Death Stranding: Or, How I Rediscovered the Importance of Connection

For many of us, the year+ of COVID-19 we’ve dealt with has taught us a lot about each other. More importantly, it has taught a lot of us about ourselves.

The extroverts of the world have dealt with a lack of human connection they sought out and thrived upon. For the introverts, some of whom are long used to this kind of lifestyle with an extraordinary happy hour or two sprinkled around (not pointing fingers at anyone, except maybe the one in the mirror), this was nothing too incredibly new, but different challenges arose.

As one of those self-proclaimed introverts, I have learned a lot during lockdown. The surprise, however, is that I learned a lot from Death Stranding — a video game by Hideo Kojima.

I should preface all of what I am about to say (and I should’ve prefaced the title itself) with that although not the most open individual by any means — all of my coworkers, bosses, family and friends can attest to that — I try to be generally kind-spirited, especially during COVID. At the same time, COVID impacted me as an introvert differently than I thought it would.

I became siloed off from the rest of the world more than I thought I ever could, losing track of what it even meant to be an individual working within the greater whole of society and, to be frank, I dropped off the face of the Earth for most of the relationships in my life.

And, with that very personal detail now out in the world, this is where I introduce how a video game with the word “Death” in its name (re)taught me a priceless lesson: One of the most important aspects of your life are the connections you make and maintain.

But first, I must try to summarize the core concept and plot of a very unique game in less than six sentences — here we go.

1. Death Stranding is set in post-apocalyptic America due to a cataclysmic event that has caused destructive creatures to roam the Earth.
2. Because of this, the United States has disintegrated as a ‘nation’ and all that’s left are very small and remote colonies of the UCA (United Cities of America) that are currently all disconnected from one another, along with what are akin to Doomsday Preppers scattered across America.
3. You play as Sam Porter Bridges, a freelance courier (ala post-apocolyptic Amazon deliverer) who, due to his connections to the UCA, is given the task of connecting all of these colonies (called “Knots”) together by traveling across the country delivering packages and linking up these Knots and Preppers up to the chiral network.
4. The chiral network is a system that facilitates instantaneous communication and data transfer across vast distances, something that is essentially a combination of the internet, 3-D printing, supercomputing, and time-dilation.
5. Connecting these Knots together is no easy task, as the world itself is the challenge and you must walk (or drive) through all of it: steep mountains, windy hills, rivers that will sweep you and your cargo away, snow-capped mountains that drain your stamina quickly, oh and rain (called Timefall) that will literally ruin your packages by aging them so quickly they disintegrate.

Did I do a good job? I did it in five and I feel like there’s only one run-on, so I call that a win in my book!

What is more important than the actual plot, however, are the mechanics of the game. Although a single player game, it is technically multiplayer, but it is asynchronous.

For example, with ladders or climbing anchors, not only are the ones you place down in your world there, but other player’s ladders and climbing anchors are there too. There are some stipulations to this:

1. You have to be connected to the internet (duh!)
2. You must connect the surrounding ‘area’ to the chiral network before other player’s structures show up (this is so you can’t just get an easy pass through an unexplored area).
3. Each area’s size is different, so you may be able to get 60% of the way there by using other player’s structures but then you’re on your own for the rest of the journey.
4. It does not load every single structure players have ever made, the map would become impossible to traverse if this was the case.

And this is where Death Stranding really began to take shape as a game about the very concept of connection. You will inevitably have to travel through areas that you’ve already been through multiple times (you deliver back-and-forth multiple times to certain locations as a requirement, and many more times electively), and people have set up structures in that area to not only make their lives easier, but yours as well. People will come together to donate their materials to create a road network that spans most of the map. People will create generators for your vehicles or shelters from the rain in spots where it’s frequent. People will go out of their way to take difficult paths from point A to B with the explicit intent of making the next person’s life easier.

That path you’re traveling has been likely traveled before (Death Stranding will literally create a dirt path in the game if a certain path is walked enough) and is full of items that other players have left behind: things like bridges, generators, ziplines, vehicles, ladders, shelters, and more that will help you on your journey forward.

And, if that path hasn’t been traveled before, you can be the literal trailblazer and make the people that walk that path in the future have an easier time thanks to you. This system is so effective in fact that, if structures like bridges are put in the right place, it’ll completely change the ‘standard’ way of going to a location!

This creates the foundation of Death Stranding’s core theme, that although we may be physically alone and apart from one another, there are people just like you and me out there. These game systems remind us, constantly, that the connections between us make all of us stronger and that being and doing good helps everyone in the long run.

When you’re making that long trek up a mountain or through a snowstorm, you want to bring the best motorcycle, ziplines, ladders, etc. you have because not only does it make your life easier but, when you get as far as you could with that bike, you can just get off of it and someone else will be able to use it when they get to that point.

You’re not just preparing for your future.

You’re preparing for everyone’s future.

These systems coalesce into making you, the player, feel like you are part of something much greater than yourself. Not only do you feel compassion from others, you want to be compassionate back.

As a personal example, whenever I was going to a new location I would bring tons of ziplines with me, not only to make my life easier when I had to make return trips, but to make other player’s return trips easier — as well as their initial journey. Because when the game loads in other player’s ziplines, it only loads in one of two of the required connections. So instead of getting an easy skip past all the challenges, you have to finish the zipline network yourself (but you get help from others).

