Good afternoon, beloved -
I don’t have very much of anything to say about last week’s election result, beyond noting that I feel like all the tiredness in the world has found me at once. It is, without question, an awful, terrible outcome, and I do not doubt that people will die in sobering numbers as a direct result of it. But I find these days that there’s very little I can meaningfully add to the pile of verbiage that attends any such shared event in our culture — and, in fact, that the greater the pressure is to produce some kind of hot take, the more resistant I am to even gesture in the direction of doing so. There are writers and thinkers aplenty more than willing to play public intellectual at moments like these, and I’m perfectly happy to let them generate the anguished thinkpieces and so on.
What I would like to share with you, though, very much, are my thoughts in response to the 70 hours, 36 minutes and 58 seconds (!) I spent playing Hideo Kojima’s PS4 game Death Stranding over the past month. If this seems like a curious inversion of priorities, well, forgive me. But it feels like the things I have to say about the game will almost certainly be more interesting to you, and are definitely more generative for me, than the grim resignation I feel in the wake of the election.
§ The first interesting thing is that I should find myself playing, writing and thinking about a game at all. As many of you know, I am so not a gamer (and, in fact, had to borrow a PS4 from a generous friend in order to play this one). Something in the space appeals to me maybe twice a decade, meaning that Death Stranding joins SimCity 2000, Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri, Halo, Civilization IV and Portal on the rather short list of games I’ve paid money to buy and play in all the years since I stopped pumping my allowance into arcade machines one quarter at a time.
I knew, in setting out, little about the title other than its raw premise: that you play a “porter” tasked with traversing the blasted landscape of a post-apocalyptic America, knitting isolated communities back together with each successive act of delivery and connection. And I knew very little indeed about its creator Hideo Kojima — not much more than that he is the visionary behind a fairly absurd and highly successful series of stealth-combat games called Metal Gear Solid; that he left the studio at which he developed that series, Konami, under acrimonious circumstances; and that the long-anticipated Death Stranding is both his first title since setting out on his own, and therefore something of a personal passion project.
At some point, though, the few bits of pre-release material that had been salted through the fan community began to filter into my consciousness, primarily through two MetaFilter threads. It was the latter one that really put the hook into me, with its spectacularly weird and beautiful video of star Norman Reedus peeing in-game.
It wasn’t so much the peeing itself that grabbed my attention; given that the number of requests I’ve parried from the CEOs of large Japanese corporations that their website prominently feature a mascot that farts when you mouse over it is “>1,” I’m familiar with that little-boy strain of scatological humor running through the culture. It was something complicated and threefold: that I’d been away from gaming for long enough to be completely blindsided by the cinematic resolution one could now render a landscape in; that as an “open world,” every single rock and blade of grass depicted in that landscape was actually there to be visited, interacted with, and walked over; and that I’d spent enough time doing hard walking in real-world landscapes a whole lot like the ones in the game to have some sense of what it might mean to simulate moving through them. Putting the overarching narrative and any other mechanical or theoretical aspect of the game aside, that was already enough to snare my interest.
But then I did read more about Kojima’s intentions, both thematically and in his design of the fundamental game mechanics, and the more I read the more I liked. In its aspects of stealthy maneuver and of exploration on foot in a Zone marked by literally otherworldly difference, Death Stranding sounded like the game I always imagined the PC-only S.T.A.L.K.E.R. to be, and that of course appealed to me given the cod-Tarkovskian spin I invariably put on my own wanderings on the land. In its emphases on a mechanic of repair and a pervasive ethos of connection — more about these qualities soon — it seemed like a powerful specific for the all-toxic cultural moment we find ourselves in.
And perhaps most exciting of all to me was the game’s surprising rejection of violence as a method of solving problems.
