals the original, base text to have been lacking all along. It then offers itself as the solution to this lack, stoking player desire to recover something which is lost through access to a world beyond. This other world elides the narrative and telic structures of the original text, marking itself as a return to the innocence of discovery. Framed as a fantasy both within and beyond the base game, it is one that now appears dreadfully bereft.
According to Payne, desire for DLC cannot be unilaterally inflicted on players but must, in part, reflect existing cultural and subjective motivators. I turn to psychoanalysis here to clarify the desiring mechanism that underpins the logic of the DLC. Benjamin Nicoll (2023) claims that part of the pleasure of videogame texts is the way they reveal, rather than produce, an ontological lack in the playing subject. According to Nicoll, any “historicist” picture of desire “takes the unidirectionality of cause and effect as a given,” making it “difficult to conceive of a pleasure associated with videogame play that is not somehow indexical of, or caused by, external historical and cultural forces” (p. 99). He argues that the cause of desire is radically “extimate,” or “a cause that is at once both intimate and uncannily exterior to the subject” (p. 99). Drawing on Jacques Lacan, Nicoll claims this cause is the subject’s discovery of language and, in turn, their entry into the signifying order. Because the signifying order is incomplete, one’s subjectivity is ultimately constituted by an ontological deficit that “gives birth to the uncanny feeling that they have lost something that once made them whole” (p. 107). In Lacanian thought this is the objet petit a, an object whose very unattainability generates desire. The videogame text cannot itself generate desire in a player, but it can commandeer the player’s already existing sense that they have lost something. DLC thus exists in relation to the failure of the original text to make the player whole, and it insists that the unattainable is now closer than ever — on the other side of a portal.
In attending to desire, DLC can be read as a text that routes industrial, artistic, and subjective drivers toward the evocation of a lost something. In what follows I turn to SotE as a text that gives shape to, and forces players to dwell in, the lack that generates desire for a kind of ludo-spatial objet petit a. First, I examine the portal itself along with the relationship between frame and secondary worlds, according to Farah Mendlesohn (2008) and Clute. I develop their claims that fantasy worlds tend toward entropy, while portals hint at the possibility of restoration, mapping them onto the relationship between base games and DLCs through the incorporation of player desire. Following this, I conduct a textual analysis of the Land of Shadow, SotE‘s virtual landscape. I initially find that it offers a melancholic intimacy, owing to its proximity to the base game, in effect becoming a nesting “miniature.” Susan Stewart’s (1993) discussion of the intimacy of miniatures is useful here. As my analysis expands outward, I argue that our sense of the world’s scale diminishes the more we move through it. This is significant, as the DLC as a secondary world is supposed to expand and fill in original text. In this case, however, it is very much depleted. In order to understand this depletion I return to Nicoll’s writing on the circularity of the player death drive, finding that SotE confronts the player with a dead end rather than a satisfying call to begin anew. Finally, in claiming that there is a depressive pleasure to the text, I use Julia Kristeva’s (2024) writing on melancholia to argue that the very emptiness of SotE is important in having players recognise, and consciously play with, their own lack.
Portals, the Vehicle of Desire
Standing before the portal, on the Elden Ring side, I know that when I touch Miquella’s hand I will cross the threshold that takes me to the Land of Shadow. There is something about such a threshold that elicits apprehension. It is an apprehension that stems from the childlike hope that there is something beyond. Something missing. To activate the portal is to retroactively mark the existing text as lacking and the fantastical beyond as a site of wholeness. Mendlsohn (2008) writes that, in a work of “immersive fantasy,” the reader is assumed to be part of the world (p. xx). The fantasy effects a “cognitive estrangement” in the reader, then negates it: the immersive effect is so mimetically convincing that the reader is persuaded “to forget the mediation of language” and believe the fantasy entirely (p. 59). We can take Elden Ring as such an immersive fantasy. But, Mendelsohn goes on, the introduction of thresholds within the fantasy also introduces the “dividing line between the real and the not-real” (p. 61). Suddenly, the immersive fantasy is not total. With the portal, “[t]he vision is of elsewhere; it presumes that the frame world (our world) is already thinned, and provides the moment of rupture in which elsewhere becomes here” (p. 19). A hierarchy is established in the text between the “frame world,” here,and the “secondary world,” beyond. All at once, the frame world (our world) appears lacking and the secondary world capable of making it whole. The introduction of another world has the effect of alienating us from this one.
