How Dark Souls Taught me to Value All Learning, In and Out of School

Video games have always been a contentious topic; since time immemorial (or 1958), kids have been judged by their parents and teachers for wanting to play (and learn, and improve at) video games, and the debate rages on over whether or not video games can be an artistic medium (like books, movies, symphonies, and the other miscellaneous and somewhat insular media of "Fine Arts"). I myself feel strongly that yes, a video game can be a legitimate and meaningful artistic expression, certainly as much as any other medium. And furthermore, because they are interactive and require decision-making, skill, and critical thought, video games can inherently teach us lessons that we may not learn from passively consuming other media - lessons that teachers often try to shoehorn into their classes in ways that feel out of context for students who may be more apt to learn them (or may not even realize that they're learning them) in other, more familiar settings. To illustrate my point, I'd like to share my own experience with one particular video game (actually a series of games), the brainchild of director Hidetaka Miyazaki, the infamous and endlessly scrutinized Dark Souls.

The original Dark Souls, released in 2011.

I say infamous because the Souls games are notorious for their unforgiving difficulty. Just Google "Dark Souls Difficulty" - in a word cloud of the results you'd see "punishing," "too hard?" "extremely" and "brutal," stand out. Despite the frustration and immense challenge, players who enjoy these games (myself included) consider them to be pinnacles of the video-game medium: peerless masterpieces that have perfected a particular type of very difficult gameplay, and literary exemplars of unparalleled storytelling and world building (more on that shortly).

The reason so many of us enjoy this challenge (and the primary response to the argument that Dark Souls is too hard) is that by trying, over and over, to beat a tough area or boss, we gradually learn its mechanics and attack patterns, and eventually we can overcome the immense difficulty and beat it, which is one of the most viscerally satisfying experiences I've ever had while consuming media designed, ostensibly, for "entertainment."

But examine that point more closely - by learning the game's patterns and mastering certain skills, we achieve victory after having failed (many, many times, in some cases). In fact, it took all the failures, all the many deaths to the same boss, to learn how to beat it. The Souls community inducts new players by telling them to "git gud," because the games are designed in such a way that you really can't get past the tough parts without learning (presumably by dying - failing - several times). I think that the "git gud" loop, while rather snarky, in fact captures the essence of Carol Dweck's well-renowned growth mindset concept - a topic on which I have taught countless lessons to my students in a rather fruitless attempt to help them see failure as a learning opportunity.

The fundamentals of the growth mindset (in particular, openness to failure and the understanding that mastery requires effort - both of which lead to persistence in the face of challenge) are echoed in the "git gud" gameplay loop. Miyazaki himself lays it out for us in this 2011 interview on difficulty in the early Souls games: "The difficulty is high, but always achievable. Everyone can achieve without all that much technique – all you need to do is learn, from your deaths, how to overcome the difficulties." ¹

Playing Dark Souls - a game recommended to me, incidentally, by a student ² - I find myself literally acting out perseverance, patience, and openness to failure as a learning opportunity that I've been trying to teach my students all these years. This led me to ponder the experience of failure, patience, perseverance, and growth that my student probably had when she played Dark Souls, and became so enamored of it as to recommend it to me. Perhaps, I realized, rather than teaching the growth mindest from the front of the classroom without any context, it may be more productive to present these mindsets and habits of thought in school by connecting them with the non-academic learning experiences our students are already having.

This take isn't limited to the growth mindset, nor to Dark Souls. I would argue that Dark Souls is also worth considering as a piece of literature, a masterfully written story set in a fully-fleshed-out fantasy environment, beautifully told through prose as well as gameplay. Dark Souls is uniquely obtuse and cryptic in it how it presents its story, unlike most linear games that guide the player through the story checkpoints (much the way a book or movie lays out a story with a beginning, middle, and end). Instead, the main story of Dark Souls, its background lore, and even many of the actions required of the player are only revealed in optional conversations and in the descriptions of various items found in the world of the game.

