Tags: video_game, essay
I have recently graduated from Lund University and was left to find my place in the post-covid, pre-climate apocalypse capitalist hell-scape we call the Öresunds region. Coupled with an onset of a depressive episode and stress of a PhD position at a new university, graduation felt like a death sentence. I was filled with existential dread. However, thanks to some timely media about Norman Reedus carrying an unborn ghost-sensing baby across the post-apocalyptic US while being chased by a ghost of Mads Mikkelsen, it also felt like a rebirth.
Everyone, at some point, has to take a moment to sit down and evaluate their place in the universe. How do I - an aspiring socialist - fit in the aforementioned hell-scape? We can not stay students forever; at some point we need to leave. Throughout this ordeal I could not stop thinking of an often overlooked game by auteur Hideo Kojima - Death Stranding.
In this (is this a krönika?) I aim to explore my journey of finding my place in the world through a socialist reading of Death Stranding.
Death Stranding is set in post-apocalyptic US. For existentially terrifying sci-fi reasons, everyone is relegated to living in isolated underground settlements. Infrastructure outside of the few remaining cities is non-existent. Deadly nature, or what is left of it, has taken over.
It is the end of times.
You take control of Sam Porter Bridges (Norman Reedus). The name is both allegorical and literal. You are the reliable uncle Sam - the man who delivers. You are a porter, you cross the unforgiving landscape to distribute resources necessary for survival. You are the bridge between the isolated settlements, you also build bridges. The game is often comically unsubtle.
The world you inhabit is going extinct. The veil between the dead and the living is gone, time falls from the sky, beached whales are stranded ashore. You traverse this dying world, trying against all odds to reconnect America, rebuild some of the infrastructure, and stave off extinction. You do a lot of walking.
For all intents and purposes you are a futuristic Amazon Prime delivery driver. However, you do not do your job for any material reward or to profit papa Bezos. You deliver packages because you are Sam Porter Bridges, it is in your name, what else would you do? You do this all game long. The only reward is seeing how your deliveries impact the inhabitants, as well as gaining some social likes. These have no tangible value apart from being another avenue for the game to communicate its appreciation for you. All you do is make everyone’s life a bit better as a singular part of the system.
The game-world has no currency. When you require equipment or materials to build some infrastructure, these are given to you at no cost, no questions asked, the settlements will give what they can spare. The game trusts that what you do is work towards the common good.
As you journey through the lonely and passively hostile landscape, you eventually build up some infrastructure from borrowed materials and equipment. At this point, the game does something brilliant. Every rope, ladder, bridge, or road that you have laid down has a chance to appear in someone else’s game and their contributions - in yours. Your Sam will never meet the other Sams, but every time you use each other’s equipment you can leave some likes. Slowly, like a rising tide, a flood of likes starts to rush in as other anonymous players around the world express their appreciation.
You make connections with other players. Your character Sam, an agoraphobic and haphephobic individual sheds the comfort of isolation and rebuilds relationship with characters touchingly portrayed by Mads Mikkelsen, Léa Seydoux and Guillermo del Toro. Through my struggle I’ve made someone’s life a little better, I’ve made a connection - both as Sam and as myself.
It made me feel human. It made me happy.
Since the release of the game, there has been no end of snarky quips like ‘If I wanted to deliver packages, I would just get employed by Amazon instead’. Well, what is so bad about the low-key vibe of a game all about helping people by delivering packages? Those quips are so frustrating to me since they paint the game experience as shallow and single-faceted, which it is not.
Death Stranding is a stylish, technically impressive and expertly crafted audio-visual experience with an overwhelmingly earnest message - ‘Build connections, don’t lose hope, love each other while we are still here’. It is also odd in this way. The entire game is incredibly ludo-narratively syncratic. Which is to say - its various faces are entirely internally consistent in portraying this message in earnest… it just takes a shotgun approach to its presentation. Director Hideo Kojima, who had full creative control behind the project, will throw characters, symbols, ideas, exposition, gameplay, and quite literally blast everything at you to make you experience this feeling of building connections and leaving isolation.