Elden Ring prepares the player for this alienation, and the hope of another world, through confronting them with the lack immanent to fantasy. Resurrected into a fallen fantasy world and tasked with making themselves Elden Lord, the player-character, guided by the blessing of the Erdtree and the principles of the Golden Order, must restore that which has been lost. This follows what Clute calls fantasy’s tendency toward “fables of recovery,” in which the reader encounters a diminished world and becomes invested in it through the hope of restoration (p. 942). Integral to the promise of recovery is a mourning here and now for the “higher and more intense reality” of the past (p. 942). By the end of Elden Ring, however, the possibility of restoring anything, and accessing that glorious past, is very much in doubt. To become Elden Lord is to see our playthrough become one in an infinite set of repetitions of a single entropic world system, and the text ends on the revelation of its own depleted, undead status. As Mendlesohn notes, “immersive fantasies” are overwhelmingly concerned with describing cosmic entropy (p. 61), which Clute explains is “because in an immersive fantasy, what is storyable is not the discovery of the world (in which we are immersed) but its loss” (as cited in Mendlesohn, 2008, p. 61). With ‘discovery’ taken care of, we can only learn of the fantasy through its failure. The introduction of the portal then sees the re-introduction of ‘discovery,’ and a switch from mourning the past to the hope of recovering what was lost elsewhere. Elden Ring and its DLC thus collude to reinforce the exhaustion of the original text and the possibility of wholeness in the beyond.
Such framing, as I have said, elicits apprehension. The threshold of the text marks the point in which one’s childlike belief in a beyond, formerly surmounted, threatens to return. There is of course no fantastical world beyond, whether in Elden Ring or SotE, however much this fantasy endures in videogames. Brendan Keogh (2018), for instance, shows how “spatial conceptions of digitality” lend themselves to virtual/real dualism, where the virtual exists in opposition to the real (p. 72). In reality, he argues, we respond to the sensory outputs of the screen and controller, incorporate them into our own bodies, and finally respond through bodily action, forming a virtual/real cybernetic feedback loop (p. 34). The world of the text is not elsewhere, but is manifested in play in the here-and-now. There is still an element of the fantastic in Keogh’s materialist account, however, when he cites William Gibson’s dualist “cyberspace”: “the virtual world is a consensual hallucination that the player must help to construct” (p. 47). Alfie Bown (2017) takes this a step further, writing that “[t]he videogame is not a text to be read but a dream to be dreamt” (p. 61), one requiring a “temporary psychoanalytic disavowal” (p. 107) in which the player is both embodied in the text and cognitively aware of its illusion. With a portal, the original text is transformed into a frame world that includes ours and the DLC a secondary world of dreaming. Critical, material awareness is suspended, re-invoking the childlike dream of a fantastical realm elsewhere. That which is beyond, the appropriately named Land of Shadow, is privileged as a site of fantasy within the entropic fantasy of the Lands Between. Here, fantasy’s generic fable of recovery is tied to the industrial, cultural, subjective desire for recovery in the pursuit and production of additional, linked content.
The Miniature and the Border
Having touched the desiccated hand of Miquella, I’m taken to the Land of Shadow where I awaken in a cave. Outside the cave, I find myself in long grass, lusher than anywhere in the Lands Between, tumbling into a landscape that slopes down toward a basin branching out through old ridges, each revealing forests, cliffs, gaping chasms, and beaches. The contrast between the two worlds could not be more pronounced. Miquella’s corpse, our portal, lies cocooned in Mohgwyn Palace, a crumbling mausoleum swarming with deranged worshippers, the grounds of which extend from the woods through red lakes fed by the bloody waterfalls above. It’s a relatively small area, but one filled with awful life. Giant, diseased birds, dogs, and malformed humanoid creatures all appear to thrive here. What is so striking about Mohgwyn Palace is this celebration of perpetual mutation, where life continually springs from lowly, bloody death. Conversely, what is so striking about the Land of Shadow is its subdued desolation. Bodies hang from trees in the distance, with not even a breeze to move them; tracks have been worn into the soil through use, except there’s hardly anything here to have done that.
Aside from the relative dearth of terrestrial activity, the difference in the sky in the Land of Shadow is pronounced. The clouds are so vivid they curdle, seeming to press down against the landscape but stopping short of the rigid forms we could touch. Reds and purples churn and flash behind the clouds and into the dark. The expressionistic fury of these skies affects the atmosphere here on the ground, but it also makes us aware that we are down here, where life remains withdrawn, at a distance. In the Lands Between most lines of sight lead back to the Erdtree, shedding the leaves of golden light we’re told signify life eternal. Here everything looks to the Scadutree, not straight and golden like the Erdtree, but gnarled; not raining light, but holding up a veil of shadows. Hidden by Queen Marika the Eternal, the Land of Shadow now bears an ambiguous relationship to the Lands Between. One does not need to follow the narrative closely to understand what SotE communicates through feeling. Large swathes of light, starting at the top of the Scadutree, curve out the closer they get to the stratosphere. Comforting, but also bereft, as though to remind us that we are now in a veiled beyond, far from the activity of the original text.
