Soulslike video games — a corpus linguistic analysis of the language of "Elden Ring"

Video games have been enjoying world-wide popularity among gamers and fans alike to the point that academics from various fields, too, have started devoting their attention to them. For example, literary scholars have studied how narration is developed in video games, archaeologists have studied the “archaeological” techniques for looking for in-game objects, and psychologists have focused on the impact that gaming skills have on learners’ minds. Up to now, linguists interested in video games have examined digital games’ slang and its application to students’ everyday life, the usefulness of video games in learning and practising languages, and the complexity of translating video games. However, ‘soulslike’ games have not received much academic attention. Soulslike games are role-playing video games, usually set in medieval and fantasy environments, in which the player has to “immerse” him-/herself in the game by crafting materials, finding useful objects and assembling equipment for facing various dangers during the game. This involves speaking to characters and looking for items, accompanied by some verbal description, that may turn out to be useful. In this dissertation I provide a linguistic analysis of "Elden Ring". "Elden Ring" is the first open world souslike game, that is one characterised by a large and completely explorable game world. My analysis describes the lexical make-up of the speech of the main characters in "Elden Ring" (Blaidd, Boc, the Dung Eater, Fia, Gideon, Alexander, Melina, Millicent, Miriel, Nepheli, Ranni, Roderika, Sellen, Tanith, and Varré) and the descriptions of the main objects related to them (e.g. weapons, armours, spells). To this end, I used a corpus-driven approach, exploring the recurrent phraseologies of each of the above, pointing out shared and unshared vocabulary choices. By using the software AntConc, I identified the most frequent words, the keywords and the word combinations of characters’ talk and of object descriptions. The findings show that the speech of soulslike games’ characters, who embody stereotypical roles, are characterised by distinctive lexico-grammatical patterns, which contribute to shaping the personality of the characters. They also show that the texts about the game objects have a descriptive and a narrative component which complement the mysterious content of the characters’ discourse, crucially leading to a thorough understanding of the characters in "Elden Ring".