Just like a shotgun, this approach is criminally unsubtle, but effective. It hit me straight in the chest.
Death Stranding has lots more to say in its uniquely earnest tone besides ‘be excellent to each other’. I do not find it accidental that the only way the game portrays survival in the apocalypse is sci-fi socialism.
It is difficult to imagine a world after capitalism.
The world of Death Stranding is such a world and the game conditions the player to understand what working in a system built for everyone to succeed would feel like. It feels good.
Of course, this system is just a dream. A carefully crafted dream by the team at Kojima Productions. A game system rigged to succeed, there is only one way the narrative goes. In a game where the presentation moto seems to be ‘show AND tell’, the explicit political ideology of the game is shown but intentionally never told. Audience’s implicit reaction to a word such as ‘socialism’ would just take away from the emotion behind the ideology - ‘sympathy’.
In the face of existential terror, the game presents the only path of survival to be existential sympathy, both for yourself and others. Self-interest and fear are always the last barriers to human connection and change. Sympathy can go a long way in bringing down these barriers. The game depicts how quickly change can come in the aftermath of the apocalypse, when these barriers are disregarded. We have to change.
When existential dread hits, accepting the feeling is not an option, and Swedish healthcare is slow to respond - a typical strategy is distraction. Read a book, watch youtube, listen to music, play a game. Anything to numb the brain. Doesn’t work for me, instead the brain reels against it and amplifies the feeling. I have one escape - walking.
Alone, no distractions - no headphones with music or audiobook blasting. Get dressed, leave through my front door and walk. It is just me, my thoughts and the chilly Swedish weather. During these walks, I can not help but think of the protagonist of Death Stranding - Sam Porter Bridges drudging his way through the existentially dreadful world of the game.
I find walking to be annoying. Very much like in the game, it is not difficult, but it is a slow and menial task where you actively need to pay a small semblance of attention to not trip over, make small decisions on your path, and respond to your environment. It allows your thoughts to breathe while still grounding you in the present.
The same grounding relief is found in the walking of Death Stranding. Every delivery you make provides you with a carefully planned span of 15min of walking. I have now done more than 30 hours of in-game walking. A lot of time to find a path, navigate it, maybe make an odd observation about what you’ve experienced in the game like:
‘Huh, the game invented a limbo dimension between life and after-life it calls “the beach”. It also widely uses imagery of dying sea-life, black sludge, schools of dead fish and beached whales. I wonder if Hideo Kojima knows that strand means beach in Swedish? Or is that where the word stranded comes from? Wait, is the game’s title referring to isolation in death? No matter what, when dying, you lose all the connections you’ve made. You are stranded. Damn this game.’
Reflecting a little bit, but still being present, I come back home.
I’ve been on a journey.
I fell into the abyss of existential dread which is difficult to express and at this point difficult to recall. My brain found it painful to exist. Typical tired question haunted my mind - ‘What is the point of life, of suffering, of anything, if nothing matters at a grand enough scale?’.
I climbed out of this hole not only thanks to some timely intervention by the Swedish healthcare system, but also thanks to my experiences with Sam. Just as Sam, I leave the nihilistic hole with genuine sympathy for the human condition and a new appreciation for people who got me this far. I find the joy of life in the small human experiences and sharing them with others.
Like the game, I’m trying to make a self-indulgent but earnest point. I’m trying to replace my existential terror not only with medication, but also with existential sympathy. We can not afford apocalyptic barriers imposed by capitalist self-interest and fear of radical climate action. We need more ‘sympathy’. We have to change. But will we? Well, in the words of Disco Elysium, ‘Realistically, 0.000% of Communism has ever been built. Evil child-murdering billionaires will still rule the world with a shit-eating grin.’ One should only imagine Sisyphus as happy. We gotta keep on trying.
For now, I’ll do my research towards postponing the climate crisis, but eventually I’ll have to leave my isolated shelter, venture out and game the capitalist system. In doing so I aspire to live a life where my actions hopefully have a positive impact on yours without you ever meeting me, just like in Death Stranding.