In this way, the game encourages the player to compile information and connect many, many dots to understand the complexity and depth of the story, requiring interpretation, interpolation, analysis, and even speculation in order to piece together the central themes, the plot, and in some cases even what to do (there are several successful video series devoted to it, such as youtuber ENB's highly regarded "From the Dark," which dedicates nearly 40 hours of commentary to discussing how subtle details revealed in-game may hint at story elements left untold). If I were an English teacher, I would be overjoyed to see my students putting in the kind of critical and analytical thought I put into the story of Dark Souls - I had a field day browsing the Common Core standards for ELA and discovering how the same skills that go into literary analysis can be applied to uncovering the plot of Dark Souls.

Beyond Dark Souls, I think it's clear that the particular media a teacher chooses to teach skills or patterns of thought in his own class, unbelievably specific and limited to his own amassed experiences in the medium (however broad that may be), are not the only media upon which those skills and patterns of thought can be exercised. Beyond valuing student voice and honoring their preferences in media (which, of course, we should), we must also recognize that the type of thought they put into understanding the things they like (play, watch, listen to) can be equal in substance (if not downright identical) to the thinking skills we want them to apply in class. Our students are developing growth mindsets and critical and creative thinking skills (among other skills) every day, but they're doing it ways that we may miss if we lash ourselves too closely to the content we chose for our own classes and disregard the intellectual validity of the thought that goes into enjoying and engaging with other media or activities.

In forcing me to "git gud" - to fail, learn, and grow - Dark Souls reminded me that my students, like myself, are already developing growth mindsets and other thinking skills in contexts both entirely legitimate in their lives, yet entirely foreign to school. This is fantastic news, because it means they can exercise those same skills on the media we put in front of them. Alternatively (and maybe preferably), if we leave our curriculum open-ended enough, we (teachers) can support them as they practice and improve those skills in school by discussing or analyzing the very games, books, or music upon which they've honed them.

But first, we need to help students see this connection, to recognize these skills in themselves and practice applying them on diverse topics both in and out of school. This can only happen if we raise up and resonate those experiences in our classrooms and show our students that we value not only their interests, but the learning that they do while engaging with those interests. If we do, we can bolster their confidence and academic self-concept, so they can see school as a place to explore their curiosity and expand their intellect, no matter what form it takes.Every teacher wants her students to transfer skills and knowledge from the classroom to other walks of life and to see the relevance and benefit of what they learn in school, and what better way to do that than by showing our students that they already have these mindsets and supporting them as they develop them further, rather than trying to teach them in an experiential vacuum devoid of emotional resonance? Imagine if your teacher taught you by helping you persevere in Dark Souls while showing (teaching) you that you were developing a growth mindset by playing it! You'd certainly stop wondering about the point of school and what it will ever be good for.

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¹ Learning from deaths is so deeply woven into the gameplay design of Dark Souls that, if you play online, you can even see the places where other players have recently died in their games, and watch short clips of their actions leading up to their death to get a hint as to what may have caused it, and prepare accordingly.

² This student, it's worth noting, was a high school senior. While I'm generally in the pro-video-gaming camp overall, I do feel compelled to disclaim that Dark Souls is a relatively violent game, with a rating of "M" for "Mature." Even as a middle school teacher I hesitate to recommend or even discuss this game with my students, although I certainly wouldn't shut them down if they brought it up with me. I also don't think my argument here is contingent upon Dark Souls specifically, nor is it in any way wrapped up in the debate over whether violent video games are harmful for kids, although my positivity toward gaming in general may be tipping my hand with regard to that issue as well.

What Really Matters in the Classroom?

Spoiler Alert: It's not teaching content.

On a recent episode of the Modern Classrooms Podcast, my cohosts and I discussed of the shifting role of the teacher, both in a Modern Classroom, and in general as we strive to improve our teaching. The discussion was rather cathartic, frequently returning to the frustrations the three of us shared in our early careers - principally, the frustration with feeling like we knew what we wanted for our students, but also feeling unable to provide anything even close to our ideals of student-centered, authentic learning environment. As the discussion developed, it dawned on me just how much teachers seem to agree on what actually matters in a classroom, but how much we universally struggle to implement it - and that it's not necessarily teaching our content all the time.

