DEATH STRANDING PROVES WE CAN’T HAVE NICE THINGS IF THEY DON’T FALL INTO PRESCRIBED BOXES.
Will publishers ever take a risk with a Triple-A game again?
Whether you liked, loved, hated, or were indifferent to Death Stranding is irrelevant, really. Me? I thought it was a game surprisingly accurate at replicating a significant-if-mundane part of my childhood, one spent delivering errands for a disabled mum around a South Yorkshire pit village. At times my mind shifted to the memory of my beloved six-gear mountain bike, ultimately torn away from me by a horrible scrote as I foolishly left it outside the fish and chip shop. I’m over it. Really I am.
Almost two months from release, it’s preposterous to be talking about Death Stranding’s legacy. Nobody would have asked Stanley Kubrick what 2001: A Space Odyssey meant for the cinematic medium a month after release. Fifty years on, Paul McCartney still fields questions about the inner workings of The White Album – released 1968, considered to be a work of batshit genius. Games have long walked to a different beat. Perhaps this is understandable. This is, after all, a medium that’s always active, always on; popular across the globe, it’s a medium fuelled by a furnace demanding comment and classification at all times. Those of us who play videogames are proud of the lofty standing our preferred form of entertainment holds. And yet I can’t help thinking it a failure that we struggle to treat our creators like artists, or even their output like art.
The release of Death Stranding exposed this like few releases have before. Thanks to the vision of Hideo Kojima, this is a game pitched as coming from a lineage of artistry. That the game possesses an auteur immediately positions it as a shape gaming-as-we-know-it doesn’t have a hole for. If you were perplexed about what the game was in the run up to release, it’d take another half day of actual play before you had any idea at all, while there’s an argument that the word ‘game’ doesn’t cover what Death Stranding even is. ‘Ordeal’ is a suggested alternative. ‘Duhka’ (the Buddhist word to describe ‘suffering for enlightenment’) is another. ‘Experience’ is my favourite. All these things are fine. Experiences beyond enjoyment – fear, confusion, frustration – all help us grow. The reaction Death Stranding received – visceral, histrionic, outraged – suggests games are far from possessing the maturity and nuance we might have hoped our industry would have arrived at by now.
SCORSESE UNDERSTANDS
When Martin Scorsese talked of “[a lack of] mystery or genuine emotional danger”, last month, he was talking about his frustration at cinema being dominated by superhero franchises. He might as well have been talking about Call Of Duty. “Nothing is at risk,” he continued. “The pictures are made to satisfy a specific set of demands, and they are designed as variations on a finite number of themes.” It’s hard to shake these words as I try to have a stab at what Death Stranding’s legacy might be. I’ll go with this: nothing good. In an industry where a Metacritic average will make or break the worthiness of a game to a publisher, the game’s decent-but-not-God-Of-War sales and reviews with barely one thread of commonality have surely aligned to create a warning to dithering publishers, saying, ‘Are you sure you want to try something new?’
I dearly want to play games that challenge me, that contain danger and risk, that make me see the world in new ways. I do believe games are a medium that can do this. And yet perhaps Death Stranding’s legacy will be to tell us that at the time of writing, we just weren’t ready for that.