ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that Sianne Ngai’s aesthetic category theory is a productive method for game studies to adopt in order to address the hybrid nature of contemporary video games. Looking to categories of experience that cut across media rather than siloed modes of analysis, Ngai’s methodology is a robust way of engaging with video games and their complicated social, mechanical, and meaning-making ways of interacting with their audiences and developers. This paper addresses the case study of the “soulsborne” and its progenitor game Dark Souls (From Software, 2011). By paying special attention to the slippage between Dark Souls and the development of the “soulsborne” genre, I argue that what we have seen is not just a cluster of mechanics and a lack of clear storytelling, but rather the emergence of an aesthetic category within games. In conversation with Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the diagram, I claim that we can achieve a better analysis of the hybrid reality of games through a new method for engaging with these complex objects. Aesthetic category theory allows for the analysis of the transposable elements of a game, or what can travel on from it, and thus to better understand how subjects are formed within the assemblage that is video game culture.