What ends up happening is that you bring your own ziplines to complete the connection, or you use your own ziplines to connect two ziplines from other players that are too far apart for them to connect on their own, or you bring ziplines to make your own network. This creates a domino effect. Because you’re trying to complete a connection, you end up creating a zipline, which then gets loaded into someone else’s world, and they’ll want to complete that connection so they’ll create a zipline, which will then get loaded into someone else’s world and…you get the point.

Pictured: Those blue goal-post looking things are ziplines. All the blue ones are ones I put down, while the green are the ones that have loaded in from other players’ maps. To belabor the point I was making above, the red lines I have poorly drawn in Paint 3D show where I have either connected my zipline network to the shared network or places where I rely on the shared network entirely. That winding yellow line is the road that can be created, usually through multiple players’ donations of materials.

Hideo Kojima crafted these systems with the intent to foster this kind of positivity. In one interview he states:

In games we default to doing things that benefit us: If I do this, I’ll power up; if I do that, I’ll make money. Even building bridges is motivated by personal gain — I want to get across this gap, so I’ll build a bridge. But the bridges you build in Death Stranding are shared with other players in the world, and they’ll give your bridge a ‘like’ when they use it. Once that happens you start thinking things like, ‘Huh, maybe that was a good spot for a bridge,’ and then you build your next bridge in a spot that helps others as well as yourself…Though I will say the staff hated the idea of including just ‘likes’ in the game. They kept saying, “Who would bother giving something a ‘like’ if it doesn’t do anything for them?”

Just as a quick note, likes have zero effect on your character, it’s just a number that goes up when you help others. However, players are given the option of giving more likes if they want. If your likes are really high, it shows that you have helped a lot of people. And that’s the whole point. Helping others if for no other reason than to say to yourself “I made someone’s life a little easier today”. And that small connection makes you feel good, and it probably made the other person feel good too.

Kojima made this game as a reactionary push-back against what the internet has become these days (somehow ringing more true today than in 2019, the year the game was released). The internet is amazing and has done a lot of good for the world, but it has also done a lot of, well, not-so-good. A lot of our connection to the outside world (especially now) comes from the internet — and that has its own drawbacks. The internet can be spiteful, hateful, hurtful, and at times can even make you feel bad to be a human (at least that’s how I feel at times).

Kojima echoes this in the very same interview where he says:

The internet can directly connect players, certainly. But some people use the anonymity that [it] affords to do and say hurtful things to people without a second thought. Even in games we get online to pick up guns and shoot at each other. Technology can connect the entire world in real-time, and that’s all we can think to do with it. I think a lot of people could be pretty sick of the internet.

So, with this philosophy behind him, he crafted a game where, even if it was just for the time you were playing it, you were a part of something bigger, creating connections with others around the world and trying to help them as much as you can. I cannot tell you how many times I have been saved by someone else’s motorcycle, or I was running low on battery for my truck and just happened to find a generator in the middle of nowhere. Those people helped me and, because of that, I try my best to pay it forward. And that’s really what Death Stranding has (re)taught me.

This is crystallized at the end of the game, where (I won’t spoil everything!) a character tells Sam (who is effectively a stand-in for the player), “They told me your name was Sam Porter, but you’re Sam Bridges…my bridge to the future…”

If this wasn’t Kojima slapping the player in the face with the idea that the connections you make will outlive you and bridge you from the now to the future then I’m not sure what else could do it. The player is the bridge to the future. And, on some level, the players of Death Stranding are Kojima’s bridge to the future. He forced all these people to connect to one another, willing or not, and hopes that this taste of cooperation and connection will continue into the future — a butterfly effect of sorts.

All these tiny connections you make, whether it’s the people you meet at the Starbucks you go to every morning, or the person running the front desk of your apartment complex, they mean things — and can mean a lot even if they’re a stranger.

Then there’s the bigger connections, the ones to your family, your community, your friends, your coworkers, those mean a lot too. The game forces you to examine those connections and ask yourself, as Kojima states:

What does it mean to be connected? It means taking some measure of responsibility, which can be a very dangerous thing…In Death Stranding, while there is some distance between you and these people, the game puts you in situations where you end up making connections you have to take responsibility for. These aren’t just people you meet and form a brief bond with only to deny you ever knew them later, and that exposes you to a bit of risk…

The game reminds you to be considerate of others and to think with others in mind (both in the game and without), to put your best foot forward and always try to lay the groundwork to make peoples’ lives easier in the future (and, yes, SOPs do count).

Kojima hopes that Death Stranding “[makes] you think deeply about what it means to be connected to someone else. Your response to it will vary, I’m sure, whether you decide to visit family you haven’t seen in some time or are just a little nicer to the delivery person the next time they drop off a package.”

And, if you’re still reading, I hope you think about that too.

Fun fact: This game literally would not have been made if it wasn’t for the connections that Kojima had made throughout his career (one of which was a fan of his who worked at a bank and that’s how he was even able to get a loan to fund this game’s development). You can read more about that here.

Another fun fact: I only quoted one article the entire story so any hyperlink you choose will bring you the same place — all bridges lead to the same place. Get it?