The Land of Shadow is vast, yet this insistence on its adjacency to the frame world turns it into a miniature. I here turn to Stewart’s writing on the dual comfort and sadness elicited by the world-miniature. According to Stewart:
In its tableaulike form, the miniature is a world of arrested time; its stillness emphasizes the activity that is outside its borders. And this effect is reciprocal, for once we attend to the miniature world, the outside world stops and is lost to us. In this it resembles other fantasy structures: the return from Oz, or Narnia, or even sleep (p. 67)
Stewart is not referring to videogames, of course, but her language is apt, mirroring as it does Payne’s observation that the ideal DLC upends narrative in pursuit of the joy of discovery. Diegetically, SotE is a place free from the base game’s narrative drive. It formally enacts the fantasy of recovery through situating itself as a beyond that, nevertheless, is to be found within a frame text. Experientially, the Land of Shadow appears arrested and still, while the world outside of it, the Lands Between, is lost to us for as long as we are here. Stewart argues that the miniature exists outside of historical time; that is, it is valuable because it suspends public time for interiority and the “infinite time of reverie” (p. 65). Truly, the Land of Shadow is a place conducive to daydreaming — it evokes places we’ve been and things we’ve seen while stripping them of their specificity, leaving only a vague longing. For as difficult, and as sorrowful, as wandering in it can be, the landscape is by its very nature sheltered. We know that, back in the original text, warring factions are still competing over what will become of the Lands Between. Players familiar with the entirety of Elden Ring understand that nothing in the DLC will affect that other world at the lived, historical level. Whether we choose to enter the Land of Shadow or ignore it, reach its ending or leave it unfinished, we understand that the possibilities presented to us within SotE are excluded from the future. This is strictly a detour, which for Stewart “stands in tension with narrative closure” (p. 30); its borders demarcate the activity of the original text while affirming the DLC’s status as sheltered, or interior. These borders, privileging the DLC as a site of reverie, also make it a distinctly eerie place to inhabit. Unable to give life to the original text, it tells the player that for as long as they’re here the flow of time will be stopped.
Tarnished, Disinherited
I have claimed that the DLC offers a detour in which the joy of discovery, lost in the original text after completing the game, is restored. In reality, SotE is haunted by the possibility of discovery as well as the failure of joy. Everything in the Land of Shadow seems to tell us to keep moving, to point us to new vistas, because the one we’ve arrived at is invariably found to be empty. This is interesting, as what should be life-giving is instead bereft and the expected joy of discovery is continually deferred. In its deprivation, though, there is a strange pleasure to SotE. It is a pleasure that cannot be explained by the arrival of novelty, as previously described with regard to DLCs, but through a depressive affect that undermines the text’s own justification as life-giving project. In order to understand the pleasures of SotE as a text, and to better grasp the strategies deployed by DLCs to stir player desire, we must then reevaluate joy as such while pushing for an understanding of the word that includes its ostensible opposite: sadness.
In SotE I regularly visit a certain cove along the Cerulean Coast. It lies at the foot of a rugged peninsula and is bridged by a sandbar that players can cross. Like all of the Land of Shadow, it is a thing of aching beauty. Beaches in the Lands Between tend to be unspectacular. The seaside ruins in Limgrave, for example, lie at the bottom of an unscalable cliff that exposes you to the elements with no hope of shelter; the beach in Weeping Peninsula, on the other hand, is the result of flat ground disappearing into the water, as though the land itself has given up. It’s grey, with debris from ships wrecked in its dreary haze. Meanwhile, the cove feels like a place in its own right. Tidal, shallow water pulls from the ocean across the sandbar and trough before disappearing into sand among the stones and driftwood. Shelves of pine trees shelter the cove, their blue shadows stretching until the water glows sunset pink, while, far across it in the distance, jagged rock formations only underscore the softness of what is immediately before us. The beauty of the scene almost distracts me from the fact that there is nothing to do here. No difficult enemy groups demand my attention; there are no details to be pored over in the cliffside graveyard or in the ruins; there are no side quests or narrative reasons to stay. With dispiriting ease I cross the sandbar and ascend the other side of the cove, to where the spectacular Finger Ruins of Rhia are found hundreds of feet below. This site is a crater filled with colossal, curling fingers each of which looks oily, like that of a bog body (corpses that, preserved in peat bogs, have retained their skin and internal organs). Between each runs barchanoid ridges of black sand dunes mimicking the oily contours of a fingerprint. Rain sweeps down off the cliffs from above in sheets, directing our eyes to the chasm below. Though we are high up, the site grows higher still, as above the cliffs lies a ragged mountain range, with the faint outline of a rope bridge between two peaks. Exploring this area, I choose to descend into the crater, having been instructed to sound a bell somewhere in the ruins. The mummified fingers are as tall as buildings. I strike the bell — and that is all. The sole reason for being here has been depleted.
If aching, beautiful emptiness is a defining characteristic of the Land of Shadow, so, too, is our realisation that every detour only seems to produce greater longing. If SotE is a pleasurable text, then its pleasure lies, paradoxically, in subjecting oneself to a world of such disheartening emptiness. Here I turn to Kristeva’s writing on longing and melancholia to better understand this strange joy. Throughout her book, Kristeva orbits the figure of the black sun, as found in Gérard de Nerval’s poem El Desdichado (“The Disinherited”). To the speaker, bereft of happiness, the world, however beautiful, appears to have been annexed by le soleil noir. Kristeva asks, “[w]here does this black sun come from? Out of what eerie galaxy do its invisible, lethargic rays reach me” (p. 1); and the answer, as with Nicoll earlier, is our mourning for the lost object particular to every subject: “that Thing— necessarily lost so that this ‘subject,’ separated from the ‘object,’ might become a speaking being” (p. 110). As before, the sense of something lost leads us to objects of desire incapable of satisfying us, for the Thing “does not lend itself to signification” (p. 9) but instead interrupts “desiring metonymy, just as it prevents working out the loss within the psyche” (p. 10). As Tarnished, players are born disinherited: we can see the black sun in the far distance, but we can never feel its warmth. The Land of Shadow imagines exactly this lack. Beckoning us, it unfolds with splendorous beauty and, at the same time, categorically refuses to provide any warmth, meaning, or reason for our being here.
What we have here is not, strictly speaking, what Nicoll calls the “unconscious” drive to fail (p. 100). Playing SotE does not reveal “the traumatic lack that retroactively alienates the player from their conscious wish for pleasure or mastery” in the videogame (p. 100). The objective in SotE, like with Stewart for the miniature, is to consciously dwell within this lack, to become intimate with it, and to embrace one’s disinheritance. Kristeva positions melancholic longing for the absent Thing, not as the painful failure to fill a sense of loss, but as an end in its own right. Thus “sadness is really the sole object; more precisely it is a substitute object they become attached to, an object they tame and cherish for lack of another” (p. 9). For Kristeva, melancholic individuals “cannot endure Eros”; instead, they become “Messengers of Thanatos” who actively “witness [and are] accomplices of the signifier’s flimsiness, the living being’s precariousness (p. 15). By transforming sadness itself into the object of desire, the melancholic is able to anticipate and ultimately enjoy the failure of every object to provide fulfillment. In short, the depressive affect elicited by incomplete texts like SotE allows players to pretend they are cocreators of that anguish at the text’s core and that of our being. If SotE fails as the development of Elden Ring into some life-giving, fantastical beyond, paradoxically it succeeds on precisely the same basis: the failure of its text to afford the player a sense of libidinal wholeness. The DLC, drawing out the player’s sense of textual lack as they search for plenitude, allows them to derive pleasure from the very disappointment incurred in doing so.
Poacher’s Pride
While so far I have positioned SotE as a detour, a spatiotemporality kept separate from the narrative impetus of the base game, I now turn to the telic drivers of SotE in order to analyse how the DLC asks us to bear witness to the collapse of symbolic order and the precarity of life. The player is tasked with finding Miquella, who has come to the Land of Shadow to proceed through the Gate of Divinity and achieve godhood. Should Miquella become a god, he will bring about the Age of Compassion. Once again, this mirrors the portal fantasy structure, which in turn mirrors the DLC’s relationship to the base game: the entropic world of Elden Ring is afforded a vision of restoration via the secondary fantasy of SotE. Except, given the DLC’s status as a miniature, as a text which occurs prior to the base game’s conclusion, the player knows ahead of time that Miquella fails. Arrested in time, the DLC stands for the original text’s inability to find meaningful closure and, reciprocally, the failure of SotE to influence the primary text which shelters it. This in turn makes following the DLC to its own conclusion an ambivalent affair.
Ultimately, fulfilling SotE‘s textual objectives means ensuring the hierarchy of the base game to the DLC is not cross-contaminated. Should the DLC influence the original text in any way, this would seem to negate the portal structure as such, marking the border between entropy and the hope implicit in that which lies beyond. SotE presents the rejection of Eros, and the perpetuation of longing, as a rejection of Miquella’s Age of Compassion. In attending to the DLC’s narrative, we, too, become the active agents of Thanatos rather than its passive witnesses. Kristeva notes that, in classical psychoanalysis, depression and mourning actually conceal an aggression toward the lost object, “thus revealing the ambivalence of the depressed person with respect to the object of mourning” (p. 8). This for Kristeva involves “a whole complex dialectic of idealization and devalorization of self and other” (p. 8): Miquella, the idealised Other, is revealed to be fraudulent and must therefore be destroyed, or consumed. The fantasy of either becoming or eliminating the exceptional Other is a key concern in Nicoll’s reading of videogames via Lacan. In our lack we invent an exceptional Other whose boundless joy also limits our own (p. 105). The subject is faced with either becoming or eliminating the exception; in either scenario, however, victory results in lack as well as the revelation that the Other never really existed (p. 106). As Nicoll argues, “all videogames predicated on restoring lost satisfaction through the promise of becoming exceptional appeal to this fundamental fantasy” (p. 105–106); but the fact that the Other is at last illusory “alienates the player from the underlying logic of their enjoyment” — their unconscious desire to fail (p. 111). For Kristeva, we needn’t understand this process, the desire to become exceptional or the guilt following its elimination, as one of aggression. The melancholic player identifies neither with the Other nor its executioner, but rather with the failure of the exception. What we identify with, in other words, is Miquella’s failure.
This identification with failure itself can be traced to SotE‘s basic narrative structure, wherein one follows in the footsteps of Miquella on a doomed pilgrimage. In Elden Ring, the player’s map of the Lands Between includes, as a UI element, their most recently discovered Guidance of Grace, that trail of golden light directing them on their quest to become the (libidinally exceptional) Elden Lord. In the Land of Shadow, however, there are no glowing markers. No deity tells us where to go. Instead, we wander the land, looking for crosses left behind by Miquella. At each cross we encounter fellow pilgrims also looking for the would-be god. They tell us that Miquella has abandoned some part of his flesh in preparation for godhood. With each cross we discover, the narrative of Miquella’s failed ascension is gradually revealed. Mapping the iconography of a cross to the progression structure of the game was no accident. Together, there are thirteen crosses — one short of the fourteen Stations that make up Christ’s Passion, which Miquella’s journey clearly imitates. The missing cross, of course, would be the fourteenth: Christ is laid in the tomb. Locating Miquella, which means “succeeding” in SotE and hence eliminating the exceptional Other, is a decidedly anticlimactic affair. We are given no particular reason for stopping Miquella other than fulfilling the Golden Order’s dubious mission; and, even if we were motivated by some personal objection to Miquella’s mission, we know his failure remains captured within the Land of Shadow, where it has no chance of transgressing the DLC’s border back to the base game.
There are any number of ways to understand the thirteen crosses that form the primary path of SotE. One might be that Miquella’s pilgrimage simply falls short of Christ’s — another sign of his failure. In fact, there is a fourteenth cross, and we are there to enact the events of the final station. At the Gate of Divinity, its two columns forming a tau cross in the sky, the player finds and kills Miquella (in the form of Radahn, Miquella’s consort). Finally, he is laid to rest. In this interpretation, the Land of Shadow itself acts as his tomb; a caesura, it forms the point at which the world falls still, emptied of time and meaning. Indeed, this reflects the cyclical gameplay of SotE, where every scene of divine beauty empties itself before us, moving the Thing further and further into the distance until we accept it will never arrive. Kristeva insists that we as subjects identify with Christ’s martyrdom, writing that Christianity “set [the rupture of coming into being] at the very heart of the absolute subject—Christ; because it represented it as a Passion that was the solidary lining of his Resurrection, his glory, and his eternity, it brought to consciousness the essential dramas that are internal to the becoming of each and every subject” (p. 100). Addressing Hans Holbein the Younger’s painting The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb (1520–1522) in detail, Kristeva describes how the artist empties the Passion of its typical beatific glory and promise of eternity; instead, it provides “the subject with an echo of its unbearable moments when meaning was lost, when the meaning of life was lost” (p. 101). Likewise, what is the lack experienced by players in the Land of Shadow if not “the nonrepresentable conceived of as the dissipation of means of representation on the threshold of their extinction in death” (p. 92)? For Kristeva, Holbein’s Christ endures as a caesura, no longer in pain but without the hope of resurrection. As viewers, we intuitively identify with a scene in which the promised Thing, paradise, has failed to appear; following this sorrow, Kristeva explains, we ourselves stand in for the absent mourners in Holbein’s work. The SotE player fulfills this same obligation through witnessing the failure of Miquella before finally choosing to remain in the stalled Land of Shadows, a beyond which can neither show us paradise nor, on the other side, “resurrect” Elden Ring’s depleted text.
Endings as Caesura
No one comes to visit. Except you.
—Moore, Shadow of the Erdtree
With Miquella gone I wander this empty landscape now tomb, veiled from the watchful activity of the world outside. Most of the pilgrims encountered along the way are now dead. Departing from this sombre place, I return to the Lands Between, meet would-be Lords, carry out interfactional subterfuge, weigh up whether death cults like the Chaos Followers are wanting oblivion or a total reset. But then I once again seek out the pleasures of the detour. Standing again before Miquella’s hand, I turn my back on the original text’s narrative teleology and trigger the portal to the veiled miniature of the Land of Shadow. Upon returning, I recognise the profound emptiness of the landscape for what it always was: an arrested stillness incapable of delivering on anything other than the vague, depressive affect that haunts the continually deferred promise of that which lies beyond.
As discussed with respect to frame worlds and nesting, secondary worlds, Elden Ring relays its text to us through entropy, while our objective to return the world to order is in fact a mask for a material and cosmological death drive. The game is unable to render an ordered future for us — it can only repeat the cycle with every playthrough. The player derives pleasure from this, as Nicoll explains, because in enjoying without exception they “remain faithful to the unconscious drive to circle but never fill one’s lack” (p. 100). But Shadow of the Erdtree doesn’t begin or end so easily. Making it to the DLC is a very involved and time-consuming process, and finishing the DLC doesn’t, as it does in the base game, automatically begin a new cycle in the form of starting a new character or continuing into New Game Plus. SotE ends in caesura, that of a text without beginning, end, or even cyclicity. Instead of joyous repetition there is only a lingering emptiness. For Kristeva this is textual nonrepresentation, “the hiatus, blank, or spacing that constitutes death for the unconscious” (p. 20). SotE’s non-ending confronts us with a textual death in which imagination and reality, player and text, threaten to part.