§ In Death Stranding, America (and presumably the rest of the world, though it is never mentioned) has been physically and socially fractured by a cataclysmic, evidently high-energy event of that name that has sundered the membrane dividing the worlds of the dead and the living. As porter Sam Porter Bridges, you work (yes) as a porter for a parastatal logistical and relief agency called (yes) BRIDGES. It’s your job to rebuild the land by crossing the continent on foot, visiting the farmsteads, outposts and research stations that survive, and connecting them to the “chiral network,” a matter- and information-transmission backbone that will bring them back on line as members of a functioning community.
You inevitably encounter human adversaries aplenty in your traversal of shattered America, from the near-zombified cargo-cultists known as MULEs to out-and-out terrorists. You’ll have a variety of lethal weapons at your disposal, too, and more of them as the game progresses. But the in-game narrative strongly incentivizes you to avoid using them: should you happen to kill a human character, they’ll become one of the powerful otherside entities known as Beached Things, or “BTs.” The only way of preventing this is by bagging up the corpse, physically hauling it to the (generally faraway) incinerator complex, and cremating it your ownself. Fail to do so, and the BT will rupture catastrophically, causing a massive explosion called a “voidout” which permanently renders a whole section of the map barren and inaccessible to play. It’s a great way to lose the game.
To finish it successfully, by contrast, you have to deliver, quite literally. And very often, that means collaborating with others, both inside and outside the narrative frame. As you make your way west, making lily-pad hops from one bunker to the next, you’ll be charged with moving various sorts of cargo from the regional BRIDGES distribution centers to the loose scatter of hardcases and traumatized isolates eking their living in the blasted land. Do this reliably enough, and with enough care and attention to detail, and you’ll eventually bring even the most skeptical of homesteaders into the fold of the provisional continental government, the UCA, or United Cities of America. Over the course of the game, you therefore get to see how your actions and their consequences transform hardbitten, profoundly self-reliant survivalists into participants in a functioning polity. (Here Kojima’s script nicely captures the ornery streak of conspiracy-theorist irrationality running through these would-be individualists, which is surely one facet of the psychic damage wrought by Manifest Destiny in the American West — though keep reading for the trouble with his handling of big themes like this.)
That accounts for the in-game cooperation. But Sam can’t even cross the badly ruptured land without ladders and climbing ropes, far more of either than he can carry. All the vitally necessary structures he’s eventually able to build — the ziplines, bridges, shelters and roads — require upkeep and maintenance if they’re not to corrode to the point of uselessness, and you’re simply not always on hand to provide it. And that means in turn that you’re reliant on the actions of other people currently playing Sam, in what amounts to a metaverse smeared out across the entire server space. When those other-Sams craft a bridge in their world to ford a raging, impassable torrent, build a network of zipline towers to speed transit across a vertiginous mountain pass, or leave a motorized trike just exactly where it’s needed, those things become available to you too, just as the things you build are available for them to use. Those Sams will leave literal signs in the terrain marking danger spots, places where rockslides or MULEs or BTs threaten your progress, and as you get deeper into the game (and establish more tacit connections with other players through the things you build), these helpful signs start to populate your own map. You’ll have a hard time surviving this world and its many hazards without access to the tools and information furnished by your alters, and the more you share with them, the more they share with you.
This is Kojima’s central innovation in Death Stranding, the reason he thinks of it as the founding instance of a genre of “strand games” as well as the reason I’ve been racking my brain trying to think of ways its core mechanics might be usefully extended to real life: the only way you ever encounter other players is when they’ve done something that’s helpful to you. If there’s a meaningful way to be a griefer in this metaverse, that I’m aware of nobody’s yet discovered it. (You do see other players’ screen names and avatars, and even this simplest and most obvious vector of obnoxious fuckery seems to be going unexploited; in my seventy hours of gameplay, I never ran into any dipshits calling themselves e.g. WERWOLF1488 or worse.) In a single mighty stroke, the very worst thing about multiplayer games — in fact, the very core of the deeply toxic culture that’s grown up around games — is nullified utterly. Somewhat unbelievably, in the universe of Death Stranding there is only goodwill and gratitude between players.
