Obsession

I've been playing a lot of Dark Souls over the last year, having gotten into the series after playing Bloodborne, and while there's not a lot of story to the games, what is there follows a consistent and constant theme throughout the games. While you travel from world to world, fighting your way through endless hordes of monsters well beyond your capacity to fight and slowly but surely overcoming them and using the souls and blood of your fallen enemies to become ever stronger, you are told repeatedly about a far off goal that no one has ever been able to reach, or be able to move past after reaching it. But we are not like our predecessors. We, as the player, as the hero of our story, push ever onward past where those before us have failed, past the impossibilities of the fight we face, until we are set upon by a choice that ultimately is the deciding factor for our journey.

It's not much of a story. A good frameworking for one, but not much of an actual story. But what it is is remarkably reflective of how the fans of Dark Souls play the games. They don't let the difficulty of the games stop them. They die to the same enemy over and over and over again, and each time they learn a little more until they can destroy that enemy. Some of them will go back again and continue to fight and to learn until they can crush that enemy in the palm of their hands without ever being touched. A rare few will go so far as to learn the entire game in this fashion.

The player and their character are both driven by the same force, which connects them - obsession. The player is obsessed with conquering the game, famous for its rampant difficulty, so that they can say that they are a member of the elite. The character, and everyone in the game's world, are obsessed with continuing. They don't want to die along with their world, and want to push it forward so that their story may continue. They want to be a moving force, rather than to sit idly by as they and everything that they have ever known is wiped away. Both are obsessed with their forward momentum, to the point where anything that pushes them back becomes nothing more than another obstacle to overcome.

And this obsession is what connects audience with world. It whats immerses you into the game, even without a real story to speak of, and makes you feel prideful every time you surpass something and make it to a new area. That sharable, relatable obsession. It's an important point to remember as a writer, because you don't have to make a plotless video game to apply that. It is always applicable. Making your character obsessed with what they are doing will draw in the reader, because they will want to know what comes next just as much as the character does.