Why the Unexplained Unreality of Death Stranding’s America Is So Frustrating

It’s alienating. But no matter how much close reading I do, it’s never invigorating or elucidating. There’s no real supportive, definitive readings to be made here. The characters don’t comment on the landscape in a way that explains how this topography is so vastly different from any existing one within the continental United States signaled by the game. There’s no mechane-like appearance by Kojima, either.

As a general rule, we are entirely too reliant on making brash, definitive claims about media, especially videogames. It’s partially the market, or our perception of the market. I’m not referring to “clickbait” or even a sloppy, intellectual process. The world is chaotic, often unknowable or indefinite. Finding assurance in specific meaning is soothing, and it feels good to write. Media has become too broadly important to our sense of identity, to making ourselves legible, finding legibility for ourselves. Sketchy outlines of the self in times of instability are uncomfortable. Readers look for commentary that makes them and their worldviews coherent. Digestible.

As a result, our responses to media indicate a need to see, to be seen, and to show explicitly. This is meaning. Even as we push against canonicity, we insist on establishing an even stricter canon. Questions in response to interpretive probing can be unsatisfying, anxiety-inducing.

Investing in a media property and being left with no answers and no room to maneuver can be hellish.

It’s partially why Death Stranding’s America is so frustrating. History, society and politics have tied me up in this landmass called “America,” left to unpack what is happening in the game. And with no trails or waypoints or breadcrumbs—it’s unnerving. I can’t find myself in this America. There’s no grounding. Just a dreamcatcher and an edict to push westward with infrastructure.

Even Red Dead Redemption 2 offered me an understanding, a vision of an America that I could push against.

Evangelion gives us a rationale for the constant drone of cicadas.

Hideo Kojima can’t even have characters comment on the weirdness of this apocalyptic manifest destiny. Here, there’s nothing.

And there’s plenty of readings I could make. I could make brash, definitive statements that Hideo Kojima’s vision of America is an expression of his own anxieties of America in the 21st Century.

Or that Death Stranding’s America is a wild and alien place because it is a game about manifest destiny and colonization, and it uses a wholly foreign understanding of these biomes to destabilize players who would expect a landscape like Red Dead Redemption 2’s. Or maybe he just doesn’t know what the hell America looks like.

I could write those articles. It might even feel great to pick one, arbitrarily, to write it, and wash my hands of this whole quantum. To create that definitive legibility of self in relation to this text.

But I can’t. For all I know, given the pieces that have been presented both in and outside of the text—Kojima might have just thought it looked cool.

In the end, all I can say is that it has destabilized me. As a player, a critic, a Native. I don’t know why Hideo Kojima has made these decisions, and he won’t tell us. It could be his greatest, most brilliant trick—to leave the most crucial facet of his first independent game unexplained. It would assuage my anxiety if I could say that with certainty, but I won’t. I can’t.

Instead, I’m trying to find the joy in the anxiety of unfinished endings, of illegibility. Of packing up all of these unsupported readings onto my back and trying to carry them across an unknowable terrain.

Dia Lacina is a queer indigenous writer, photographer, and founding editor of CapsuleCrit.com, a monthly journal dedicated to microgenre work about games. She tweets too much at @dialacina.