Created by Steve Russell and assisted by other members of the Tech Model Railroad Club at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the earliest known computer game with a directly interactive avatar is Spacewar! (1962). Created as a new type of display hack for the PDP-1 computer, two players take independent control of duelling spaceships flying around a central Heavy Star (Levy 1994: 57). With opposing torpedoes and a dangerous planet to compete against, the end result for one of the ships is an unsophisticated ‘random dot-burst’ (Graetz 2003: 48). This game-halting explosion is the first death state in an interactive computer game. Spacewar! awards the victorious player a point, an identical new ship appears for the defeated player, and battle recommences. From this beginning, death has been an integral part of the software-led videogame experience, with it becoming more ubiquitous in this medium than in any other pop-cultural form. Over 50 years later, Death Stranding, directed by Hideo Kojima, features multiple visions of death and resurrection, but it also moves on from the minimalistic representation of avatar fatalities in Spacewar! where it functions primarily as a mechanic by which scores can be tallied. Death Stranding is a deeper exploration into what death might mean, both for the digital form it is constructed within, and for wider social discourses or ‘strands’, explored through the ‘Homo Ludens (Those who Play)’ musings of Kojima and his development team, Kojima Productions Co., Ltd (Kojima 2022).
Death Stranding is saturated with death, but again as the title suggests, it is explicitly concerned with ‘stranding’: the interwoven connections that constitute the human experience and that of the world, and, equally, those that can become stranded or disconnected from both. The narrative of Death Stranding proceeds from a point in media res, after the commencement of the sixth Death Stranding, an ongoing event that has annihilated most of the planet and its population. Player character, Sam Bridges, is tasked by his dying mother, President Bridget Strand, with restabilising the Chiral Network, an information network that would unite the disparate American populous. On his journey west, Sam uses a Bridge-Baby (BB), this being a foetus procured from the womb of a brain-dead stillmother, to help alert him to Beached Things (BTs). BTs are anguished human and animal souls from an apparent afterlife that are now literally tethered to the land of the living and also, ironically, produce the Chiralium needed to establish a network for those remaining alive. In Amy M. Green’s comprehensive overview of ruin and connection in Death Stranding, she notes that ‘the post-Death Stranding world is something akin to two worlds layered over each other, the real world and the afterlife created by the BTs’ (Green 2022: 21). While this makes for a useful visual and philosophical analogy, as Green goes on to explain, the relationship is further nuanced: ‘The changes of state in the game between life and death are inconstant and far more complicated’ (Green 2022: 21). ‘Chirality’, that is a mirror image that is not exactly identical to the original, permeates this connection. The forward movement of civilisation and the self can never return to an exact, earlier living form, and neither can life find an equal relationship with its oppositional state: death; although, as demonstrated by the player’s avatar, they can be assisted by the strands that offer to bind them all.
In establishing the rules of the medium, videogames borrowed from the pinball machines that preceded them. Multiple attempts per game credit became lives that could be lost by the player, and each new life granted the player another attempt to get a higher score or to progress further in their game. Yet, with each new play of a game, the ‘telos’, which Souvik Mukherjee uses to describe as a playable ‘unit’ leading to a multiplicity of endings, is ‘not lost: it merely changes, turning into new beginnings and different repetitions’ (Mukherjee 2015: 145). Through avatar death, these games can share a ‘common telos (a very literal example being the ‘Game Over’ or exit screen)’, but in addition to the telos offering a new experience from the prior attempt, they also offer their own individualised experiences, distinct from those encountered by other players (Mukherjee 2015: 144-145). In their exploration of difficulty in video games, Jesper Juul points out that the role of failure, where Life Punishment (avatar death) is followed by Setback Punishment (restarting from a predetermined point), ‘adds content by making the player see new nuances in the game’ (Juul 2009: 238). It is from this loop that both goal-oriented and aesthetic perspectives can create ludic pleasure (or pain) and form narratological meaning.
The ‘Soulsborne’ games (2009-), a series of punishing action role-playing games developed by FromSoftware, exemplify the possibilities afforded by this circular structure. Discovery, death, and repetition form the cornerstones of a series where the player is ‘afforded a theoretically infinite number of attempts to course-correct each and every folly’ of their undead charge (MacDonald and Killingsworth 2016: 8). In Death Stranding, death also works to fold ludic expectations within the framework of the diegetic narrative, but to create a more overtly reflexive experience. Within the game world,
The full 2,900 word version of this article is published in Death in the 21st Century, edited by Katarzyna Bronk-Bacon and Simon Bacon, published by Peter Lang, 2022.
Carl Wilson 