One of my brother’s knees is six shards of bone held together by wire. The rest of him doesn’t fair much better, and not purely because of anything he was born with.
A life of retail and wage-labor jobs, of skateboarding and heavy drinking will do that to you. In my own way, my own body isn’t that much different. A once broken elbow, two dislocated shoulders. Skin that makes too much of itself and scars over, never in good places. These are small ailments and never real disabilities, but they still hurt.
In the world of Death Stranding I control how a guy named Sam Porter Bridges ambulates. Hideo Kojima may have picked that name because he thought Sam Builds Roads was too on the nose.
Death Stranding is primarily a body-action game. A piece of entertainment focused on climbing hills in the cold and rain, on slipping and losing all of my shit. I wonder if my brother would play it? Would my friend who can no longer go outside in the cold? Sometimes taking care of yourself isn’t that easy: we don’t always get a choice on how it catches up with us.
In control of our Norman Reedus body, we’re constantly in states of undress. Whether showering or stripped down to a tank-top, we see the exhaustion written all of Sam’s body. Red blemishes mark how he spends hours in the wilderness under heavy straps of paracord lugging hundreds of pounds of gear. Ghostly handprints reference the (likely many) times he’s been handled by the spirits from the afterlife, BT’s; but to me I see the handprints of all of the people who’ve handled his broken body. They make me remember the times I sat in emergency rooms at 3am, while a group of strangers put my shoulder back in its socket. It wasn’t the ugliest my body has ever been.
Every time I slip on a moss-covered rock or take a spill while running from something, it is painful. There is no extreme-sports like crunch in the audio, but it’s nevertheless effective. So effective that it almost always reminds me of when I dislocated my shoulder, broke my elbow. When I watched my brother take a five foot fall onto concrete. Sam’s body always carries that exhaustion and pain. Helped of course because Norman Reedus’ default expression in every situation is exhausted. No matter how many showers you take or how long you spend in bed, the pain doesn’t go away.
Sam will grunt and strain when you load him up with too much gear. He’ll comically topple over from one side to the next, swaying in the wind as a tower made out of consumable goods. Sam will slip down hills that are too steep and fall clattering to the ground, he’ll be swept away into rushing streams. The central war the player takes part in is not about one of the life and the afterlife, it’s one of bodies versus the Earth. Sam is the lone agent attempting re-tame a wilderness that actively resists it in ways that threaten to break him.
The dangers of going hiking in Arizona are many. If the heat doesn’t kill you, the animals might. If the animals don’t, maybe the plants will. Maybe you’ll be in a canyon that gets flooded because of a storm a hundred miles away. The reason I’ve been enjoying Death Stranding so much could after all, be because I empathize with Sam. I’ve lived my whole life in a place that wants to break my body.
I may not be building bridges or roads in it, but it replicates a familiar feeling to being out in the desert.
Every time I lift something with my right arm, the muscles in my shoulder scream at me. They’ll twist in ways that are uncomfortable, or the joint will pop. I’m not in danger, I’m just being reminded that I could be by my body. Death Stranding allows us, as players, to feel weight. It’s unique in that it’s a videogame where the physical presence of objects is more than a number we have to worry about getting too high (though it is also that). Why is that so important? Because Death Stranding is also about the strain the world places on our bodies.
Fragile is unfortunately the name of one of the women in the game, a moniker she adopted because her body was rendered that way. Caught in a storm that caused her to age rapidly from the neck down, Fragile’s body is that way because of the way she was betrayed by someone else. It’s unfortunately a trope that seems constantly used for women in videogames, but here it reflects the rest of the cast. Heartman suffers a heart attack every 12 minutes that renders him legally dead. One woman has a body that will not age. The many nameless Porters out there with you in the wilderness will be found dead, will be ground into the Earth for their jobs. In a statement on the gig economy, Death Stranding says: It’s not just us.
Let’s not pretend that this is the first game where the body is more than a weightless 3D avatar. Those certainly exist and developers have played with the idea for decades. What makes Death Stranding unique may be in the way it allows us to be exhausted. That same exhaustion that Sam displays often matches how the player feels at the end of a long journey. Up mountains and through fields, across streams and down hills. Too much cargo and you’re clamping down the shoulder triggers to keep Sam’s hands on his cargo. A dropped container that weighs so little may be worth retrieving – but an eighty pound iron tanker of water may need to be left for later. Too much cargo and a quick jaunt up a hill can turn into a sisyphean trek. Alternatively, a stream that once could be waded through may sweep Sam away and leave us a mile downstream from where we need to be.
The small reminders of my body breaking are all over this vidcon. Sam Porter Bridges navigates the world with a fear of touch, but that’s true for a lot of people suffering from injury and disability. Sam’s affliction is not any of mine, nor mine of his – but they still make me think about the world my body is present in. I will never die and cause a nuclear voidout, but my body will, eventually, betray me no matter what.
Death Stranding is a game about waking up and going out into a painful, dismal world that wants to kill you. Not because doing that will stave off the slow degeneration of our bodies, but because the alternative is rotting into the floor no matter what.