Actually, let me not hedge or bury the lede any further: teaching content is not my priority, especially right now. But even putting aside the pandemic (and the myriad swirling uncertainties and anxieties to which my lessons pale in comparison, making the point of my argument rather obvious), I still think that our biggest priority - what really matters - should be to foster a love of school, a strong academic self-concept, and for our students to feel nurtured and cared for in our classrooms and see school as a part of their identity.

I don't think this is a particularly contentious opinion, but many of the struggles we face as teachers arise from the fact that we focus our time in class pushing our kids to succeed academically when they have other things going on that may or may not be a bigger deal, but are certainly more important to them in the moment. By forcing our content upon them and positioning it in opposition to what matters to them, we degrade its importance in their minds; even if we purport to care about them, we contradict ourselves if we constantly redirect students away from their interests in pursuit of success on some test we wrote. After 13 or 14 years of being told implicitly that their interests (and maybe their trauma) are less important than some numbers and symbols or some grammatical structures, it's not hard to understand why many people don't feel so fondly about school.

Responsive music educators recognize that our job isn't to churn out hundreds of professional musicians every year, and likewise it shouldn't be the job of a Math or English teacher to churn out professional mathematicians or authors or critics (students, of course, will follow their own path after school). I think (maybe I'm wrong) that most teachers know and feel this at least subconsciously, but external pressures are placed on us such that we tend to forget. We seek out strategies for classroom management rather than teaching for mastery or building relationships, focusing on what works without questioning (or at least, without listening to the nagging internal critic who questions everything) whether this is what matters.

There's a disconnect between the amount of professional development we receive on trauma-informed teaching, authentic relationships, and the buzzwordliest of all, Social Emotional Learning, and the way we're evaluated based on student achievement, or more specifically, classroom compliance (classroom management) and grades, which take a great deal of nuance to achieve without alienating students or silencing their voices (this disconnect also plays out in the types of PD teachers prefer and the types they actually receive. I have a future post planned on the kinds of PD I find most valuable, but the data in this report certainly validate the idea that we're evaluated on different standards than what we're trained on - poor pedagogy indeed!).

Of course the tricky bit here is that we do still need to teach our content, and our students need to learn it. While I think that systemically, we might be stuck in a loop where school only exists to teach students how to succeed on tests (particularly high-stakes tests) that school itself imposes on them, teachers themselves do aspire to develop kids' critical thinking skills and impart to them the knowledge and understanding that will bring them success as adults. It strikes me that our priorities (and the world of standardized testing) tend to focus on teaching students what to know rather than how to think. It feels like ubiquitous, common knowledge that kids just forget content after the test (and it might be true).

So, what does really matter then? How can a teacher, in his classroom or in her Zoom call tomorrow, put their students' needs before their content, while still pushing students toward mastery and academic growth but without pushing them away from a love of learning? I know how frustrating it is as a new teacher to hear "build authentic relationships with kids," and it's taken me until now (my fifth year) to actually understand what it means, so let's avoid that buzzword and get right to the nitty-gritty. Here's what to do: if a kid wants to talk to you about soccer during independent work time on some practice problems, listen to her for a few minutes. If some kids start blowing up your Zoom chat asking "who's the imposter" (it's from Among Us), play along for a little. If a student wants to tell you all about Fortnite or asks you who your favorite rapper is but you know she has a sentence to diagram, let it go and indulge her, even just for a bit. Listen to them. It humanizes you, and in their eyes, you are school, so you'll be modeling what it looks like when school becomes a place to be heard. Afterwards, you can direct these kids back to work, but they'll remember that you made their interests compatible with learning by making some time for them during class - time spent building relationships is not time lost . After 13 or 14 years of that, I can only imagine the kinds of curious, inquisitive young adults we'll see coming out of our schools and taking on the world as truly lifelong learners.

You can listen to this post as an audio podcast, here: