Understanding The Surprisingly Hilarious and Thought-Provoking Player Messages in ‘Elden Ring’
I have often lamented From Software games, the feeling of dread they inspire in my gut, and my almost universal aversion to difficulty that fans seem to relish. I own Dark Souls on multiple platforms, as well as a shrink-wrapped copy of Bloodborne, but any time the notion of sinking into their macabre worlds crosses my mind, I think better of it, returning them to the shelf.
Part of me wants to like these games, but I’m always more interested in the idea of playing Souls-likes than actually grinding my way through them. Our own Ben Vollmer has written about his uphill battle with depression and how Dark Souls proved to be a crucial part of his journey out of a particularly dark place. I know these games are deeply special to many people for that reason and others. And the fact that practically every trans woman I know seems to treat these games like a rite of passage creates a lighthearted feeling of imposter syndrome that, despite the transparent silliness of such gatekeeping, I want to overcome. (The “if you like Dark Souls, you should try estrogen” meme comes to mind.)
Fast forward to Elden Ring, which recently consumed both my Twitter timeline and the gaming lives of my friends. Sitting out the game’s launch was a no-brainer until it wasn’t. I started off my day listening to the Triple Click podcast on Elden Ring after muting the term on Twitter that very morning, and suddenly I was the one dumping ten hours a day into the Lands Between. There’s the obvious appeal of George R. R. Martin’s contributions to the game, but it was the ubiquitous discourse sprouting around the game’s design that caught my critical interests. And, of course, feeling compelled to “try fingers, but hole.”
Elden Ring, like many Souls games, features a fascinating passive multiplayer component in which players leave cryptic messages throughout the game’s world. Some of my favorite games like NieR: Automata and Death Stranding follow this design philosophy, and have used passive player interactions in creatively inspired ways. Elden Ring never forces you to participate in leaving messages of your own, which made me think in terms of rhetorical purpose. Aside from their more practical purpose of restoring your health when another player appraises your message, what was motivating people to write these messages into the theoretical void?
Once I started pondering this question, I started taking screenshots to build a small folder of player messages that impacted me in some manner. Usually, these messages provoked a small laugh. But sometimes they actually sent me into a brief thought spiral where I saw something from an alternative perspective than I had considered on my own. At the moment of this writing, I have only spent around 30 hours in Elden Ring; but in the same way that I flipped through the prosaic dictionary of Disco Elysium, I’d like to explore Elden Ring’s player messages – or at least the ones I have encountered thus far.
“you don’t have the right, O you don’t have the right
In shortyou don’t have the right, O you don’t have the right”
This is the first screenshot of a player message that I took in Elden Ring. Clearly, I am not alone in enjoying this message telling me repeatedly that I don’t have the right. The first question one might ask is what I don’t have the right to, exactly. But I think the presence of the giant closed door before which this player message is written gives away the implied meaning. Naturally, when I see a door in a video game, my instinct is to see if it opens. This player message hints directly at the possibility that, though this door may not yet open for me, it will open at some unspecified point in the future. Having proven myself against the game’s depths, exploring and battling my way across the map, perhaps I will then “have the right” to open this door. This message is simply someone else teasing me as though they have seen the inner secrets behind the giant door. I don’t have any clear indication apart from this player’s message that this door will open; it very likely could just function as an elaborate wall. But the fact that it might open makes this world come alive, imbued with magic and possibility.
“fort,
night”
Fortnite feels more like a meme than an actual game, and here it is in memetic form. I associate Fortnite’s staggeringly large player base with my nine-year-old cousin, not Elden Ring players. But like all cultural memes, Fortnite pervades any space it can. I took this screenshot because I felt trolled. These player messages in Elden Ring are Schrodinger’s cat, except when I open the box the cat could either tell me useful information or could bludgeon me over the head like an unmuted multiplayer lobby. Seeing this message reminded me of when you lose “the game” in grade school, or when someone pulls a “made you look” hand gesture before slugging your shoulder. But in a world as unforgiving as Elden Ring’s, messages like this go a long way to making me feel less alone. And the fact that this message baffled Japanese Elden Ring players into expecting a Fortnite crossover event is simply delightful. Sometimes, a little chaos is good.
“dog!”
In a game like Elden Ring, I always have a suspicion that a message in front of a character could indicate some kind of duplicitous merchant or surprise attack from behind. I’m wary of sudden death in From Software games, so I will always read player messages in places like this. But then you just have this: “dog!” It’s hard to explain why this causes me joy, but I think part of it is the toddler-like simplicity of pointing at something that’s clearly not a dog – in this case, a donkey – and calling it such. It’s a subversive style of unexpected humor that I started noticing after this point. Sometimes I’ll find a turtle and it’ll just say, “dog?” And you know what, it is: a very good dog.
“Ahh, pickle…,
Let there be backstepping”
It took me about 15 hours in Elden Ring before I encountered the fabled “pickle” messages. This is the first one I found, and in retrospect the meaning is quite clear. Atop the ladder in the background is an unrelentingly annoying room of enemies that, amongst other things, will shoot you dead with rapid projectiles. There is a strong likelihood that what awaits you in that hollowed out cave is your death, and by the nature of Souls-like games, death means backtracking to obtain the game’s “runes,” a currency of sorts that allows you to upgrade your character. Thus, you may find yourself in a pickle, as the saying goes, caught between a rock and a hard place. There are occasions in Elden Ring where I simply do not feel prepared to defeat enemies, and so my inclination is to leave. But if I dropped 30,000 runes from my corpse back there, I have to calculate the risk and reward involved with doing so. At some level, the pickle I am presented with is just a sunk cost fallacy, but in Elden Ring, every rune counts. As for the “backstepping” nature of this advice, presumably doing so would enable you to more adequately respond to the incoming attacks hurtling at you, but in this case I simply grabbed my staff and hauled out of there.
