ABSTRACT
One of the most central functions of NPCs in quest games is giving and taking valuable objects, as well as directing the player toward them. In Ultima IV, the Codex of Ultimate Wisdom can only be gained through a mastery of all of the correspondences in the game’s virtue system, displayed in a complex rune within the book. Nearly every object in the Souls games by From Software resonates with powerful meaning both at the gameplay and the narrative level. The role of symbolic objects in gameplay appears even more pervasively in the tattoo system of Planescape: Torment, a method of documenting quests and translating these achieved narratives into gameplay advantages. Quest items like the Testament of Suns and the Rune of Torment drive players to uncover the symbolic resonances of a narrative through gameplay, making these items susceptible to study from the standpoint of both ludology and narratology.
