This essay was written during a seminar on games & citizenship in 2021.
Introduction
The game Death Stranding is known and respected for its complex story (Clark 2019), as are most games by Hideo Kojima. However, the game received after releasing much criticism for its mechanics and overall gameplay. The criticism mostly referred to gameplay, mostly the combat system and aspects of driving (Webster 2019; Reimann 2020). Nevertheless, most critics could agree with each other on how innovative Death Stranding’s asymmetrical multiplayer was (Strickland 2019; Reynolds 2020). It may be the purely ludic or mechanically well-executed aspect of the multiplayer that convinces people, but the multiplayer also plays an essential role in how the meta-narrative of the game is conveyed to the player.
The story and plot itself discuss traditional issues of citizenship. For example, how the protagonist Sam deals with being asked to fulfil his obligations as a member of the UCA. Or how other characters in the game are integrated into a civic body that provides benefits to the ones who participate in forming connections through the chiral network. Death Stranding’s multiplayer, on the other side, is an almost cynical commentary on how citizenship in the digital era is formed. Connections to other players are not established out of sublime duties and rational principles but out of a narcissistic necessity to be loved, in a strict Lacanian sense.
In the following, I will introduce Death Stranding’s multiplayer and describe its primary functions. Moreover, I will introduce Lacan’s notion of love to offer a theoretical framework in which the multiplayer functions will be evaluated in a subsequent interpretation and conclusion.
Placing & Liking: Death Stranding’s Asymmetrical Multiplayer
An asymmetrical multiplayer is an aesthetical component that allows multiple players to interact with each other without immediate contact. That means player interactions are directed either retrospectively or prospectively and always mediated through virtual artefacts.
In Death Stranding, this plays out as we complete quests, deliver cargo, and roam the world. While traversing the game and its hostile geography, we use tools and constructions to make our journeys more convenient. These objects can be ladders or ropes but also watchtowers and safe houses. However, our objects transform here into actual artefacts that transcend our game to fellow Death Stranding players and their games. They cannot see our avatar, but they will find our ladders, use our ropes, and most importantly, give us a like as a token of gratitude (Ryan 2020: 302), a retroactive interaction.
Logically, we can place objects at difficult to traverse sections in the game in a most optimal fashion, prospecting another player’s use of it. Naturally, the game rewards thoughtfully placed and by other players frequently used artefacts with a plethora of likes, a prospective interaction.
Receiving likes has a minor but not unimportant intradiegetic incentive as likes increase our level and grant us a passive upgrade allowing us to carry more cargo. But the major incentive for liking and wanting to receive likes will be discussed in the upcoming section.
There are also other functions in Death Stranding’s multiplayer. Players can, besides utility objects, place symbolic objects like signs or holograms (i.e., like, babyface, warning, nice view and many more). Signs like the babyface are in a way symbolically arbitrary and difficult to interpret. They are one of many signs that players can choose to place somewhere on the game’s geography to mark their presence. Furthermore, signs such as the warning or the nice view can communicate to players that either danger or a beautiful panorama is nearby. Signs can be liked by walking through them.
Beyond that, additional multiplayer functions include sharing or requesting raw materials, completing deliveries for other players, and more. However, their description will be skipped as they do not add to the quality of the analysis compared to the two previously discussed primary functions of placing objects (utility and symbolic object) and liking artefacts (to clarify: objects transform into artefacts once they are picked up by other players and can be interpreted independently from their maker).
Lacan’s Notion of Love: The Narcissistic Loop
According to Zizek’s reading of Lacan (2011), in this essay, love is, first and foremost, narcissistic. Love is the need to be recognised as an imaginary subject that represents us in pure fulfilment. To love is wanting to be loved as a perfect objectification of our own desires. Lacan discusses and develops the notion of love throughout all of his work. However, we can derive a critical understanding of the pathology of the narcissistic dimension associated with love from his Seminar III.
“The person who aspires to be loved is not at all satisfied, as is well known, with being loved for his attributes. He demands to be loved as far as the complete subversion of the subject into a particularity can go…. to love is to love a being beyond what he or she appears to be” (Lacan 1993 [1975]: 276)
This passage describes the inevitable downfall we face in setting out an imaginary description of how we want to be loved. This neurotic operation has its origins in the mirror stage, during which we develop the desire for our own objectification. Our mirror image promises us completeness, voidlessness and pure fulfilment. But instead of understanding this profound misrecognition, we transpose our position with the mirror image, and we begin to see ourselves through a gaze that emerges from our phantasmic objectification. Nietzsche has already described this intimate interaction between our unfulfilled embodied existence and our ideal objectification of ourselves with the famous sentence, “And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” (Nietzsche 2008 [1886]: 68).
