I thought that Death Stranding is about loneliness; that I wander alone through a beautiful landscape for a long time, searching for the meaning of Death Stranding. The landscape is beautiful, but I never feel alone, everyone wants to talk to me. Message notifications beep, people call me. I receive hundreds of mails. I am glad when I leave the area with network reception and find some tranquillity. But you must read your mails in Death Stranding, for example, to start the next mission or to get the crucial clue to move on. If you don’t read your mails and stand around somewhere too long looking around, someone will call and ask if have already read your mails. There is a Steam achievement for reading hundred mails. I did not get it.
Wondering what the game is about is more interesting than playing the game itself. In the game, I spend hours navigating the menu. I browse through pages of submenus, I confirm and revoke, I select, I change the distribution of my cargo, I scroll through job descriptions. The landscape of Death Stranding is the menu. I do all this to deliver packages. You could say that Death Stranding is about delivering packages. But is this a satisfactory answer? Is delivering packages what the game is about?
Each of my deliveries is awesome and I get lots of Likes for it. It is not difficult to deliver the cargo. Lost packages are scattered all over the place. I orient myself by intrusive markers. I wonder why packages are not transported by helicopter or underground pneumatic tubes. When I drop off a package at some bunker where a lonely prepper lives, the prepper is happy and tells me how great I am. When I have delivered packages to a bunker several times, and then approach again, a holographic image shows the prepper jumping up and down like an excited child. They wave at me and shout Hey Sam! I bring the joys of civilization with my deliveries; the people in the bunkers say that I’m a true hero.
I don’t want to interact with other players online. It annoys me that there are markers everywhere and even worse are the signs from other players. Most annoying: At the spot where I have relieved my bladder of all that Monster energy, a mushroom grows. When I walk across the landscape, I see the mushrooms other players have left behind. It is disgusting, I don’t want to see where other people have peed. I disable all online multiplayer features than I can. I am probably going against what author Hideo Kojima wants me to do, but the text that I read is the text that I read, and not the text that the author wants me to read.
Death Stranding is like an anti-Western, a Western inverted. I am the civilization pushing from the East into the fragmented West, taking lonely preppers into joining the network and leading them back to civilization so they can ... I don’t know; each character is portrayed as missing the community, but at the same time, the united bunker people of America are not a real community; belonging to them just means sharing the prospect of fading away in a bunker with entertainment stuff and mails. But Death Stranding is about community, that is for sure: About reconnecting people separated from each other; I dispel their mistrust and create a new community. These are my tasks and that is what Die-Hard Man tells me; Die-Hard Man: the character who gives me new assignments and mentions America in every other sentence. At one point he says the goal is to make America whole again. I shiver: Make America whole again? The game has come out in 2019, in the heyday of Trumpism, when Make America Great Again was repeated ad nauseam. Wasn’t society divided by such slogans? Is Death Stranding a commentary on that? Is it us sitting in bunkers (playing Death Stranding) longing to be rejoined with others? What kind of community is that supposed to be? Is the game making fun of it? Is it making fun of me? Is this what the game is about?
Death Stranding shows that a divided society can be brought back together. Those separated from each other are united by the desire to collectively consume entertainment (united staring at the screen). I deliver giant gorilla figurines to the Film Director, fertilizer for bonsai trees to the Elder, an old board game to the Collector. As different as we all may be – we are film directors, cosplayers, photographers, jihadists, Trump voters, anti-vaxxers –, we all rejoice over the packages that a kind courier delivers to the entrance of our bunker. The divided society reunited as a community of consumers, an association of possessive people.
However, in Death Stranding, package delivery is not just positive. The logo of Sam’s delivery company, Bridges, shows a spider web stretching across the USA. It looks creepy. The logo of the other delivery company in the game, Fragile Express, is two skeleton hands. What companies have such strange logos? Also, the inclusion into the network of America is presented ambivalently: As a member of America, I must equip a wearable computer called ‘handcuff’. The handcuffs symbolize that I am connected to other people, and at the same time I receive mails and phone calls through them, and Die-Hard Man can monitor my vital signs.
Sam doesn’t care. He hardly talks, he expresses no inclinations or passions, like a cowboy. His only interest is not being touched, but since no one ever comes out of the bunker anyway, there is no one to touch him.
What is Death Stranding about? You might say: It is about building the network of America. Or you might say: It is about finding out why the dinosaurs became extinct. But are such answers satisfactory?
I wonder: What happened in other countries, did Death strand there too? Or is that not important, because “America” is just a metaphor for mankind gone mad? I wonder if I actually do connect people in Death Stranding. Do I care about the preppers? I am not sure if Sam even exchanges a single word with any of them. He does not answer their mails. If Sam says anything at all, he makes it clear what he is thinking in a few words. For example, when someone talks to him about America, he says, why don’t you save the shit for someone who cares, fuck America. Maybe the idea of healing a divided society through package deliveries is too utopian. Maybe Sam does not connect to others, but to himself? Maybe Death Stranding is about a man reconnecting with his feelings?
In comparison to another game, Journey, Death Stranding seems megalomaniacal: Sam is, I am, supposed to replace Amazon, heal a divided society, reconnect an entire continent, and prevent the end of the world. With Journey, the developers wanted “to evoke in the player a sense of smallness and wonder and to forge an emotional connection between them and the anonymous players they meet along the way” (Wikipedia), meaning that players should create an emotional bond with another being. This is a more modest task but something that can succeed.
At the end of Death Stranding, I am a Porter Grade 244 elite courier and have received 124.118 Likes. At the end of Journey my companion stamps the shape of a heart into the snow on the mountain.
Zu /texte.