Death Stranding in 2023
Better late than never
Well, a little Christmas break became a longer break! I have not written in a while. Truthfully, I saw this coming: I taught CentreTerm this January, which means that I had three hour classes every day with students that were promised in-depth and experimental classes. This is typically a lot of fun, but it also requires a ton of prep, especially when teaching a new class.
My go-to is my course "History and Video Games", which is a pretty natural fit for this blog (I think I'm going with blog - it dates me, but this is clearly a blog). However, I am not teaching that this year! For a bunch of reasons I typically teach specific CentreTerm classes every other year. Too much of a good thing, perhaps. For a few years now I've been trying to settle on a rotation. I will likely teach "History and Video Games" every other January for a long time. What about the other, other January? I wanted to create a sister-course to the first, and so came up with "History and Science Fiction".
We are getting to games shortly. Don't worry. Though I have been light on the whole education aspect of this newsletter (wait... didn't I just call it a blog) so I think we're still more or less on safe territory. A quick review of my January class and why I think it's relevant. The sci-fi course was largely a film course. I wanted students to think about science fiction films as cultural products, as historical products as well as works of art influenced by history. This borrows very heavily from my approach to History and Video Games. Developers (and filmmakers) sometimes consciously adopt historical themes, setting, characters or events as the basis for their work; sometimes they are more nuanced or choose to create allegories or larger tales clearly influenced by historical experience; sometimes the historical themes emerge despite no conscious efforts by the creators at all; and sometimes the history around the creation of the product is just as interesting as the historical themes with which it engages.
We watched seven films together: Snowpiercer (2013), Alien (1979), Akira (1988), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), Silent Running (1972), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) and Children of Men (2006). Of all of them, Snowpiercer was perhaps the easiest for students to write papers on I think - the film is very open about its theme and its symbolism and the Industrial Revolution is a clear inspiration for what Bong Joon Ho is trying to say. Our discussions of Alien and Akira were quite different: for both films we talked in detail about the social contexts around the production of those films. Alien has clear classist themes, but the decision to cast Sigourney Weaver as the lead fit into larger conversations around feminism (and femininity) in the 1970s United States. It is impossible to discuss Akira as a work of art without considering twentieth century Japanese history, particularly the trauma of nuclear attack in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
We have these conversations in History and Video Games too - Sid Meier's Colonization is a go to, for me - and it was in my head when I played games in the evening. When I could. And when I could, I played a lot of Death Stranding.
Death Stranding came out in 2019. As I am wont to do, I played a bit of it and then got sidetracked by something else. But I remember distinctly loving playing the game. I just wasn't physically sitting down where my games are for long enough a time that I ended up doing other things. The game is a lot, and frankly well worth experiencing. As someone who has never been the biggest Kojima guy, this game helped me feel like I got what he was trying to do. And he is trying to do something. The use of music alone in the game is special, elevating.
As for historical themes - there are actually plenty of places the game does go and plenty of places one could interpret it to have gone. On the meta level, certainly, it's right there. I'm not really spoiling anything by pointing out that Death Stranding's setting is dystopian. More than that however, the game is focused on a clear theme of human connection and the meaning of life. I don't think it's a coincidence that I ended up with a spectacularly emotional reaction to Death Stranding when between sessions I was sitting down with students to watch and then discuss the fear of losing individuality and each other in Invasion of the Body Snatchers; or the transience of nature and humanity's need for it to be truly whole in Silent Running; or Children of Men's demand that we understand faith as a central component of the human condition. All of this and more is right there in Death Stranding as well. By the time it was all over I found myself a little stunned by it. How do I talk about this? And why didn't I finish this game in 2019?
A lot of people played the game in 2020 of course, when the physical isolation of its characters had special, pained resonance for everyone back here in the real world. The game is eerily prescient in that regard, though we have more coming in the sequel. I will have ample cultural context to discuss this game with my class in a few years.
Kojima's prescience is a fluke of course. The game is more usefully understood as a reaction to social media, the internet and changing modes of human labor in a global economy utterly defined by basic logistics, where one ship getting stuck in the Suez Canal can create problems for millions of people. The Metal Gear Solid games similarly tackled the impossibility of world peace and what that meant, written and made by people who came of age in a postwar pacifist Japan.
Though I never felt as connected to Solid Snake or any of the others as I did to Sam, as we trekked together through rivers and over hills, on our own but steadily inexorably brought into a community. Icelandic pop gently coming in like the tide as I rappelled down a cliff within first sight of my destination is one of my favourite gaming memories... ever. Kojima did something with Death Stranding and I don't mind being late to the party. Walking simulator indeed.
It's been a while since I wrote so consider this a belated recommendation to check out Bob and me on the History Respawned podcast discussing our games of the year for 2022. The podcast was a blast as always and we had fun!