In their travels through a text that wishes to disappear, I notice that one of Miquella’s followers in particular is still here. Speaking with Moore, a gentle knight, he laments, “No one comes to visit. Except you.” It’s as though we have become the custodian of this place, the sole witness to Miquella’s failure and the only ones who can keep Moore company. Stewart insists that such pathos naturally accompanies the miniature, as it “holds the reader in suspension, or annoyance, for it presents the possibility of never getting back, of remaining forever within the detour” (p. 30). This is not necessarily a problem for SotE players, but Moore is an eerie reminder of how the DLC’s suspended temporality contrasts with the temporal flux of the outer world of the base game. When Stewart goes on to describe how the “observer of the fairies must ‘wake up’ at the conclusion of his or her encounter with these animated miniatures” (p. 113), I’m reminded of Alfie Bown’s (2017) discussion of The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening (1993). In that game, the inhabitants of the world recognise it is actually a dream, and they beg the player not to proceed with their quest as doing so will cause the dream to end. In hindsight, SotE‘s pilgrims seem to demonstrate the same awareness and protectiveness of their world as a miniature. Brown sees game-playing as itself a form of dreaming (p. 61), given the interdependence of reality and the virtual. The pathos of textual exhaustion in a videogame, of realizing that there is no beyond to be found, is thus the same as Stewart’s “waking up” in the miniature.
Why are we here in the Land of Shadow, and why do we return again and again in search of its profound emptiness? The revelation of textual exhaustion would seem to be implicit in any game that promises discovery. According to Daniel Vella (2015), players are drawn to make sense of and ultimately master games, and this desire is thwarted by developers who suffuse the texts of their games with a sense of ludic, or even cosmic, mystery. The drive to mastery becomes an issue for players and developers alike, however, as with it inevitably comes disenchantment: “[w]hat is initially encountered as a boundless spatial extension harbouring a dizzying range of possibilities is reduced into a network of locations, paths and possibilities for action, such that it can, eventually, be easily grasped as a bounded, orderly cosmos” (Conclusions section). According to Vella, FromSoftware games attempt to convey a “ludic sublime,” where the game system and its textual cosmos deliberately bewilder the player in order to keep the pathos of achieving mastery at bay (The limitations of perception and the ludic sublime section). In other words, what players go in search of is a mystery that invariably recedes, holding out hope for as long as they choose to remain with the text.
The aching beauty of the Land of Shadow presents us with the sense that the ludic sublime has already been evacuated, leaving a longing for the sublime, for discovery and what lies beyond. But under the influence of the black sun, we’re aware that such longing can only proceed along the dissatisfying path cut by the emptiness of the libidinal Thing. As Stewart reminds us, “[t]he place of origin must remain unavailable in order for desire to be generated” (p. 151): without the Thing there is no desire. Mirroring Kristeva’s model of the melancholic who tries to bypass the Thing, longing for sadness itself, Stewart offers a definition of nostalgia as “the desire for desire” (p. 23). Melancholic nostalgia, or the longing for longing, are all present in fantasy, as William Gray (2008) suggests in his study of C. S. Lewis:
fairy land arouses a longing for he knows not what. It stirs and troubles him … with the dim sense of something beyond his reach … [T]he boy reading the fairy-tale desires and is happy in the very fact of desiring (as cited in Gray, p. 74)
For Lewis, desiring itself is both important and contingent on its not being satisfied. Fantasy works as the ideal vehicle for desire because it can invoke in the reader a longing for something that is both familiar and unknown, present but always out of reach. Longing is also produced by the failure of the very desire to close longing’s gap. Where there is fantasy, we are in the realm of the Thing and the anguish of a lost paradise. Clute writes of Lewis’ preoccupation with sehnsucht — desire for that which we never experienced (p. 849). For Lewis the object of this longing must be the Christian Heaven (p. 849), whereas for Kristeva it is the imaginary wholeness that precedes subjecthood. Videogames offer a similarly paradoxical experience of longing after that which remains forever beyond one’s reach while relishing in the knowledge of its profound lack. The appeal lies in this detour, as Kristeva writes: “[k]nowingly disinherited of the Thing, the depressed person wanders in pursuit of continuously disappointing adventures and loves; or else retreats, disconsolate and aphasic, alone with the unnamed Thing” (p. 9–10). With Miquella gone and the land as disappointingly bereft as the day we arrived, we find ourselves alone in a miniature and dissatisfied with the unnamed Thing.
