Abstract
This qualitative thematic analysis examines Reddit community members’ pedagogical practices in a discussion board related to Elden Ring, a notoriously difficult video game. Elden Ring is highly acclaimed by both critics and users for its excellent gameplay and tough-but-fair philosophy. A focal thread on Elden Ring was selected in which a novice player shared their difficulties in the game and community members replied to share advice, perspectives, and experiences on the game and gameplay success. Data analysis revealed two primary themes of pedagogical practices in this affinity space: instructional pedagogical practices and affective pedagogical practices. Instructional pedagogical practices included Explaining, Strategizing, and Questioning & Answering. Affective pedagogical practices included Encouraging and Empathizing. Collectively, these six pedagogical practices illustrate how dedicated fans of Elden Ring acted as a community of practice and supported one another’s learning experiences on this Reddit discussion board affinity space. Implications for education and directions for future research are discussed.
Keywords
Introduction
Video games have been examined in a broad range of scholarly contexts, and digital game-based learning has been analyzed in a variety of academic fields. Meta-analyses have shown that digital game-based learning is effective for promoting student learning in general (Clark et al., 2016; Wouters and Van Oostendorp, 2013) as well as in specific academic disciplines including science (Lei et al., 2022), math (Tokac et al., 2019), and TESOL vocabulary acquisition (Thompson and Von Gillern, 2020). Naturally, much of the existing research focused on how video gameplay can support teaching and learning in various contexts. However, the video game community does more than play games and regularly engages in robust and complex online discourse related to games, including creating game tutorials, strategy guides, and participating in discussion boards. While such activities have received some scholarly attention (e.g., Hayes and Duncan, 2012; Marone, 2015; Steinkuehler et al., 2010), they still represent an opportunity for educational researchers to look beyond video games in terms of learning content and towards examining the complex pedagogical practices that sustain communities of practice and affinity spaces where people share their mutual passions. This article examines the pedagogical practices of participants in a discussion thread on Reddit, a globally popular social media platform with over 50 million unique visitors each day (About, 2022). On Reddit, people create and participate in interest-based communities called subreddits, where they post comments and questions to discuss a target topic. This study focuses on r/Eldenring, the subreddit for Elden Ring, a highly anticipated video game released on February 25, 2022 (see Figure 1). Elden Ring is a critically-acclaimed game that earned a score of 96 out of 100 on Metacritic, a critic-review aggregation website, earning a spot on a list of the top 50 video games of all time (https://Metacritic.com). The game was created by FromSoftware, a Japanese game development studio, which has developed numerous games, including Demon Souls, the Dark Souls trilogy, and Bloodborne. With similar design styles and mechanics, these games are frequently described as being brutally difficult and punishing. Collectively, FromSoftware’s games have resulted in a new video game genre: Soulsborne games, which have developed a dedicated legion of enthusiastic fans who appreciate their difficulty, mechanics, and tough-but-fair philosophy. When Elden Ring was released, its subreddit was one of the top-ranked and most active discussion boards on Reddit, spending spent multiple days as the #1-ranked subreddit based on total posts per day (https://subredditstats.com). Reading through the subreddit’s jokes, memes, videos, questions, and answers, we began to suspect that something deeply educational was occurring in this dynamic online community—a suspicion that prompted us to formulate the following research question: Elden Ring screenshot.
- What kinds of pedagogical practices occur among users on r/Eldenring?
Investigating this question provides a few valuable contributions to relevant scholarship. First, research has explored various social media platforms and their connection to pedagogical practices and education, including Twitter (Krutka et al., 2017), Facebook (Chugh and Ruhi, 2018), and others (Khlaif and Salha, 2021), yet limited research has examined educational practices on Reddit (Carpenter et al., 2018). Second, while affinity space research has examined a variety of contexts and video games (e.g., Hayes and Duncan, 2012), we are unaware of any that examine Elden Ring, a highly-appreciated game with a global community of fans. Through our investigation, we illustrate the complex pedagogical practices that occurred on a focal thread on Reddit, which included instructional pedagogical practices (Strategizing, Explaining, and Questioning-Answering) and affective pedagogical practices (Encouraging and Empathizing). Understanding how such pedagogical practices emerge in online communities complements existing literature on affinity spaces and communities of practice and has implications for other areas in educational research, including problem-based learning, socio-emotional learning, and online teaching.
Conceptual framework
While the concepts of communities of practice and affinity spaces are sometimes understood as different ways of framing social dimensions of learning (Gee, 2005), some scholars, including ourselves, understand them to be complementary (Abrams and Lammers, 2017; DeVane, 2012), a perspective we develop in subsequent sections. In what follows, we clarify our use of these concepts and situate the study in relation to scholarship on gaming and affinity spaces.
Communities of practice
This study was guided by Lave and Wenger’s (1991) theory of situated learning, according to which learning should be viewed less as an individual, psychological phenomenon and more as a social, collective one. They accounted for learning not only as a change in individual cognition, but also as “changing participation in changing practices” (Lave, 1996: 150). Accordingly, the object of study is not the learning individual in isolation, but the learning individual as part of a community of practice, including the social practices and interactions of pedagogical actors. Lave and Wenger assumed that learners necessarily participate in communities of practice, and that mastering knowledge and skills requires expanding participation in the sociocultural practices of such a community. They modeled learning as the process of legitimate peripheral participation, or evolving participation in a community of practice towards what they termed “full participation” (Lave and Wenger, 1991: 29).
Contrary to a common misunderstanding, Lave and Wenger’s theory is not only useful in understanding learning within close-knit groups (see Cox, 2005). Indeed, according to their theory of situated learning, all learning takes place in a community of practice—irrespective of whether the criteria of a theoretically ideal community of practice are met and whether a learner has any personal contact at all with other members of the community. For Lave and Wenger (1991), as Barab and Duffy (2000: 40) noted, “legitimate peripheral participation is learning. Any discussions of learning, therefore, must begin within a community of practice and must consider the individual’s position with respect to the hierarchical trajectory of the social and power structures of that community.”
Guided by a communities of practice perspective, this study understands members of r/Eldenring to be enrolled in a community around the practice of video gameplay. However, unlike Lave and Wenger’s apprenticeship case studies, we do not view members of r/Eldenring as involved in any sort of unidirectional mentee-mentor relationship. Instead, following previous research on communities of practice within informal digital learning spaces, we view r/Eldenring as a web of reciprocal pedagogical relationships and mentorships which are subject both to situational change (see Black, 2007) and “reciprocal forms of teaching and learning that occur in all directions throughout the social network” (Steinkuehler, 2006: 100).
In later work, Wenger concentrated on the theoretical differentiation (e.g., Wenger, 1998) and practical application (e.g., Wenger et al., 2002, 2009) of the concept of communities of practice. In this work, Wenger was not primarily concerned with further developing a general learning theory, but rather with examining ideally constituted communities of practice that, in his opinion, offer particularly good learning conditions. Wenger (2002) defined communities of practice according to three characteristics: domain, community, and practice. Accordingly, the foundation of each community of practice is formed by a thematic domain that is shared by its members, which in our case is Elden Ring as well as the Soulsborne genre of games in general. The community, which in this study consists of active contributors as well as lurkers, is characterized by its members’ participation in joint activities and discussions, mutual support, and exchange of information. Thus, a community of practice requires interaction and learning. Finally, members of a community of practice share a common practice. In the case of r/Eldenring, this practice includes not only the practice of playing Elden Ring, but also the development of a shared repertoire of resources (e.g., experiences, stories, tools, problem-solving routines, etc.) through their interactions on Reddit. On r/Eldenring, this knowledge exchange occurs, for example, when contributors collaboratively construct discussion threads by posting, commenting, and engaging in Reddit-specific practices (e.g., upvoting), thus collecting and documenting their own teaching and learning into a public knowledge base that persists over time. Additionally, the collaboratively created collection of resources can spill over to other places in and outside Reddit, such as when players jointly compile FAQs or write articles on specific topics within wikis.
In summary, the concept of community of practice is relevant to the present work in two different ways: (1) as a theoretical perspective on learning, including its underlying pedagogical practices and interactions (Lave and Wenger’s, 1991), and (2) as an ideal construct of a learning community that offers valuable learning opportunities (Wenger, 2002).
Gaming affinity spaces
For Gee (2005), the communities of practice frame is somewhat limited by its focus on “belongingness” and “close knit personal ties among people,” and therefore is not suitable for examining loosely affiliated online groups (Gee, 2005). Gee’s notion of affinity spaces—a specific form of semiotic social space organized around a set of shared interests (Gee, 2005)—views learning as a social phenomenon defined by physical and virtual spaces, such as websites, chatrooms, or internet forums. Gee (2005) underscored the learning potential of affinity spaces by delineating 11 characteristics, such as the presence of a common endeavor; the common participation/non-segregation of newbies and experts; and the encouragement of intensive, extensive, individual, distributed and dispersed knowledge.
In order to access (and interact with) an affinity space, individuals must enter a so-called portal: “A portal is anything that gives access to the signs of the SSS [semiotic social space] and to ways of interacting with those signs, by oneself or with other people” (Gee, 2005: 220). From this perspective, both r/Eldenring in general and its specific threads in particular function as portals to a learning community, which coheres within the broader culture of video gaming and enables users to communicate their experiences. Since Gee introduced the concept, many educators and researchers have applied affinity spaces to non-formal and formal pedagogical contexts (Lammers, 2016; Magnifico et al., 2018). Overall, affinity spaces, like communities of practice, heightens attention to ways learning in informal spaces can offer pedagogical possibilities for formal learning (Resnick, 1987).
With affinity spaces, Gee proposed an alternative to the concept of communities of practice, one that focused on learning communities in relation to the physical and virtual spaces they inhabit. Crucially, however, these two perspectives are not mutually exclusive. Online spaces do not only allow but indeed often encourage group formation. The present study therefore examines r/Eldenring with two overlapping units of analysis: (1) the community of practice, which focuses on the pedagogical interactions between participants, and (2) the affinity space (i.e., r/Eldenring) where the community of practice takes shape, its logics, particularities, and affordances.
Empirical studies on gaming affinity spaces
Following Gee’s (2004, 2005) theory, scholars have conducted empirical studies on gaming affinity spaces, generally exploring portals such as traditional internet forums (Duncan and Gee, 2008; Steinkuehler and Duncan, 2008). However, few studies have examined the portal-wide affinity space of a digital game (Martin, 2012). Several studies of single portals have been able to identify sophisticated literacy practices, such as science literacy (Steinkuehler and Duncan, 2008), advanced reading comprehension (Steinkuehler et al., 2010), information literacy (Martin and Steinkuehler, 2010), and design activities (Marone, 2015). While research has shown that communication in gaming affinity spaces contributes to the improvement of individual and collective video games literacy (Hayes and Duncan, 2012), the underlying pedagogical practices and interactions remain somewhat unclear, hence our focus for this study.
Methods
To examine users’ pedagogical practices around Elden Ring, we conducted a qualitative thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2006) of a focal post to r/Eldenring. As Braun and Clarke explained, “qualitative thematic analysis is a method for identifying, analyzing and reporting patterns (themes) within data” (p. 79), and it encourages researchers to interpret the significance of such patterns in relation to a given research question. While qualitative thematic analysis is sufficiently flexible to accommodate varied epistemological assumptions, this study assumed a constructivist epistemology (Hyde, 2020) wherein meaning, including research findings, is produced through social interactions. As Maxwell et al. (2020) demonstrated in their study of Reddit, qualitative thematic analysis offers a useful way to examine how people co-construct meaning through social interactions on digital platforms, specifically by helping researchers develop detailed accounts of complex relations through the identification, synthesis, and interpretation of discursive patterns.
Launched in 2005, Reddit is one of the world’s largest social media platforms, with over 50 million daily visits, over one-hundred thousand subreddit communities, and over 13 billion comments and posts (About, 2022). Reddit is currently in the top 20 of the world’s most visited websites (Top Websites Ranking, 2022). The platform is structured by subreddits, or interest-based communities, users, or Redditors, visit to share and discuss content. Reddit is home to many different video gaming communities, such as r/gaming (over 34 million subscribers), r/leagueoflegends (over six million subscribers), r/ps5 (over two million subscribers), and so on. There are also subreddits devoted to individual games, including r/Eldenring, which currently has over 1.5 million subscribers. While scholars have examined gaming discourses on subreddits (e.g., Bergstrom and Poor, 2021; Jorgensen and Bogers, 2020), the platform has received less attention from educational researchers focused on gaming affinity spaces.
The focal thread
Elden Ring was announced by its developer, FromSoftware, in 2019 at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (i.e., E3). That same day, a Redditor created r/Eldenring—almost 3 years before the game was actually released in February of 2022—as a space where users could post developer updates and teaser content, and also share their excitement and expectations about the highly-anticipated game. The subreddit’s content eventually shifted in response to the game’s release, as users began posting their reactions to and questions about the game. We began tracking r/Eldenring in the weeks leading up to the game’s release, both because we are gamers ourselves and were excited about its release, and also because we wanted to become familiar with the community ahead of our study. Following Caplan and Purser’s (2019) recommendations for social scientific research on Reddit, we developed our research question, confirmed that institutional review was not needed—data on Reddit is both public and anonymous—and then identified a focal thread for our study.
The thread we selected to investigate was posted on the day Elden Ring was released. It was a “text post,” or a post created to initiate discussion, entitled, “I’ve never played a FromSoftware game, this is my first, and I nearly quit.” In the post, the user r described their early experience with Elden Ring, which was both punishing and discouraging, that is until they stumbled upon an encouraging in-game message left by another player—“Well done,” the message said—just beyond a difficult enemy. “I’ve never felt more validated in my life by a person playing the same game as me,” the user wrote. “I think I get why y’all do this now.” The post, which was upvoted over 18 thousand times and included 2,363 comments, inspired a lively discussion in which users (a) shared their initial impressions of the game, (b) asked other users how best to approach it, and (c) offered each other advice of various kinds. Reading through the comments, it quickly became clear to us that the thread had the potential to provide rich insights into the ways teaching and learning unfold within affinity spaces, which aligned with our research question and prompted us to select it for this study.
Data collection and analysis
Adapting Caplan and Purser’s (2019) and Maxwell et al.’s (2020) approaches to studying Reddit, we began by identifying a focal thread for analysis. We then exported the entire thread as a .PDF file and imported it into MAXQDA, a qualitative data analysis program. All three of the authors regularly play video games, and two of the three had extensive experience playing Soulsborne games, including Elden Ring. These backgrounds allowed us to understand the thread as gamers, as well as an understanding of the target game and its mechanics. Analysis began with the research team browsing through the document to gain a general sense of its tones and topics, after which we developed a list of 10 preliminary codes for a pilot analysis of the first 25 of 245 total pages. This pilot analysis allowed us to evaluate whether the preliminary codes were fit for our purposes while also providing an opportunity to create new codes related to our research question. The research team then met to share our initial coding pass and any new codes we created. Through discussion, debate, negotiation, and consensus-building, we arrived at 15 final codes that informed the full analysis: philosophize, debate, cite, explain, narrate, evaluate, vent, joke/meme, strategize, speculate, celebrate, empathize, encourage, question, and answer. Each member of the research team then used the above 15 codes to analyze the entire document. We then met to engage in a dialogic reliability check (Åkerlind, 2005) to promote validity by discussing and deliberating upon prominent codes and themes that aligned with the research question to address in the results.
Findings
Our analysis of the focal Reddit thread revealed two themes in users’ pedagogical practices: instructional pedagogical practices and affective pedagogical practices. Instructional pedagogical practices refer to activities focused on knowledge transmission, such as those aimed at developing an understanding of the game’s basic design and affordances. We identified three trends in users’ instructional pedagogical practices: explaining, strategizing, and questioning and answering. Affective pedagogical practices, on other hand, speak to interactions in which users offered emotional support to other users, typically in response to the game’s difficulty. Our sense of affective pedagogical practices follows that of Patience (2008), for whom affective pedagogy “is as much about feelings and emotions as it is about learning outcomes” (p. 560). In this perspective, attention to affective pedagogical practices encourages a closer look at the various ways emotion comes to bear on the acquisition of knowledge and skills (see Pekrun and Linnenbrink-Garcia, 2014). We identified two key trends in such affective pedagogical practices: encouraging and empathizing. While our overall analysis included nine other codes as well, the six selected for this paper were most salient to our research question. In what follows, we describe how users’ instructional pedagogical practices and affective pedagogical practices helped sustain a harmonious community of practice and supportive affinity space for new and experienced players of the Soulsborne genre of video games. Specifically, we demonstrate how the subreddits’ members of various skill and experience levels collaboratively supported both novice and advanced players to acquire specialist knowledge as well as become members of this Elden Ring community of practice.
Explaining
Elden Ring is a highly complex game produced by a developer that is notorious for not explaining game mechanics. Thus, many players are unsure how they can or should progress in the game. The game is structured around various unexplained mechanics—some critical, others optional, all valuable—which inspires many players to seek help in digital spaces like R/Eldenring, where helpful explanations generally described how things (e.g., game mechanics) work. In this way, novice players were apprenticed into the domain and the community of practice through such explanations. Here we focus on two prominent game mechanics: Sites of Grace and Summons.
Sites of grace
Sites of Grace are a central mechanic of progressing in Elden Ring (see Figure 2). Sites of Grace appear throughout the game in the form of a small glowing golden strip of energy. Upon discovering and reaching a Site of Grace, the player has access to that location for “fast travel,” or the ability to teleport to that location in the future. Additionally, Sites of Grace serve other functions such as leveling up one’s character. One commenter, for example, noted that “leveling is only possible after you have met Melina” (an important non-player character in the game). Another participant offered additional information: “You gain runes for killing enemies. With runes you can ‘buy’ levels at a grace after you have met Melina.” As the game does not explicitly tell you how to level up, these community members provided valuable information, which is particularly helpful for new players to the Soulsborne games who are unfamiliar with how to strengthen one’s character to progress in the game. Beyond leveling up, using a Site of Grace also affects the game world and influences one’s strategy during gameplay. One community member offers a detailed explanation: When you visit a grace, all enemies that you have killed will respawn so that you can kill them again. That's the key mechanic in these games. You have made progress but used a lot of flasks [for replenishing health and magic]. The last grace (or bonfires in dark souls) was a long time ago but you sense that another one is near. Do you go further and risk losing your souls/runes or do you backtrack to the last visited grace/bonfire to level up, meaning you have to kill all these enemies again? Point is, by leveling up, your second round will be much easier and you have learned enemy locations, so you have actually made progress. Use this to your advantage by finding an area where that you can get familiar with and farm runes over and over again. Screenshot of site of grace menu.
As this commenter noted, enemies respawn after using a Site of Grace, so players need to strategically think through whether they want to utilize a Site of Grace, because even though they can spend their runes and replenish their health and flasks, they will likely need to battle the same enemies once again.
Summons
Summoning is another mechanic in Elden Ring that can prove incredibly helpful given the game’s difficulty. In specific instances and with the right resources, a player can summon AI spirits or another human player to assist in a location or with a particular enemy boss. Elden Ring, however, does not clearly explain to players how to use the summoning feature; thus, members of affinity spaces like r/Eldenring step in to explain this mechanic to players.
Some community members first encouraged players to get a necessary item for summoning AI spirits to assist in battle. One commenter wrote, “Get the summoning bell ASAP (look up how to get it if you must, as it’s surprisingly specific),” and another wrote, “The sprit summons alone are extremely helpful. Be careful you don’t miss to get the bell for it.” These suggestions explain the value of summoning and that the summoning bell is a required item for summoning. Beyond summoning AI spirits, players can also summon other people playing online (see Figure 3). Summoning other players is another multistep process that requires actions from both the person summoning and the person making themselves available to be summoned. To be summoned into another world, a player must place a summoning sign near a summoning totem. When a player wants to summon a cooperating player into their world, community members shared the following explanations: “I think you need to craft the Finger Remedy to see any player signs,” and, “If you find little crosses poking from the ground you can access the summon pool. Read the item descriptions in the top of your inventory you can summon players. Run around pick up the Gold leaves so you can see summon signs [to] invite a friend.” Screenshot of summoning area.
As the quotes above illustrate, the process of summoning is complex, and given the game does not clearly explain the mechanic, curious and confused players are drawn to this affinity space to learn about such mechanics. More experienced and knowledgeable players also visit this forum and participate as community members by explaining complex game mechanics to support the learning of their peers.
Strategizing
Strategizing, or developing a plan to achieve a goal, was another common pedagogical practice displayed in the focal thread, and it contributed to the collaborative endeavor of apprenticing novice players into the game. In the focal thread, strategizing occurred in two primary ways: (1) navigating the game (including its difficulty and mechanics), and (2) strategies for attacking and defeating enemies.
Navigating the game
Given the complexity of Elden Ring, there was substantial commentary on approaches for progressing through the game. One common and important strategy was understanding how to effectively manage and utilize runes, the in-game currency allowing players to level-up (i.e., strengthen) their character. One commenter wrote: Keep spending [runes] as you can, levelling is important…I always make sure that I have as little runes as possible heading into a boss fight (yellow mist) and to make sure I spend them just before I go in.
This comment illustrates an effective strategy for utilizing runes—spend them while you can, because if you do not, then you may lose your currency forever upon dying. Additionally, given the extra difficulty of boss fights, the entrances to which are signaled by a yellow mist, players should spend runes ahead of the fight to avoid dying against the boss and losing them. Before one can spend runes, however, they must earn them, which is accomplished through defeating enemies. Typically, weaker enemies drop fewer runes and stronger enemies drop more runes. A common strategy for gaining runes is through rune farming, the process of intentionally killing enemies, often by repeatedly doing so by revisiting the same location over and over again. One commenter recommended that players “farm runes for leveling by killing enemies and kill enemies until they drop gear.” underscoring that not only can you gain runes from killing enemies but also take their gear for future use.
Additionally, if a player dies, they drop their runes wherever they died and have one life to recover those lost runes by revisiting the location and retrieving them. However, if a player dies before retrieving the runes, they are lost forever. An important tactic for gathering and spending runes, thus, is retrieving lost runes. As one commenter strategized: Make a bee-line for the runes you dropped when you died. just duck and weave any enemies you alerted and run away until they stop tailing you. then regroup and return to picking them off one by one. if you get mobbed, run.
Attacking and defeating enemies
Battling enemies is central to Elden Ring gameplay. Enemies in this game are notoriously difficult, yet there are various strategies to productively and successfully eliminate enemies. Comments on battle strategy in the focal thread took two primary forms: general battle strategies and strategies related to specific weapons and enemies.
One general strategy mentioned throughout the tread related to learning enemy move sets and being patient. Commenters noted that rushing into a battle haphazardly was a recipe for failure. Instead, one participant suggested the following: “Best advice: take your time. Learn to be calm in those stressful fights. Don’t rush it. Only get in the hits you can.” Other community participants mentioned similar ideas: “Take your time. Observe surroundings. Remember enemy attack patterns,” and, “Learning boss attacks and learning when to dodge and not getting greedy with your attacks helps a lot.” Such contributions demonstrate the importance of patience in the game, as successfully defeating enemies involves taking one’s time, observing the surroundings, and learning enemies’ movements and attack patterns. This is particularly important given that suffering one or two blows from many enemies is enough to kill the player and cause them to lose their runes. Similarly, another commenter offered a general strategy for battle success in depth: When you roll you become immune to attacks for a brief moment. Each type of enemy has certain attack patterns. Pay attention to how they attack, some have a long wind up, some are quick. Some attacks leave them stuck in an animation for a moment. Once you learn enemy’s attacks you can learn the timings of rolls, when to block, and when to attack. Be patient and have perseverance.
This quote illustrates a few important points on Elden Ring battle strategy. First, that rolling one’s character (i.e., doing a summersault, a form of dodging an enemy attack) briefly causes your character to become invincible. This is a crucial strategy in the game that many players, particular Soulsborne newcomers, are unaware of. Second, by understanding enemy attack patterns, one can know when to strategically roll, block, and attack to maximize the damage they inflict on the enemy and minimize the damage they take. Third, perseverance is essential in this game, which we explore in greater depth in later sections.
Comments about battle strategy also focused on the use of specific types of weapons and attacks. Such strategies often vary based on the type of character build one chooses and develop (e.g., a sword-wield knight or a wand-wielding sorcerer). People playing as a knight can learn ideas from community participants, such as, “Try using a shield, the block and counter for light attacks is pretty good and takes the string out of the frenzied attacks of some enemies.” Another community member noted, “The game has jumping attacks and heavy attacks, and from what I’ve heard, unlike the other [Soulsborne] games these are vital to getting criticals on bosses. I watched a video of someone destroying [the boss] Margit like this, mixing in jumping attacks and heavy attacks.”
Sorcerer players also received advice in the Reddit forum: “Fire is your friend, once you can learn faith spells that should help a bit.” Another participant wrote: “Sometimes using an [area of effect] spell or attack will be key [which causes damage to all enemies in a particular area]. It all depends on the situation.” Another commenter reflected on their experience as a sorcerer and their strategy for defeating an enemy: “I’m playing a caster build, so I hit him with spells when his back was turned, then ran away from him until he lost aggro [i.e., his aggression], then did some more spells when he turned around and started walking home. Rinse and repeat.”
Questioning and answering
Commenters visited the thread both to ask and answer questions about Elden Ring. While we coded question and answer as two separate codes, we recognized how frequently these codes colocated together as well as how examining these two codes together was more illustrative of these processes than examining them separately. We noted three basic kinds of questions: (a) factual questions, (b) strategy questions, and (c) support questions.
Factual questions
Factual questions were those with clear answers within the context of the game. For example, one user asked, “What are runes? Sorry I’m a NOOB. Also how do I equip the ring for my horse? I could t [sic] figure it out.” This user’s questions, couched in self-awareness of their status as a novice, focused on fundamental aspects to the game. “Runes are the currency you use to level up or buy things,” a user answered. “Go to equipment near where your flasks are and select an empty slot to equip your horse ring.” Later in the thread, another user asked, “You can summon actual players to join you? How’s it done?” One way Elden Ring’s developers offer relief to players struggling to defeat one of the game’s bosses is through the game’s multiplayer feature, which allows players to invite other players to join them in the fight. Another user answered, Essentially, someone leaves down a summoning sign with an item, it’s one of the finger items you receive at the beginning of the game. They leave their sign in hopes that someone will summon them. You can see their signs by using an item (I forget what it's called, but you can buy it from the first merchant you meet). Then you pick the person you want to summon, and summon them. People in older souls games typically leave their signs by the fog gate of a boss, however there seems to be these statues in the game that encourage summoning to be done at the statues.
This reply, which walks the questioner through a step-by-step process for summoning help from another player, is characteristic of the kinds of answers posted to users’ factual questions. In this particular example, the user drew on their past experience with the Soulsborne genre (i.e., “People in older souls games…”) while also noting some degree of uncertainty around this new game (i.e., “…there seems to be….”). These two question and answer exchanges demonstrate how members of the r/Eldenring community support each other in understanding the game’s basic mechanics.
