Literature reference
In order to better analyze the relationship between asynchronous online and emergency narrative, I have searched related papers from Google Academic (most documents) and other academic platforms.Although there are few related topics (perhaps because death has been stranded for only two years, and related research is still very rare), I have found many valuable contents.
In this news report about Death Stranding, the commentator gave it a very detailed analysis and considerable evaluation and summary.This gives me a better judgment on the positioning of this game.
ROBIN MEYER-LOREY: Death Stranding: Is It Really a New Genre?.https://gamerant.com/death-stranding-genre-new/.NOV 24, 2019.
Is It A New Genre?
What makes Death Stranding a new genre is the fact that it was built to allow the community to connect and completely change the game over time in an organic, spontaneous way. However, what holds the game back is the way that it is too bogged down by other focuses. The core gameplay loop of fetch quests discourages many people from joining the community, and keeps players from being able to take full advantage of the most interesting parts of the game. Ideally, the ability to to join an online community that slowly alters the game experience over time would be accessible, exciting, and fun.
Death Stranding introduces enough new ideas and mechanics to qualify as belonging to a new genre, but it is not genre-defining. Hopefully future games will take advantage of the multiplayer ideas pioneered by Death Stranding without getting bogged down by mundane mechanics and a prohibitively confusing story. The potential for something extremely new and interesting is hinted at by Death Stranding, but the game does not represent the fulfillment of that potential.
Introducing a new genre and defining it with a single game is a very difficult thing to try to do. Death Stranding offers enough new ideas to set it apart, which is plenty enough to make the game a conceptual success.
The game is also fun for enough people to warrant a good deal of commercial success, so it is easy to imagine that its influence will be felt for some time to come. Perhaps the lasting impression that it leaves on games as a whole will only be calculable in a few years time, when the potential for community creations is fully understood and some other titles have taken their own shots at similar ideas.
Lin, Yow-Jian, Katherine Guo, and Sanjoy Paul. “Sync-MS: Synchronized messaging service for real-time multi-player distributed games.” 10th IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols, 2002. Proceedings.. IEEE, 2002.
In this report, Hideo Kojima indirectly expounded his understanding of Death Stranding.
Gault, M. : What hideo kojima wants you to learn from death stranding (2019). https://time. com/5722226/hideo-kojima-death-stranding/. Accessed 28 Jan 2020
Indeed, Death Stranding’s biggest theme is connection, and Kojima sees a world in disarray. The election of Donald Trump and the Brexit vote in the U.K. directly inspired the game. Video game creators are often reluctant to talk politics, but Kojima doesn’t mince words. According to him, all art, games including, is inherently political — our connections make it so. “We are living in the world,” he says. “Politics is always involved. I can’t create art … while trying to be blind about it. I put myself out in a game. Those parts will come out. If someone doesn’t do that in their works, it means that [they] don’t care about politics at all or maybe is just a weird person.”
Despite its morbid themes, there are signs of life here that betray Kojima’s optimism. As Sam makes his way across America, he builds structures that help him on his quest — a rope to descend mountains, a ladder or bridge to cross a river. If the player leaves these things behind, other players can find and use them too — it’s a kind of hybrid single player/multiplayer experience. You’ll never see another player, but you might see their left-behinds — artifacts that let you know you’re not alone. “Just knowing that, you won’t feel alone anymore,” Kojima says. And while I played the game, I could press a button to make Sam shout. If another player was in the same area as me in their own game world, they would shout back. I couldn’t see them, but just hearing their voice made me feel less alone.
Kojima told me that, while his game asks plenty of big questions, it doesn’t answer all of them — in part because he’s still trying to work out what the answers are. But he’s hopeful that players come away from Death Stranding feeling renewed. “I want players to think about these things and have the energy to live on the next day,” he says.
Kojima isn’t a luddite — it would be hard for someone in the gaming world to eschew technology completely. But he believes that innovations like social media have made it so easy to communicate that people forget to consider the humanity on the other end of a message. “We’re in an era of individualism,” he says. “Everyone is fractured. Even on the internet. It’s all connected, all around the world, but everyone is fighting each other.”
Neto, Abel, Pedro Cardoso, and Miguel Carvalhais. “Asynchronous Interactions Between Players and Game World.” International Conference on Design and Digital Communication. Springer, Cham, 2020.
ROBIN MEYER-LOREY: Death Stranding: Is It Really a New Genre?.https://gamerant.com/death-stranding-genre-new/.NOV 24, 2019.
Ramirez, Fanny Anne. “From good associates to true friends: An exploration of friendship practices in massively multiplayer online games.” Social interactions in virtual worlds: An interdisciplinary perspective (2018): 62-80