Conclusions
Fantasy literature and game-playing generally both depend on thwarted desire, dramatising our longing for a kind of narrative objet petit a, and the masochistic pleasure which derives from its failure to arrive. Elden Ring and its DLC, Shadow of the Erdtree, pair these generic and material tendencies to foreground the lack inherent in any text as well as the failed hope of restoration in whatever DLCs and sequels may arrive in the future. SotE‘s depressive emptiness suggests that the typical understanding of DLC as something that will revive an exhausted, original text, only repeats the lack which drives both play and the creation of texts, however sprawling these secondary texts may initially appear to us. Having demonstrated the emptiness of its own world, SotE even refuses to direct the player to a paradise elsewhere — another installment, another expansion, another meticulously detailed location or world beyond its borders. In this way, SotE discloses to us something peculiar about fantasy and play: not only Nicoll’s unconscious drive to fail, but the player’s conscious drive to witness the melancholy of textual depletion. It is a text marked by the cyclical experience of disappointment, confronting players with a threshold beyond which no new representation can arise. This challenges the notion of DLC as life-giving, of players’ desire for bigger and better worlds, and the possibility of joy free from lack. Most importantly, SotE presents us with a stage on which to play with an experience of symbolic collapse which comes tethered to subjectivity.
In case it appears that I am valourising suffering, I want to finally acknowledge the dangers that Freud (1957) saw in what he called the melancholic’s “pathological disposition” (p. 243). Freud was careful to distinguish melancholia from mourning, which is directed at a loved person, thing, or idea that no longer exists (p. 244). Because mourning is directed at an actual object, it is eventually overcome and the subject is freed from their attachment (p. 245). Melancholia, on the other hand, is directed toward that which cannot be consciously perceived and, therefore, cannot be overcome (p. 243). “The complex of melancholia,” Freud writes, “behaves like an open wound, drawing to itself cathectic energies [. . .] from all directions, and emptying the ego until it is totally impoverished” (p. 253). This leads to a regressive narcissism to identify with the lost object (p. 253) and the propensity to enact sadistic revenge on loved ones (p. 251). Separating mourning from melancholia might not be so easy, however. Sanja Bahun (2014) notes that, however much the Freud of the 1910s might have characterised himself as a “successful mourner,” somebody willing to accept transience and the experience of life after loss, by the 1920s the psychoanalyst had confessed of his inability to move on from grief: “actually, this is how it should be. It is the only way of perpetuating that love which we do not want to relinquish” (as cited in Bahun, 2014, p. 27-28). This has bears an obvious resemblance to SotE’s continual deferment and pathetic lack. In one sense, the DLC presents itself as an object through which we might direct our unconscious mourning and in its depleted state eventually asks that we relinquish it. This serves a dual role: resolving pathological mourning in the individual and pathologising the pop-cultural expectation that beloved media franchises never die (Lizardi 2017). In another sense, this is simply a matter of signifying the unnameable. The depletion of a text exteriorises the lack that underpins and survives the object of fantasy. It asks that we play with this lack, now given shape by the text.
A text which encourages the subject to play with melancholia also curtails the associated inertia and regressive narcissism. It allows the player to reflexively experience, and give expressive shape to, the primitive wound that marks us all as subjects (Kristeva, p. 10). The text’s mediation of our means and desire to communicate this lack is key here. Bahun notes that Freud appears troubled by the “insistent communicativeness” of the melancholic, for the individual seems unable to find the right words to adequately signify their affliction. She points out that such communicativeness puts us in the realm of the creative act, the exteriorisation of painful inner processes, common to everyone, in a language we can all understand (p. 25). This is the work of sublimation (2), which Freud sees as both inadequate and necessary as a channel for our unease (p. 30). The failure of the text to eliminate lack does not count against it but rather ensures that communication remains alive in the work and subject alike. Herein lies the true relevance of Kristeva’s poetics of melancholia: “transpos[ing] affect into rhythms, signs, forms,” such texts “become the communicable imprints of an affective reality, perceptible to the reader” (p. 17). Against both depressive inertia and the notion that art should provide us with a “cure” (3), sublimatory activity is resexualised (Bahun, 2014, p. 68) as text-maker and reader alike strive for a common language as fractured, ill-fated, and lacking as their experience of reality. Laurence A. Rickels (2011), too, notes Freud’s concern that, in the melancholic identifying with the lost object, “both the object and the longing for the object are thus doubly abandoned” (p. 3). A text like SotE not only induces longing but encourages a playful, expressive, and self-reflexive engagement with longing and fantasy in the form of a text that communicates through, and urges the articulation of, the universal experience of lack.