We realise that we cannot break free from this gaze, and therefore, we delegate the task of being recognised as our ideal version to someone else. We offer our love to be loved in return for what we desire to be. A destructive relationship to us and our world that is perfectly encapsulated by a cryptic section in Lacan’s Seminar XI:
“The world is all-seeing, but it is not exhibitionistic—it does not provoke our gaze. When it begins to provoke it, the feeling of strangeness begins too. What does this mean, if not that, in the so-called waking state, there is an elision of the gaze, and an elision of the fact that not only does it look, it also shows” (Lacan 1997 [1973]: 75)
This section makes more sense once it is read as a parable: “The world is all-seeing, but it is not exhibitionistic […] not only does it look, it also shows”. This parable confirms the suspicion that the imaginary other, the external coordinate that we ask to love us, is a kind of a shadow image, a shape-shifting entity. The other is what we need it to be for us to function as human being. The love, recognition and appreciation we need are determined by our distinct imagination of the source from where it transcends to us.
Love me for what I do and not for who I am
In Death Stranding’s asymmetrical multiplayer, we find a modification of the dreadful process of love described by Lacan. Here, love is detached from the actual consequence of having to face the abyss. While love in the real world remains a complex navigation between our neurotic relationship to ourselves while being in a relationship to someone else and their neurotic relationship to themselves in Death Standing, we are presented with a pragmatic shortcut.
Love is extracted from its intricate web of symbolic relations and repurposed as a simplified transaction. Love is demoted to like. The like bears the essential element of love, recognition and appreciation, but its associated coordinate is displaced. We are not recognised for our ideal self but for our mediated interaction with a world. Our artefacts are a mediated representation of our existence that becomes the rescue rope from the gaze of our objectified ideal self. It is like having the chance to experience the essence, the agalma of love, without facing its consequences. Alternatively, in the words of Zizek, receiving likes instead of embarking on the quest of finding true love is felt “in the same way that decaffeinated coffee smells and tastes like real coffee without being the real thing.”
Through the condensation of love to like, the game manages to obtain players as self-motivated members of a community that constitute a civic body under the intradiegetic framework of the UCA. Here, players feel no civic obligation to help others or advance and maintain the infrastructure of the UCS. The UCS has no constitution. Nevertheless, what the UCS has, being more potent than a constitution, is a social credit system that engages its citizens through a shortcut to fulfil their basic narcissistic needs.
Conclusion
Death Stranding’s asymmetrical multiplayer fulfils a double function. It is one side a social credit system that incentives and rewards social engagement while being on the other side a cynical commentary to contemporary social media. It shows on an interactive level the power of a social credit system that exploits the narcissistic dimensions of myself while cynically exposing our interaction with other humans via social media as dumbed down and alienated. While the game is conceptually about making connections and forging relations with others, it also acts as a smack into one’s face in giving a cynical reflection on how humans interact and form communities in the digital era. This aspect of the game may also answer Sam’s logic behind his decision at the end to leave it all behind. But can this be a viable solution for us?
References
Clark, Justin. 2019. The Entire Death Stranding Story Explained. November 20. Accessed May 13, 2021. https://www.looper.com/175811/the-entire-death-stranding-story-explained/.
Kojima Productions. 2020. Death Stranding. Sony Interactive Entertainment.
Lacan, Jean-Jaques. 1993. The seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 3: The psychoses 1955–1956. Edited by Jaques-Alain Miller. Translated by R, T Grigg. London: W.W. Norton & Company.
—. 1997. The seminar of Jacques Lacan: The four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis (Book XI). Edited by Jaques-Alain Miller. Translated by Alan Sheridan. London: W.W. Norton & Company.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2008. Beyond Good and Evil . Translated by Marion Faber. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Reimann, Tom. 2020. ‘Death Stranding’ Review: A Beautiful Story Burdened by a Dull Game. July 12. Accessed May 13, 2021. https://collider.com/death-stranding-review/.
Reynolds, Matthew. 2020. Death Stranding multiplayer explained: How online structures, Bridge Links, Strand Contracts and other connected features work. July 14. Accessed May 13, 2021. https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2019-11-08-death-stranding-multiplayer-6027.
Ryan, House. 2020. “Likers Get Liked. Platform Capitalism and the Precariat in Death Stranding.” Democracy Dies Playfully. (Anti-)Democratic Ideas in and Around Video Games, 290-316.
Strickland, Derek. 2019. Death Stranding’s multiplayer is rather unconventional. September 16. Accessed May 13, 2021. https://www.tweaktown.com/news/67603/death-strandings-multiplayer-unconventional/index.html.
Webster, Andrew. 2019. Death Stranding is a long, bizarre journey that’s both breathtaking and boring. November 1. Accessed May 13, 2021. https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/1/20941606/death-stranding-review-ps4-hideo-kojima.
Zizek, Slavoj. 2007. How to Read Lacan. London: W.W. Norton & Company.