Death Stranding – combating anti-artistic sentiment

The most extreme double-edged sword of gaming as an artistic medium is the hyper-individuality they invite by design. No truer is this than with Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding. Game worlds are designed for the player, and the player is usually one of, if not the most powerful people within that world – responsible for driving its plot forward with their actions. Whether in side-quest or main story, exploration or grind, there is always some kind of positive feedback loop for every action. Not only are they free to, in many cases, transgress societal norms and express themselves as an individual more so than in real life, but each individual choice made is also fetishized and revered by the game in a way that simply would not happen in reality. 

Unfortunately, for certain gamers, years of this has dulled their ability to disengage from the medium. Their artificial sense of entitlement has bled into the real world generating a belief that, in the same way as every decision in the game is about their character, every decision in the games industry is about them or their preferences, and feel the need to complain about it incessantly if it does not go their way. Common forms of this are exhibited in the standard opposition to diversity and inclusivity, which usually reads as straight white male anxiety, where they project themselves onto a character instead of playing a character and then get mad that the game no longer so accurately reflects the world they identify with. I have been reminded of this phenomenon recently in much of the discourse about Death Stranding. I have encountered, more often than I can count, the opinion that certain people simply ‘do not want to play’ a game primarily about walking through a post-apocalyptic America, to which the correct response is ‘then don’t.’ But this does not placate a particular kind of gamer, who believes that every game must be, at least to some degree ‘for them’.

This is an utter misunderstanding of what games are

I think this comes down to a fundamental difference in understanding of what games are. To these gamers, they are quantifiable, material ‘content’ and thus subject to certain understandings of economics – namely conceptions of opportunity cost. The reason, I believe, that so many gamers are angry about games like this from AAA studios is not because they necessarily oppose its existence, but because they believe that in an environment with finite funding and studios, the time and effort that went into this game could have instead been directed towards creating ‘content’ marketed towards their taste. Every other social group demanding representation, and every other taste, is a de facto adversary because they are competing for finite content creation. 

This is an utter misunderstanding of what games are. First and foremost, games are an artistic medium, not mere ‘content’. Although repetition of the same formulas by top studios can come to markedly resemble a production line, they require vision and drive to create worlds and characters that people want to experience and that is where the genre is at its best – unlike any other artistic medium, you participate and shape the art through your interaction with it. New artistic trends demand new experiences and new methods for creating and framing these experiences. 

Breaking new ground is always going to leave some people dissatisfied with the change, indeed, if it did not would it really be change at all, as what art can really impact the observer without changing them or their perspective at least a little. That is not to say whether Death Stranding is actually any good or not – that is profoundly irrelevant to the conversation – most of the discourse centres on whether or not it should exist at all because its gameplay borders on tedium, for some, and many of the crowd who suggest games should be ‘apolitical’ are dismayed by its critique of modern America. My responses to these are twofold: firstly, the slow pace and the walking is intended to emphasise the effects of the collaboration and worldbuilding done by other players in the shared world environment. Its meant to be a kind of ambience that helps evoke the feelings Kojima is aiming for – the warmth of community arising out of a desolate mess. 

Death Stranding is not for everyone

The gameplay is subservient to the message and the feeling, not the other way around. It is about what you take away from the game, not what you put into it, which profoundly challenges some members of a generation brought up on games that require continual and narratively inconsequential grinding. Secondly, beyond the ridiculous notion of expecting a Kojima game to be apolitical, I have a bigger bone to pick with the premise of the argument. In a genre beset by military-politically complex shooters – where recently in Modern Warfare the infamous ‘Highway of Death’ incident in 1991 was in-fiction attributed to Russia rather than the US to retain their position as infallible protagonists – the very fact that a game about go-betweens taking arduous steps to go between walled off groups to try and create community, companionship and co-operation is deemed a heinously political critique of Trump’s America is very telling. If you are angry at this ham-fisted allegory for rebuilding America, what sort of America do you actually believe in? Though this leads me back to my fundamental point, Death Stranding is not for everyone. I do not even know if it is for me. 

Criticism over the implementation of its ideas is welcome and necessary, nothing and no one is above critique, but that is not what the discourse around this game has been. It has been primarily bile from people that see the creation of fundamentally niche art with massive budgets in a zero-sum fashion as decreasing the amount of ‘apolitical’ ‘content’ that they can consume, and I find that entirely depressing. By all means dislike and dispute Death stranding, but if you fundamentally disagree with its existence, it says far more about you than it does about Death Stranding.