“joy?”
Thus far, most of the player messages I’d screencapped were well established memes being executed in the right places. This player message, however, hit far differently. The necessary context of this message is that I am standing inside Stormveil Castle after defeating Margit, the Fell Omen – one of the first major bosses I encountered during my playthrough. Margit felt like a wall that I could not surpass until I did what Souls players notoriously dangle as advice: “git gud.” I tried fighting Margit a few dozen times, with some relevant grinding on the side, and when I felled Margit, there wasn’t a massive shriek of victory, just the idle ambience of curiosity guiding me forward. When I reached this player message, considering my well-earned victory, I hiked up a climbable foundation, scanning for items or passageways. This is what I found: “joy?” Reading this felt ponderous, profound even, like this person unlocked the emotional cavern inside of me. Part of me expected to feel joy when “GREAT ENEMY FELLED” crossed my screen, and another part of me thought there would be a cool reward on the other side of the fight. But what I found was ultimately more interesting, and I can read this message both in terms of relating to the person who wrote it but slightly suspecting that, like all of the messages explored in this article so far, there’s a wink and a nod going on here (i.e. “If you thought that was tough, and you’re feeling good about yourself, just you wait.”).
“pickle”
We’ve already explored the use of “pickle,” but it’s the placement and wide reception to this message that drew my finger to the screenshot key. 9999 appraisals, for starters, is absurd. As you can see in the screenshot, I had just destroyed some environmental objects in order to see what this message obscurely tucked in a dark corner would say. Lo and behold, it’s just a reminder of the obvious truth that pickles are a fantastic snack – or so I choose to believe. This person, like so many Elden Ring messages, had just deliberately wasted my time, but I didn’t resent them for it. I, too, see the humor in leaving a note that requires going out of your way to read, only to realize you’ve been pranked. The Dadaists would adore this use of the player messaging system.
“First off, up”
In a vacuum, this message makes no sense. But in front of a ladder, it makes all the sense in the world. The redundancy of someone telling you indirectly that what you’re facing is a ladder, and the first thing you should think to do when encountering a ladder in a video game is climb it, is ridiculous. It’s fascinating the degree to which context informs bare language, because in a different environment, these exact same words could mean, “there’s an enemy hanging from the ceiling: beware.” But they don’t. The eye roll this message provoked is not unlike when games indefinitely tutorialize button presses for you; maybe I need a quick rundown to get started in a game, but at some point all good games should pull back and trust the player with the reins. Elden Ring is towards the far end of the hands-off design perspective, so seeing the tonal dissonance between player and designer is just cheeky enough to be interesting.
“regret”
This one message can summarize about half of my experiences in Elden Ring, whether that be a cliff that I misjudged before falling to my death or, in this case, delving into every nook and cranny of a space, hoping to find something. I had just rounded a bend and saw the glow of this player message in the corner, so I continued wandering down the path. What I found was exactly what this player wrote here: regret.
“Behold, regret!”
I’m including back-to-back regret here because it serves as an interesting layer about tone in these player messages. When thinking about rhetoric, one of the most fundamental ways to analyze discourse is in terms of how to present an idea in the most effective way possible. The previous player message is aware that it wastes my time (look at me wasting my own time further by writing about it), and the “behold” version shares that awareness. But the tonal presentation of the same idea dramatically shifts how I feel about it, as a reader. Whereas the first “regret” message was lowercase and almost sorrowful, this second message has a triumphant quality to it, as indicated by the capital “Behold,” sounding like an official pronouncement, and the exclamatory delivery of the message adds to that effect. The tone of the messages in Elden Ring has a lot more variation than one might expect.
“Praise the lever!”
Obviously invoking the “Praise the sun!” meme from Dark Souls, this message is humorous because of its mundanity. Perhaps this person wrote the message while naively trying to be helpful, telling me that pulling the lever would be required. Maybe they are just making a simple joke that From Software fans will appreciate. Whatever the case, I think the idea of praising a lever to an elevating platform is quaint and cute. These messages are riddles in the size of a fortune cookie.
“snake?,
snake!”
Another reference, but to a game series I’ve lamentably not played: Metal Gear Solid. Though I now consider myself a fan of Hideo Kojima’s work, I have only ever experienced Metal Gear games through the analytical lens of other people. One of my favorite podcasts, Get Played, has twice chosen November as a month to play through and discuss Kojima’s games, which they affectionately dub, “Hideo Kojember.” As a comedy podcast, the hosts will routinely develop quote-worthy parody bits from the games they are playing, and “Snake? SNAKE!!” became one of them. This message circles us back to the ladder instructions discussed above, but this time it genuinely made me burst out laughing. The key ingredient being that the Metal Gear games have a notoriously and absurdly long climb up a ladder, and perhaps this player felt that, like Metal Gear, this ladder was too long. I don’t think any player message will inspire as much delight again in my playthrough.
“introspection?”
Ultimately, this player message captures what each example above serves to illustrate: communicating through introspection. Intended or not, these player messages in Elden Ring make you think about where you are in the world, what you should be doing, and how the role that you’re playing contributes to a simultaneous feeling of isolation and connectedness. Sometimes the question you ask yourself is what other players are seeing that you’ve failed to see; other times you ask yourself if what you’re doing is even worth it. But each time, there’s a moment of self-reflection, and I don’t think it gets any clearer than this. In between the bombast and intensity of Elden Ring’s more memorable moments, there are pockets of time where the game is just dead silent but for the sound of your footsteps. Those quieter moments are what make Elden Ring so incredibly engaging to me, allowing me to take in the game’s beautiful vistas as I explore the boundaries of the known world and secrets therein.
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