Longing, Ruin, and Connection in Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding

by Amy M. Green

This volume provides an in-depth examination of the video game Death Stranding, focusing on the game's exploration of ruin, nostalgia, and atonement as its primary symbolic, narrative, and mechanical language.

Offering the first close examination of Death Stranding's narrative, the book also incorporates a strong foundation in game studies, most especially related to the concepts of immersion and embodiment. The focus of the book lies in considering how Death Stranding expands on the themes of ruin, longing, and the need for connection, and whether a reconciliation - on a community level, national level, or even global level - might be possible.

This book will appeal to scholars in a variety of disciplines in the Humanities and the Social Sciences, from video game studies and media studies to English, history, philosophy, and popular culture.

96 pages, Hardcover

Published December 28, 2021

Reviews

[Aisling · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think the strongest ideas in this book center around Green's analysis of the game's use of landscape, both in the sense of the literal geography of the environment, and every other human or non-human way that a sense of place is constructed. Extending that to look at the way the game uses bodies as a landscape was a nice rhetorical move, and I think it really works. Those ideas, alongside and supportive of Green's analysis of the role of nostalgia in the game's narrative really hold the thing together, and I think a lot of the extraneous stuff could have been re-oriented to give more focus and primacy to that central pillar.

There are some interesting ideas in here, and I do think the interpretations of the symbols that the game deploys is thoughtful, but there are a few too many instances of relevant information being left out or obvious roads to further thought being left unaddressed that I think kneecaps the ability to bring the ideas to any sort of meaningful point. As a result, I think the conclusions are kind of weak. Which is okay, I think the book is more about analyzing the things that the game evokes rather than developing any particular read or argument–I just think that Green leaves a lot on the table in places where she could have pushed the analysis a little further.

I also got really annoyed at how citations are deployed. There's essentially no connective tissue at all, a quote is just thrown in with zero contextualization–it's never entirely clear if the original writer was talking about the game, games in general, media in general, or just something else altogether. Green sometimes does a decent job of retroactively working it back into her arguments but often I felt the quotes served as a distraction, and made me more likely to lose the thread of analysis rather than bolster it.

[Martijn Van · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've written a few pieces on this game myself and was surprised and happy by the existence of this book. I gathered some new insights and would love to play the game again and write more about it