§ And these qualities land, and that pervasive ethic of repair is made meaningful, because the America of Death Stranding feels big and crossing it feels hard. A lot of the game is spent slogging across rocky basins or wading through hip-deep snow, and you feel every step. Your cargo must be precisely balanced, and you have to walk with care.
This is one of the aspects of Death Stranding hardcore game enthusiasts seem to care for the least, derisively referring to it as a “walking simulator.” Perhaps precisely because I don’t habitually play games, though, it’s the part I loved best. The game is astonishingly good at capturing the tedium, frustration, loneliness and exaltation that attend long-distance solo walking, from the hassle of looking for safe footing through iffy terrain when exhausted, to the sense of progressive revelation that attends moving through a massively articulated three-dimensional landscape, to the indescribable feeling of accomplishment that washes over you when your destination first becomes visible in the far distance.
Because nothing in this world is perfect, though, Sam and his work for BRIDGES are eventually folded into a larger and not particularly compelling narrative about nothing less than mass extinction. It turns out — and this really isn’t a spoiler — that a Death Stranding event has attended each of the five previous Great Extinctions in the history of life on Earth, and that the one whose aftermath Sam is wrestling with was the proximate cause of the sixth. Oh, and like the others, this mass annihilation is embodied and personified by an Extinction Entity or EE…that Sam just happens to know well.
This, frankly, is a stupid and an offensive idea, monstrous if taken at all seriously. But then, for all its pleasures, Death Stranding is liberally furnished with these utterly tone-deaf notes, or what I began to think of as “OH HIDEO KOJIMA NO” moments. Most obviously, to detect the ghostly, lethal BTs, Kojima’s story has porters like Sam depend vitally on the sensory awareness of human fetuses worn on the body in an incubator pod, but synchronized to a braindead but preserved “stillmother” elsewhere via the game’s all-important chiral network. These are called “BBs” or “bridge babies,” and Sam’s relationship with the BB he’s issued eventually becomes central to the overarching narrative. While this is all darkly imaginative, and “stillmother” in particular wordplay of an impressively evocative register, you don’t for one single second get the sense that Kojima has anything like the moral authority to be toying with concepts like stillbirth, or maternal death, or for that matter any of the other similarly weighty topics that eventually come into play. This isn’t Margaret Atwood we’re talking about, let alone Solzhenitsyn. BBs are BBs and stillmothers stillmothers because Kojima thought that a networked connection to the world of the dead, mediated through bodies that are variously not-quite-living and never-quite-born, sounded cool.
And this is endemic throughout the game. In fact, Kojima persistently confounds and reverses what he thinks of as his Big Theme of mass extinction with the biographical details he treats as mere character notes. In Death Stranding, characters are tortured, or suffer infertility as a result of uterine cancer, or relate losing their entire family to terrorism, or are harrowed by the accumulated trauma of repeated exposure to combat. These are much, much bigger events in any one individual life than anything as general and conceptually abstract as the Sixth Extinction, but they’re treated as throwaway drivers of turns in the plot, maybe at best as tokens of Kojima’s Seriousness. You’re meant to understand that these characters are conversant with loss, but are left to wonder if it ever once occurred to him that people playing the game, or those who in turn matter greatly to them, might have actually, personally experienced such losses.
Similarly, at various nodal points in the narrative, Sam receives emails from nonplayer characters either filling in the background details of the world they share, or hipping him to some new tool or capability that’s become available. It’s simultaneously a fairly clunky way of doing exposition and kind of clever, since it doesn’t interfere with gameplay nearly as badly as Kojima’s favored exposition-delivery device, the lengthy cutscene. Most of these emails are innocuous. A few, though are seriously problematic, and what makes them so is, once again, that a topic profoundly significant to real people’s real sense of themselves is deployed as a trivial filigree on the plot. One of these mails, for example, is called “An Asexual World,” and suggests that the rise of alternative a/genders and a/sexualities (as well as incels, hikikomori and so on) was somehow a premonition of the Death Stranding event, before stating outright that a statistical drop in sexual harassment in the years before that event somehow anticipated the extinction of the species, as “sex was the last thing on anybody’s mind.” OH HIDEO KOJIMA NO.
I would understand perfectly if these decisions prevented you from wanting to read so much as another word about this game, let alone seek it out and play it. They’re beyond tasteless. But for me personally (and I’m certainly willing to concede this is coming from a position of privilege), these cringetacular moments are more than made up for by the central importance Death Stranding places on the values of maintenance, repair and connection.
It’s our job to fix the broken world, Kojima seems to be saying in his better moments, in the full knowledge that this work is difficult and thankless, often painful and never, ever glamorous. And we do this difficult work even in the face of the end of all things, because it is what, and all that, makes us human. I can’t think of a more important message for a mass-cultural artifact to bear, here at the charred end of 2019 — and not merely to bear but actually to implement, in a necessarily limited way, in its core mechanics. The word I keep coming back to is “redemptive,” which is quite a thing for a game to be. Or any cultural production, really.
I’m sensitive to the limits of this argument. Around fifteen years ago, the now-disgraced venture capitalist and Jeffrey Epstein associate Joichi Ito argued that the widespread popularity of World of Warcraft would usher in an age of distributed, network-mediated collaboration, as successful raids in that game depended so vitally on real-time interdisciplinary coordination among the physically far-flung members of a guild. I thought that was fatuous then, and I think it now. If you’re going to insist that “a game is just a game” when pearl-clutching moralists draw a correlation between the popularity of FPS titles and, say, the sudden prevalence of school shootings, you don’t get to argue otherwise when the logic instantiated in the game is one of cooperation and service. But if games there are going to be, I’d rather they looked, felt and worked like this one.
In the end, there’s roughly 220% too many ideas stuffed into Death Stranding’s creaky narrative engine, a great many of them risible. I haven’t even discussed the issues with Léa Seydoux’s character Fragile, or the ridiculously-named gang of confederates that facilitate your work for BRIDGES — Deadman, Heartman, Die-Hardman and, uh, Mama, who serves as your Q. But Reedus turns out to be good company, across the many hours you spend with him, his Sam Porter Bridges occasionally muttering cynically to himself like a stoner Snake Plissken. The imagery is, at times, powerfully and gorgeously surreal, in a way not too many films I can think of can match. And there are tiny moments of wonderful strangeness throughout, there to be found if you look for them, or occasionally just tripped over. (“Hmm,” you think, “that NPC sure does look a whole lot like ACRONYM/Veilance designer Errolson Hugh.” And this is for the very good reason that it is Errolson Hugh, or modeled on him anyway, and that he consulted on the design of costumes and personal equipment.) For all Kojima’s acute and painfully evident limitations as a scenarist and a storyteller, Death Stranding is entirely his, and its persistent emphasis on collaborative repair feels particularly welcome in our time otherwise so given over to cruelty, rupture and disconnection. The dense knot of aesthetic, ethical and visceral concerns at its experiential core will stay with me for many years yet to come.
§ I know things are particularly rough at the moment for a great many of us, and not just for those of us reeling from the British elections. I hear from you about the difficult circumstances besetting your lives in the States, Hong Kong, India, the Philippines. It’s been hard for me, too — hard to order my feelings, hard to think clearly and above all hard to set thoughts to paper or screen with any cogency whatsoever. But I’ll be back at you next week for a year-end wrapup, including an account of three or four mind-blowing things I read during my first term as a student in thirty years, and I hope that these dispatches in some small way serve as a campfire visible on a distant hillside, and a reminder that in all the expanse of the darkening land sprawling before you, you’re not alone. Please take care of yourself. Let yourself be taken care of. And take care of the others who need you.
You have all my faith, as always.
ag
ldn
This is Dispatch from London No. 97 of Monday, 16 December 2019, offered to you under the terms of a Peer Production License. You are free to reuse this content, but must acknowledge Adam Greenfield as its author. ◊