Dark Souls takes place in a true dystopia, completely apathetic to any concept of a savior or hero. You begin DS1 with a corpse thrown your way and a dying knight’s prophecy that gets utterly refuted as soon as you clear the tutorial. This series doesn’t care about you, because you aren’t important in this world. Any…

Each game has its own rules for speedrunning. Games that have an in-game clock will traditionally be timed using it, since it is the “official” clock.
Personally I prefer an external Time Attack clock, so if the runner does reset, they can’t stop the timer.