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This year The Game Awards gave the Industry Icon Award to Hideo Kojima, where he also took the opportunity to show a new trailer for Death Stranding, which we only know is a game rather than a Björk music video because Kojima has explicitly said so. The new trailer has revealed very little in the way of concrete information except that Mads Mikkelsen and Guillermo del Toro are both in it
Kojima is one of the mostly widely known development personalities, an auteur of video games. We have a tendency to assume – not without cause – that every pixel in his games has a deliberate placement and deeper meaning. This has so far been very difficult in the case of Death Stranding, because the hard facts are few and far between: it is a Hideo Kojima game, made by Kojima Productions. It’s an open world-ish game with a story and some online bits. It’s an action game, but only if you really want to put a label on it. Norman Reedus plays the main character. Kojima seems to be employing all his friends like a less terrible Kevin Smith. These are the things we know.
People are trying to look behind the imagery. But what if this is barking up entirely the wrong conceptual tree? Mikkelsen recently described Kojima as the “Kasparov of video games” which implies he’s already thinking several moves ahead. What if the only winning move is… not to play? Trying to research through the layers of meaning in the Kojima onion was getting exhausting, and I just started to read the trailer imagery literally out of self defense. To my surprise it actually makes sense for quite a lot of it.
1. The ‘ropes’ in the sticks and ropes metaphor are just ropes
In an interview at E3 after the Death Stranding reveal Kojima talked a lot about sticks vs ropes, the idea being that sticks are weapons and ropes are… something else. Quoting Kojima: “Most of your tools in action games are sticks. You punch or you shoot or you kick.” He went on “I want people to be connected not through sticks, but through what would be the equivalent of ropes.” This sounds very much like a metaphor, because he said ‘equivalent of’.
The ropes thing was my first clue that all the layered metaphorical language and story clues is Kojima dicking about a bit, because from the context given you’d expect the ropes to be a totem for something like the social connections of marriage, and other comparable things. In the trailers people are just connected to other people with umbilical cord-esque strands. It’s not a metaphor. This game is literally about people being tied to other people. With ropes.
2. The oil is oil and the dead fish are dead fish
There has been a terrible environmental event. Everything is f***ed. This is not actually a stretch of the imagination given the current state of the world i.e. hurtling into socioeconomic abyss. Oil and dead fish everywhere has happened several times in actual real life. There’s no metaphor needed.
3. Babies are still just babies
The baby in the first trailer disappeared right out of Norman Reedus’ hands, so initially I assumed it was representational of the past self, or the id, or something like that, but in the second trailer Guillermo del Toro holds a baby in a handily portable pod that looks very much like a real thing. They’re just probably pretty important. I mean they’re important now apparently (some more than others, depending on your own perspective and status as a parent, presumably), but in a world of oil and dead fish they’re probably more precious.
In a world with humanity on the downturn the means of creating babies is obviously going to be more surgical-pod-based rather than natural birth. This partially explains all the ropes between people, and also why Guillermo del Toro is so keen on looking after the pod-baby he’s carrying around. Babies represent new life, so it’s a nice oppositional point to the death and skeletons vibe of the rest of it.
4. In Death Stranding you play as Norman Reedus
Not Norman Reedus’ character, I mean you are actually playing Norman Reedus the actor. The fact that Mads Mikkelsen has clearly signed on to play a future version of himself that’s become a terrifying dead-eyed special ops soldier who controls four skeleton soldiers via burning umbilical cords is a bold move, and he should be commended for it.
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