Strategy questions
Not all users’ questions had clear, factual answers, however, as reflected in users’ questions about strategy, or the best way(s) to approach some aspect of the game. A typical example of strategy questions focused on Elden Ring’s leveling system, which, like most role-playing games (RPGs), is organized around various traits (e.g., strength), which users can improve by spending the runes they earn by defeating enemies and consuming special items. One user, for example, asked, “What level should vigor go to?” In Elden Ring, a character’s level of vigor determines their hit-points (HP), the trait governing the amount of health damage they can take before dying. Given the game’s difficulty, leveling up one’s vigor seems like an obviously good idea; however, every point allocated to vigor is a point not allocated to the game’s other traits, such as strength, which governs how powerful a character is in physical combat. How a player spends runes to level their character is therefore central to the game: are they a player with low vigor and high strength, a player with high vigor and low strength, or some other permutation? In response, a user answered, “The general rule of thumb is if you get one shotted by a boss/mob while you are having full HP then you should level vigor until that doesn’t happen again.” As another user explained, “I found 19 to be the sweet spot for me. I rushed vigor early knowing from past experience how important it is to survive at least one hit.” After playing the game for a while, this user returned to the thread later that same day to add this: As an update, I definitely think that getting to 30 vigor might be necessary for late game sections. I am gonna hold back just in case and maybe rush dex some more, but that’s how it seems to be shaping up. I am splitting between END[urance], VIT[ality], DEX[terity], and INT[elligence], so I’m using quite a lot of levels, but only doing END and INT for gear and spell requirements, so hopefully I have enough to do 30-40 dex, and 30-40 vigor, or maybe I might prioritise END for armour vitality, idk.
Unlike factual questions, strategy questions open up space for users to share their experiences, insights, and intuitions in a more exploratory, almost collegial way. The above user’s reflections underscore the complexity inherent to leveling one’s character in Elden Ring, which demands attention to one’s character’s traits at the moment as well as how those traits should evolve for success in the game’s latter stages.
Support questions
While some players asked factual questions and others asked strategic questions, another group of players asked questions that seem to be looking for emotional support from the community. For example, one user asked, Any tips? I keep getting rekt 24/7 and dont rly know what im doing wrong. like I try to dodge but get hit anyway, I try to block but take dmg anyway pfff. And I try to fight bosses and dodging their hits and stuff and then I finally get a hit in and its like 1% of their health lmao.
Clearly, this player had grown rather frustrated with the game after “getting rekt”—that is, suffering constant defeat—despite trying to use the crucial dodging mechanic. The question, “Any tips?,” is a simple call for help. “Keep trying,” a user answered. “Just think of every death as data collection. It took me months of going to the park every day to have a sweet jumpshot, same thing. Things just take practice and repetition.” Instead of a specific strategy, this user offered a more abstract form of encouragement. For this user, dying in Elden Ring is an opportunity to collect empirical data on what does and does not work in the game, and he urged his fellow player to continue practicing, something any difficult challenge requires. The original questioner replied, “yeah but it feels like im not improving. Its like im getting rekt 24/7 with 0 improvement lol[…]T_T im just dumb.” To which the other user responded, “Hmmm. You have to have the mentality of ‘I don’t suck, im just learning’ to an extent…and just saying your dumb. At the end of the day repeat something enough times and your muscle memory becomes secondhand.” Borne of a user’s frustration, this exchange evolved into a meditation on attitude, learning, failure, and practice. These players were clearly attuned to the role learning plays in Elden Ring, as well as how it relates to learning in other domains of life (e.g., basketball), where people must confront their own limitations and attempt to transcend them through practice.
Although a lot of answers to all three forms of questions—factual questions, strategy questions, and support questions—were given by experienced players, we also found cases where newbies e answer themselves and thereby support each other, even if they are not always sure about their answer, especially when it comes to more complicated strategy questions that do not tend to only have one simple correct answer. The question, “This is also my first from software game, anyone have any advice on the leveling system? Like how to rank up faster or what I should upgrade first,” for instance, is answered by another novice player as follows: “I suck so I bumped vigor to 20 asap. Dunno if I shouldve, this is my first real crack at a souls-like game but I’m starting to feel stronger.” Though not a sophisticated let alone final answer, it clearly shows how even novices can contribute to the collective answering of complex questions and thereby support other newbies through the co-construction of the knowledge in the community of practice.
Encouraging
While users may have visited the focal thread to learn more about the game and strategies for success, which occurred largely through instructional pedagogical practices, they also received emotional support, which we categorized as affective pedagogical practices, one of which related to encouragement. As Elden Ring is an incredibly difficult game, the extreme frequency and focus of encouragement in this thread inspired users’ persistence and progress. “These games are not impossible,” one user assured, “as long as you are willing to learn them then they will be your friend. To all the people who are frustrated you CAN do this!” Another user commented, “Don’t give up. This game is like real life. The harder it gets, the better the feeling after you achieve your goal (like beating the boss). I am so proud of you. I will buy Elden Ring soon. Hope to see you there.” Persistence is key to success in Elden Ring, something that experienced players are acutely aware of. It takes time to learn the environment, mechanics, and the plethora of enemy types along with their powers and combat skills. Thus, experienced players (but sometimes also less experienced players) encouraged persistence as they welcome novice players into the Elden Ring community. Through such messaging, novice players develop an understanding that perseverance and tenacity are critical to progressing in the game and becoming a highly skilled Elden Ring player.