SotE’s finitude inexorably leads players to a point where nothing f can arise, stoking in us the desire to play, communicate, and create anew. Kristeva insists that familiarity with textual exhaustion is in fact the purpose of art, as the text “set(s) forth a device whose prosodic economy, interaction of characters, and implicit symbolism constitute a very faithful semiological representation of the subject’s battle with symbolic collapse” (p. 18). The text is a container, “a play of melody, rhythm, and semantic polyvalency” (p. 10) offering masks and stages in and upon which we fail to grasp some elusive Thing, and then nevertheless try again. If every text involves the play of the lost object, the depressive text, of which SotE is most certainly one, goes further, drawing our attention to that libidinal struggle so that we can “overcome such wretchedness by setting up an ‘I’ that controls both aspects of deprivation” (p. 110). Reflexive engagement with the melancholic text allows us to play with collapse by way of fracturing of the self through desire and the false promise of fulfillment. Videogames are a rich medium for experimenting with such ideas because the reader-player’s mode of engagement is embodied and active, built on the play, and collapse, of stages and masks and narratives. Contemporary trends in game development appear to be working to obscure textual thresholds through building larger and ever more complex works, potentially exceeding the interest of the playing subject. But this only defers the state of textual exhaustion while diminishing the pleasure that comes from a player recognising how a text’s struggle with symbolic collapse mirrors their own. DLC like SotE, then, reminds us of the finitude residing within any game as well as its communion, as a sheltering world unto itself, with the player. In the aftermath of collapse, surrounded by an unbearable emptiness, there remains play.
Endnotes
1. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, “lack” and “desire” are inextricable: “It is a lack which causes desire to arise” (Evans, 1996, p. 98). “Desire” is first the want for something not currently possessed. Lacan differentiates “desire” from “need,” where the latter is an appetite emerging from an organism’s instinct to sustain itself. Unlike need, however, desire cannot be satisfied. It continues to reproduce itself and, in doing so, motivates the subject: realising the object of desire drives the subject to pursue another desire, and so on, eternally. The reason for this is lack. For Lacan, lack is the sense that some wholeness was lost upon the subject’s entry into the world. As long as there is the subject there is lack, and for as long as there is lack there is desire.
2. “Sublimation” refers to the channelling of libido into socially acceptable forms (Evans, 1996, p. 200) such as religion, scientific discovery, and the making and appreciation of art (Bahun, 2014, p. 30).
3. Where Freud believes total sublimation is possible, Lacan maintains that it is not. Moreover, sublimation “raises an object [. . .] to the dignity of the Thing” (as cited in Evans, 1996, p. 201).
Author Biography
Max Coombes, PhD, is an administrator at the University of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata Rau, New Zealand. His research is concerned with embodiment and the unheimlich, and the uncanny textuality of videogames.
References
Bahun, S. (2014). Modernism and melancholia: Writing as countermourning. Oxford University Press.
Clute, J. (1999). An Encyclopedia of fantasy (2nd ed.). St Martin’s Press.
Evans, D. (1996). An introductory dictionary of Lacanian psychoanalysis (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203135570
Freud, S. (1957). Mourning and melancholia. In The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud: Vol. 14 (1914–1916): On the history of the psycho-analytic movement, Papers on metapsychology and Other works (pp. 243–258; J. Stratchey, Trans.). Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1917).
Genovesi, M. (2018). Fragmentation: Between expansion packs and episodic video games. Proceedings of DiGRA 2018 Conference: The Game Is the Message. https://dl.digra.org/index.php/dl/article/view/940
Gray, W. (2008). Death and fantasy: Essays on Philip Pullman, C. S. Lewis, George MacDonald and R. L. Stevenson. Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Jackson, R. (2005). Fantasy. Taylor & Francis Group.
Keogh, B. (2018). A play of Bodies: How we perceive videogames. MIT Press.
Kristeva, J. (2024). Black Sun: Depression and melancholia (1st ed.). Columbia University Press.
Lizardi, R. (2012). DLC: Perpetual commodification of the video game. Democratic Communiqué, 25(1). https://doi.org/10.7275/democratic-communique.278
Lizardi, R. (2017). Nostalgic generations and media: Perception of time and available meaning. Lexington Books.
Mendlesohn, F. (2008). Rhetorics of fantasy. Wesleyan University Press.
Napoli, P. M. (2016). Requiem for the long tail: Towards a political economy of content aggregation and fragmentation. International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics, 12(3), 341–356.
Nicoll, B. (2023). Enjoyment with(out) exception: Sex and the unconscious drive to fail in videogame play. Angelaki, 28(5), 97–114. https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2023.2243161
Nieborg, D. (2014). Prolonging the magic: The political economy of the 7th generation console game. Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture, 8, 47–63. https://doi.org/10.7557/23.6155
Payne, M. T. (2018). The long tale of downloadable convergence. Velvet Light Trap, 81, 70–74. https://doi.org/10.7560/VLT8106
Proffitt, J. M., Tchoi, D. Y., & McAllister, M. P. (2007). Plugging back into the matrix: The intertextual flow of corporate media commodities. Journal of Communication Inquiry, 31(3), 239–254. https://doi.org/10.1177/0196859907300955
Rickels, L. A. (2011). Aberrations of mourning. University of Minnesota Press.
Tyni, H., & Sotamaa, O. (2011). Extended or exhausted: How console DLC keeps the player on the rail. Proceedings of the 15th International Academic MindTrek Conference: Envisioning Future Media Environments, 311–313. https://doi.org/10.1145/2181037.2181094
Vella, D. (2015). No mastery without mystery: Dark Souls and the ludic sublime. Game Studies, 15(1).
Journal of Games Criticism 