It’s a little tiresome setting the exact definition of a reference. Sometimes it seems obvious, but other examples quickly degenerate into pointless hair-splitting. Let’s pull a couple instances that feel clearly on either side. In Star Wars, when characters say ‘I’ve got a bad feeling about this,’ it’s a reference to when Luke said it on the approach to the Death Star in A New Hope. It’s derived from and refers back to that initial moment. That’s a reference. As a point of contrast, it’s not a reference when characters say ‘May the Force be with you’. That’s not a reference, it’s a saying. It’s like ‘Merry Christmas’ – it’s a cultural form within that universe. It’s something that people say to each other – a farewell, a blessing. It isn’t really a reference, because it isn’t meant to refer back to the first time it was said.

That seems clear enough, right? A messier example might be, say, the Wilhelm Scream. This famous scream is a shared joke amongst directors. It’s an identifiable stock sound that is reused across different films and contexts. It’s probably not a reference, per se, because it’s not meant to refer back to the first time it was used. It’s more about reuse, about the community of filmmakers that keep using it as a shared gag. It’s really an element of tradition. But by that logic – isn’t the ‘bad feeling’ line the same? A tradition rather than a reference? Less about the original context and more about carrying on a piece of dialogue that’s been used and reused throughout the series? Ugh. We’re splitting hairs.

Although these examples are sort of silly, the exercise of trying to define a reference pulls out a bunch of really interesting questions and processes. When is something its own thing, and when does it just point back to something that came before? And what’s the role of tradition in mediating that difference? We might not immediately be able to articulate answers to these questions, but we deploy them implicitly when making aesthetic judgements. They’re present in how we assess video games. The ‘Soulslike‘ is a genre of game heavily derived from Dark Souls, usually in either mechanics or aesthetic. These games can be good or bad for a number of reasons, but you’ll sometimes hear people accuse a Soulslike of being derivative. It doesn’t have enough of a sense of its own identity. It’s a clone – a game that’s really just pointing back to the original title. Maybe that’s not exactly the same as a reference, but it feels like there’s some structural similarities going on. A reference harks back to something that came before. Some games spend so much time looking back that they don’t have anything of their own. They do not belong to themselves: they refer back to something else.

I’ve been thinking about this lately playing Elden Ring. After playing too much Sekiro, I’ve moved on to the next FromSoftware title – which is very much a return to the Dark Souls model. It has an endurance bar, a magic bar, you find all the different bits of armour and weapons that you can equip – all the classic RPG elements that were removed or modified in Sekiro. It feels like Dark Souls 4. It’s a return to that type of game. And it has all the classic storytelling hallmarks of a Souls game, too. There’s a fair maiden who hangs around checkpoints and helps you level up. There’s a fading kingdom, a vile curse, a safe haven where NPCs teach you different spells. Like in Dark Souls 3, your central hub exists outside of the main world. You can find its ruins in the world, suggesting – again, like Dark Souls 3 – that when you visit the central hub, you’re moving to a different point in time. Thus the question about references: are they just remaking the same game?

FromSoft have always had a focus on cycles. In the original Dark Souls, the fire that fuels the world is fading. The player fights through most of the realm’s remaining monsters and heroes, and sacrifices their life to the flame, becoming fuel to reinvigorate the world. The implication is that the flame will continue to whittle down, that further sacrifice will be needed at the end of the next epoch. Thus, after completing a game of Dark Souls, you are taken back to the beginning to start New Game+. The cycle begins again. In Dark Souls, and in the FromSoft oeuvre more broadly, repetition is a sign of mythos. All stories are the same story, the same ritual process. It’s all the fight against apathy, the fight for strength, for renewal, for new life. It’s the fight against a hereditary curse – something we were born into, something started long before us and well outside of our power to break. It’s the fight against the human condition. The repeated themes and motifs are thus symbols of the universal. Dark Souls begins with the knight Oscar dropping a key through the roof of a cell. The key allows the player to escape from their prison and start their journey. Sekiro starts in a similar way, with Lady Emma dropping a note down a well to a forlorn shinobi. It’s sort of a reference, but it’s also part of a broader theme of cycles and repetition. It’s the same story, the same struggle. The particulars are different, but the struggle is the same.