Other messages of encouragement were accompanied by Soulsborne memes. These messages not only encouraged success but also welcomed players to the Soulsborne community of practice. A common meme for the Soulsborne games is “Git gud” (i.e., get good), which, as the name suggests, encourages other people to get good and improve their skills. This meme was used substantially throughout the Reddit thread. For example, one user wrote, “there’s one solution to all of your problems….Git Gud,” while another commenter noted the game’s difficulty and then added, “You just got to deal with it, and learn how to git gud. Once you do that, bam you have one of the most satisfying experiences ever in a video game.”
Overall, users’ encouragement coupled with memeing introduced novice players into the culture of the community of practice (including its insider language) and supported the formation of their identity as a player of Elden Ring. Furthermore, messages of encouragement informed novices of the importance of persistence in Elden Ring, and by heeding the advice of expert players (, novices can become experts themselves, ready for future participation in the community.
Empathizing
Empathizing was also an important pedagogical practice in the focal Reddit thread. Given the difficulty of Soulsborne games, commenters often acknowledged the challenge and empathized with Soulsborne newcomers. Users offered expressions like, “You’re experiencing what nearly all of us did when we played our first souls game,” and “Remember, Almost everyone (me too) sucked at the beginning of our first souls game. Like a lot.” Such empathetic messages serve to welcome players into the Elden Ring and Soulsborne communities. Just as novices in many domains experience feelings of frustration and inadequacy, less-skilled players in Elden Ring may question if they are good enough to succeed in this highly-challenging game. Thus, experts demonstrate empathy with novices to illustrate that such frustration is a common for people in this community, thus promoting belongingness for new players (e.g., “We all go through that process”).
However, not only veteran players of the genre empathized with novices. Newbies also empathized and thereby contributed to the community’s joint endeavor in supporting players in a similar situation. As one user wrote, “I’ve only beat one other boss so far and that one took a LOT of trial and error. But by the end I finally understood the appeal of these types of games because, like you said, the satisfaction of taking down someone who you’ve repeatedly died against is so strong.” Such empathetic expressions were often paired with encouragement. “We are all proud of you. Welcome!” a user explained, before adding, “It won’t feel like, but know that You’re doing everything right — we’ve all been there.” In this way, empathetic messages from community members created a warm environment for this affinity space to thrive. Learning in hostile environments can be a difficult and frustrating experience—and this game is already intensely difficult itself. Thus, this community offered empathy to help other members understand that everyone experiences substantial challenges in the game and that perseverance is essential to progress.
Discussion
The present study examined pedagogical practices and interactions occurring in a single Reddit discussion thread about the video game Elden Ring. Following Lave and Wenger’ (1991) theory of situated learning as well as Gee’s (2004, 2005) affinity spaces, we investigated the Reddit platform as a learning site for the acquisition of games literacy, focusing on social interactions instead of individual cognition. Our analysis revealed two broad themes in users’ pedagogical practices: instructional pedagogical practices and affective pedagogical practices. Instructional pedagogical practices refer to activities focused on knowledge transmission, such those aimed at developing an understanding of the game’s basic design. We identified three trends in users’ instructional pedagogical practices: explaining, strategizing, and questioning and answering. Affective pedagogical practices, on the other hand, speaks to interactions in which users offered emotional support to other users, typically in response to the game’s difficulty. We observed two key trends in such affective pedagogical practices: encouraging and empathizing. Overall, both instructional pedagogical practices and affective pedagogical practices helped to sustain a harmonious community of practice as well as a supportive affinity space shared by new and experienced players of the Soulsborne genre of video games.
The present study complements previous studies on gaming affinity spaces (Duncan and Gee, 2008; Steinkuehler and Duncan, 2008) in two ways: (a) it analyzed a new portal (i.e., r/Eldenring) that has not previously been investigated, which is important since Reddit has its own distinct platform-specific logics in contrast to traditional internet forums, and (b) it focused on pedagogical interactions between players of different experience levels as they acquired individual and collective games literacy.
Moreover, we distinguished two forms of pedagogical practices: instructional pedagogical practices and affective pedagogical practices. While affective pedagogical practices have not yet been explored in the gaming affinity spaces literature, they align nicely with situated learning theory, which stresses the importance of member participation and support in communities of practices. The observed affinity space offered a rich environment for legitimate peripheral participation given (a) how instructional pedagogical practices were paired with affective pedagogical practices, and (b) how novices were appreciated, encouraged, and welcomed into a community where novices and experts are not formally distinguished. In the focal thread, everyone was allowed to actively contribute to (and passively follow) the discussion about the game as well as to acquire games literacy to develop their game knowledge and skills.
However, as others have previously illustrated (Black, 2007; Steinkuehler, 2006), in contrast to the apprenticeship case studies offered by Lave and Wenger (1991), members’ roles are far from being clear-cut. Although veterans of the genre play a prominent role in introducing newbies to the genre/game/community, r/Eldenring is not built on predominantly one-directional relationships between experts/mentors and novices/mentees. Indeed, as our analysis suggests, even experienced players of the Soulsborne genre admitted they still felt like novices when began playing Elden Ring, which may be a central appeal of the game. We also found many examples where newcomers were prepared to help other novices, both in instructional and affective ways. Therefore, we suggest that the categories of experts and novices must be seen as relative, dynamic concepts. In sum, the observed thread—and perhaps the subreddit overall—cohered as a web of fluid reciprocal pedagogical interactions between experts and novices, positions which are subject to situational change.
