Death Stranding | The Inconvenience of Nature
We often don’t realize how much of reality is constructed to be Convenient to humans, most of the time. Flat surfaces, solid planes. But Nature is not Convenient.
Cliffs, Forests, Deserts, Seas, even rocky bumps and deformations on a mountain. Walking through and over these is really, really hard.
Know Your Battlefield
In many videogames we have a ‘Vision’ mode or ‘Awareness’ mode, some kind of Ping or X-Ray Vision that allows us to see more information in the world than we normally could.
We use this to help us plan, and for the most part whatever information the Awareness mechanic gives us, tends to involve whatever the gameplay is largely “about.”
Usually you end up seeing this in Stealth games, in large part because Stealth games are about being aware of guard positions and facing, and the information that Awareness mechanics grant us in Stealth games is what helps them feel like deliberate, intentional experiences instead of a sloppy, chaotic mess.
Awareness mechanics allow us to play with precision with regard to a part of gameplay that the developers feel needs its imprecision and sloppiness reined in.
What is Death Stranding’s most-often used Awareness mechanic?
Those of you who know will understand why I’m struck by its hilarity.
In Death Stranding the “ping,” the “scan” from the Odradek Scanner does what a player might expect, but most of the time the function it’s often used for is to reveal deformities on the ground. Rocks jutting out that you can trip on, and lose cargo from, which you then have to pick back up. Parts of rivers which are less shallow than we anticipate, so we have to be careful and balance through them with the triggers or be swept away, losing progress which is very tangible in this world of inconvenience. Progress which is measured, moment-to-moment, by physical distance traversed.
Kojima and Team likely took a hike and pondered, “Fucking hell, walking through nature is extremely uncomfortable and inconvenient, but it also forces our mind to constantly be conscious and aware of the Present Moment.” In life, when you’re walking down a street, or a flat surface, you can often “filter out” a lot of information because you’re doing an automated, subconscious motion that’s repetitious and identical. It requires next to no mental energy to walk on a street, apartment hallway, or house floor.
Nature is different.
When you’re walking up a grassy hill with a rock here and there or a thick root from a tree in your way, you constantly have to step left, step right, kind of walk in these crab-like, weird, awkward ways. The mind cannot detach. It has to be Focused on the total reality around it at all times, or you’ll trip on something.
Nature Forces us to Pay Attention.
That’s really cool, and something I’ve never seen expressed in a videogame before in this exact way.
“Real Gameplay” vs Set-Dressing
Before Assassin’s Creed, generally speaking Walls would be filtered information. In most games, Walls are not gameplay in the way we think when we hear the word. Walls are merely obstructions, barriers, they’re practically invisible unless used for cover or unless they’re in our way and therefore an aggravating nuisance to address.
Assassin’s Creed was notable because it caused Walls to Become Gameplay.
Suddenly, Walls are Movement now. Walls are Stealth now.
Walls are Power, now.
Walls become something different than an annoyance, they become a desirable thing, something that not only makes you stronger, it makes you stronger because of who you are.
In the world of Assassin’s Creed, Walls even inform who we are mechanically. They’re a huge part of what even makes us “Assassin,” and define how it feels to be this kind of character-archetype. This is a major reason behind why Origins and Odyssey, the “flattest” Assassin’s Creed games in terms of architecture and topography, have left so many fans disillusioned. Like an aggrieved Jack Sparrow, we ask, “But why are the Walls always gone?!”
Making The Invisible Visible
Death Stranding does for the ground what Assassin’s Creed did for walls.
Before Death Stranding, the floor, the ground, were unseen. No one thinks about walking on the ground in a videogame. You just push your left stick and off you go. You press W on your keyboard and you move. Simple. Brainless. The ground is the ground. It’s whatever, right? Sometimes it has pretty textures but uh. That’s… That’s it.
Not so in Death Stranding.
In Death Stranding the most horrific, terrifying enemies are not the BTs. The harshest conflict is not the MULEs or the terrorists or the monsters. In Death Stranding, your worst enemy is the world itself. The very ground you walk on.
It is Nature vs Man, and Man is hopelessly unprepared to contend with Nature. Always. Only through working together with other humans in our real world have we even been able to live effectively in this world of profoundly inconvenient Nature.
Or so our society has conditioned us. Because while it’s uncomfortable, aggravating, exhausting even, to walk upon the terrain of Death Stranding, as it would be to walk among nature in real life, it is also undeniably beautiful. It is rich, and meditative, and it is something that for a large part, most of us who live in modern times have Lost.
It’s, in hindsight, incredibly obvious that Death Stranding had to be set in the world and setting it is, to even work as a game and as a narrative whatsoever. They show us how inconvenient Nature is by taking away all the Conveniences of a modern world. There are few roads. There is little flat ground to walk on. Moving through a world not Made for Humans, is really Difficult, and even moreso when we’re not used to it. Playing Death Stranding after a lifetime of playing games in which ground-movement is taken for granted, is akin to going for a long hike up a steep mountain when you’ve been sitting on your bum your entire life. It feels weird, and different. Our bodies and minds can do it but it’s alien and off, somehow.
Death Stranding asks us to play under those constraints, and those rulesets, making use of our unfamiliarity to create conflict, tension, and gameplay out of something we’re bad at just because we haven’t done it before.
It then tasks us with making it less Difficult, but not for Ourselves. Rather, it’s for everyone that walks those paths After us. When we construct a highway or a zipline, it’s rarely useful to ourselves, unless we’re retracing the roads we walked a few hours later. It just helps the next player on our server who takes that route, following in our footsteps. It helps them. Death Stranding is Selflessness, Systemized, and it tries to achieve that by pitting us all against a common hardship; existing in a world that was here before us, and that doesn’t care for us one way or another.
I think that’s beautiful.
Like Red Dead Redemption 2, I feel that Death Stranding is more obsessed with being Art, than it is with being a great game. But a great game, it is nonetheless, if a profoundly frustrating one most of the time.
