Here are some interesting, if unexpected, revelations: Hideo Kojima clearly hasn't made his peace with Death Stranding being routinely written off as a mere "walking simulator", in other words a game where you spend your time walking. It's a label that has stuck to him ever since the first instalment landed in 2019, even though the Japanese creator had set out to offer an experience unlike anything else in gaming. What worries him today, though, goes well beyond his own game, because in his view social media helps entrench received ideas that end up being parroted everywhere, including by people who have never taken the time to form an opinion of their own.
The subject actually came up during a conversation with Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu for Gizmodo Japan, timed to the Japanese release of his film Digger. The pair discussed how opinions are formed in the age of social media, now that plenty of people simply take whatever scrolls past on their phone at face value. And Kojima used Death Stranding as an example to explain why this shift troubles him.
Walking Dead Simulator
Death Stranding has divided people ever since it came out — that much everyone knows. Its unusual pacing, its long treks and its delivery system have earned it the walking simulator tag time and again. It's a description that isn't entirely without basis, since getting from A to B sits at the heart of the game, but it misses what Hideo Kojima wanted to say and wanted players to feel. What really bothers the Japanese creator, in fact, is seeing the phrase keep doing the rounds, including among people who have never played the game. Repeated often enough on social media, the label ends up becoming the truth in some people's eyes. No need to actually experience the work or get to grips with its mechanics, since someone has already summed up everything you supposedly need to know. That is precisely the phenomenon that worries Hideo Kojima: an opinion can take shape without any first-hand experience, then spread until it looks like a consensus. And it hardly matters whether that opinion is right or wrong — once it's been repeated enough, it takes over the conversation.
"Social media locks us into our own opinions"
Alejandro González Iñárritu shares that concern. According to the director of Digger (and plenty more besides, including The Revenant), we increasingly live in fragmented truths, shaped by whatever we look at on our phones. People form an opinion from posts and comments, without necessarily bothering to check what they're claiming. Cinema suffers from it too, with people quite happy to tear apart a film they haven't even seen. Hideo Kojima sees this as a problem that risks getting worse as algorithms and artificial intelligence develop. Platforms learn our preferences and keep serving us more of what we're likely to enjoy. The trouble is that they also end up mostly exposing us to opinions that reinforce the ones we already hold. Before long, we find ourselves in a kind of bubble where contradictory ideas have less and less room to breathe.
Hideo Kojima goes further, explaining that what troubles him most is the disappearance of chance encounters, the ones that put us face to face with someone who doesn't think like us. For him, it's often by discovering another point of view that we start questioning our own certainties. If algorithms always decide what we see based on our habits, that sort of confrontation risks becoming rarer and rarer. The paradox is that social media gives us access to more information than ever before, yet it can also shut us inside a very narrow view of the world. Death Stranding is an example of that on a gaming scale. A catchy turn of phrase ends up standing in for an entire work, and those repeating it don't even need to have played it to join the conversation.
Except that, with all due respect to Mr Kojima, Death Stranding 1 really is a walking simulator. The second one, a bit less so — and it's also the weaker of the two. QED.