Applying instructional and affective pedagogical practices—that is, by explaining, strategizing, questioning and answering, encouraging, and empathizing—members not only taught those who directly interacted with each other within the thread, but also built up an enduring, shared knowledge base of resources, visible to everyone, as they collaboratively created the thread via posting, commenting, upvoting, and downvoting. Members based their comments on their own experiences, stories, tools, and problem-solving routines, which reflects Wenger’s (2002: 2339-2340) conception of an ideal-typical community of practice and thus offers generative conditions for learning.
Additionally, our study of pedagogical practices on r/Eldenring speaks to ongoing scholarly conversations exploring video games, educational video games in particular, from a problem-based learning (PBL) perspective. PBL is a pedagogical approach that encourages students to, as Savery (2015) explained, “conduct research, integrate theory and practice, and apply knowledge and skills to develop a viable solution to a defined problem” (p. 12). One way to think about video games is as a set of highly situated problems players voluntarily solve through some combination of exploration, trial and error, and collaboration, hence their alignment with PBL pedagogy (Watson and Fang, 2012). While studies of video games as PBL often focus on classroom practices with educational games (e.g., Warren et al., 2012), our study of pedagogical practices on r/Eldenring demonstrates PBL in the wild. In other words, this study illustrates how pedagogical practices, both instructional and affective, authentically and organically emerged within an affinity space where people came together to solve problems together through knowledge transmission, skill development, and emotional support. In this way, the study lends empirical support to scholarly and practitioner conversations about video games as PBL by calling attention to the pedagogical dimensions of people’s engagements around the shared sets of authentic problems presented by video games like Elden Ring.
Similarly, our analysis of the affective qualities of users’ pedagogical interactions on r/Eldenring offers a potentially useful contribution to growing debates, especially in the United States, over the role social-emotional learning (SEL) plays in educational processes. Broadly speaking, social-emotional learning refers to “programs that attempt to enhance EI [emotional intelligence] and emotional literacy and/or the development of what are perceived to be fundamental social and emotional skills and competencies” (Hoffman, 2009, p. XYZ). As multiple meta-analyses of SEL programs have shown (e.g., Durlak et al., 2011), such programs have durable positive effects on individuals’ ability to manage their emotions and social interactions as well as on their academic performance on standardized assessments in math and reading (see Mahoney et al., 2018). Despite this empirical evidence, some political actors in the U.S. have criticized SEL programs as forms of ideological indoctrination, arguing that attention to students’ social-emotional well-being is fundamentally disconnected from the nuts and bolts of academic learning and should be left to families. As Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, observed, for example, “It’s not about how you feel about the [math] problem or to introduce some of these other things. There’s a right answer and there’s a wrong answer. And we want our students getting the right answer” (Algar, 2022: para. 4). Again, this claim is at odds with decades of SEL research demonstrating that how students feel about a math problem is deeply connected to their ability to arrive at the correct answer, which is equally true for the many other academic challenges students encounter at school. Therefore, just as our study demonstrates PBL in the wild, we suggest that it also illustrates SEL in the wild. When members of r/Eldenring attempted to help each other navigate the game’s challenges, attention to how each other felt about themselves in relation to the game emerged intuitively and organically as a key pedagogical practice. A minor point, perhaps—but we offer it as a potentially useful data point in the ongoing debates about whether and how SEL, which we have framed as affective pedagogical practices, should be taken up in formal schooling.
While this study contributes to the literature on affinity spaces and communities of practice as well as the discourses on PBL and SEL, it also has implications for online teaching, particularly given the prominence of discussion boards in online instruction. One of the primary challenges of using online discussion boards is “the lack of participation or high-level participation of students” (Aloni and Harrington, 2018: 271). Given that participation and engagement impact learning (Hattie, 2009), teachers obviously have an interest in promoting student participation. As this study’s focal Reddit thread illustrates, including highly interesting topics can lead to substantial participation. Furthermore, given how the focal thread in this study reflected a form of problem-based learning in which participants had common goals related to understanding Elden Ring and strategies for success, online instructors might work to create discussion board prompts and tasks related to understanding and solving problems related to course content, an idea supported by existing research showing that presenting problems to students in online courses can promote engagement and meaningful interactions between classmates with target content (Dolan et al., 2017).
One limitation of our study may stem from our focus on a single thread, which was necessary since we aimed to engage in a detailed thematic analysis of situated pedagogical interactions instead of a quantitative categorization of disconnected encounters. Additional studies may more closely examine smaller portions of a focal thread to generate even more nuanced views of pedagogical practices that focus on specific participants, concepts, and discourse patterns. Alternatively, future studies may utilize a quantitative approach to demonstrate the frequency of various pedagogical practices. Additionally, this study focused on an r/Eldenring thread, and future research that examines gaming affinity spaces, including those that focus on highly difficult games, can investigate pedagogical patterns of different platforms, such as wikis or YouTube, which have different affordances than Reddit.
In conclusion, the community members of this discussion board engaged in a variety of instructional and affective pedagogical practices. Collectively, this group and their participation constitute a community of practice connected to the affinity space of r/Eldenring. This is just one of countless affinity spaces related to video gaming. Further studies of Reddit and Elden Ring would be valuable and may illustrate other types of interesting and valuable social interactions, as would studies of other platforms, such as wikis, blogs, and video tutorials, in conjunction with different games and genres. Given that approximately three billion play video games globally (Clement, 2022), scholars in fields such as education, media studies, and psychology have many opportunities to investigate video game communities and understand their passions, learning experiences, and social interactions.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
